Wednesday, September 09, 2009
"Liberal journalist shocked teacher unions shield incompetence"
I've always had a strong belief that certain groups in our society are insulated from and clueless as to what's going on in real life.
I'm not talking about self-checkout at the grocery store or pumping one's own gas.
I'm talking about their blind acceptance of idealistic cliches' that precludes their working toward changes that could really be effective.
In the computer world, the analogy is "garbage in; garbage out"...
I'm not talking about self-checkout at the grocery store or pumping one's own gas.
I'm talking about their blind acceptance of idealistic cliches' that precludes their working toward changes that could really be effective.
In the computer world, the analogy is "garbage in; garbage out"...
Michael Barone discusses the issue at WashingtonExaminer.com:
"But the elites never spend much time on ground level seeing how the public employee unions actually deliver—or don’t deliver—the services they’re so proud of. And on the rare occasions when they do, when they actually see how public sector institutions operate and how they affect ordinary people and the poor, they are horrified.
Case in point: Steven Brill’s New Yorker article on 'The Rubber Room,' an account of the thousands of New York City public school teachers who are paid, in the high five figures or even six figures, to show up at windowless offices and not teach at all. Brill, longtime proprietor of the American Lawyer, has spent most of his life at the top levels of American society, superintending some very interesting reporting but, when it comes to opinion, doing little more than mouthing liberal clichés. He’s used to dealing with very smart and able people. I suspect that for years he’s accepted, without thinking about it much one way or the other, the belief that if governments spend more money on public services, ordinary people and the poor will be helped.
Brill is clearly shocked and appalled at what he sees in the Rubber Rooms in New York. His accounts of the maladjusted and utterly incompetent teachers he finds there are vivid and terrific reporting; his accounts of the rationalization of teacher union officials for this appalling system make clear, despite his clear and graceful prose, that he is enraged by what this system costs taxpayers and, even more, by what it denies children who are most in need of help. As Mickey Kaus puts it in his Twitter-length link to Brill’s article: 'Everyone hates the teachers’ unions now.'"
