Albany beat: GOP Teachers-Union Lackeys
GOP state Sens. Jim Tedisco (Schenectady) and Dan Stec (Warren) are raising “procedural” arguments against Gov. Hochul’s plan for more charter schools, yet don’t “appear to have the same concerns” about proposals they like, reports the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin. Both men, reelected with backing from the anti-charter teachers union, also praise Hochul’s school-aid hikes. “By quibbling” about procedure, they “found a tortured way to oppose” charters “without having to defend their opposition on the merits.” They gripe about the state’s tax burden, yet defend its school spending, “the country’s highest on a per-pupil basis” despite “middling” outcomes. Hmm: It’s “difficult” to push for lower taxes and better schools while “seeking approval from a political organization working toward very different goals.”
Libertarian: Americans Fleeing to Freer States
“The correlation continues between states with lower tax and greater freedom and those that people move to,” cheers Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. “Other factors” (“opportunity, weather, expense,” etc.) “play a role too” in choosing where to relocate, but “people continually show a strong affinity for being left alone to live their lives and keep what they earn.” Notably, “California, New York, and Illinois lost the greatest number of people in raw numbers during 2022.” All have high tax burdens and are “a bit control freak-y.” Per the Cato Institute’s “Freedom in the 50 States ranks” (“based on the environments they offer for people who care about some combination of entrepreneurship, sexual liberty, gun ownership, homeschooling, and the like”), all three strangle freedoms: “New York comes in dead last at 50,” California at 48, Illinois at 37. And “of the top-10 states for in-migration, . . . five are ranked among the 10 most-free states in the country.”
Schools watch: High Standards Best Serve All
The College Board has revised its new AP course in African-American studies, but “offering the course to begin with remains an exercise in racial pandering,” laments The Wall Steet Journal’s Jason L. Riley. The Board’s concern was that few black high-school students “receive college credit for AP courses,” so it “created a black-studies course that no one expects to match the academic rigor of other AP offerings.” Again, “racial parity has been deemed more important than maintaining high standards.” Yet underperforming groups aren’t helped “by holding them to lower standards.” And this has “economic and geopolitical consequences that should concern all of us”: China and India aren’t “abandoning enrichment programs for their brightest students,” so moving “away from merit-based systems will only make it more difficult for our children to compete with their children.”
Media desk: No More Objectivity
“One of the most experienced and well-respected figures in American media,” notes Jenny Holland at Spiked, has thrown “objective truth under the proverbial bus.” Washington Post icon Leonard Downie, Jr. wrote in a January op-ed that “ ‘truth-seeking news media must move beyond’ ” objectivity “ ‘to produce more trustworthy news’.” Yet, says Holland, the media have “already abandoned all pretence at objectivity”; as a result “almost half of Americans say they don’t trust the news.” “Journalists should contort a story so it affirms every pre-conceived notion” of readers? Then “telling your readers how something really is” is “no longer necessary.” Indeed, “the biggest blindspot for journalists” is “their tendency to vastly overestimate their own importance” and “vastly underestimate just how few people share their outlook.”
News vet: Misuse of Anonymous Sources
“Most readers don’t understand the dynamics of the relationship between reporters and their sources; their conflicting yet symbiotic motivations and what gets left out of stories,” former New York Timesman Jeff Gerth warns in a Racket interview. “One example, from the Trump/Russia saga, shows some of those complexities. The founders of Fusion GPS, both former reporters, were anonymous sources for many news outlets. Reporters used their information for negative stories about Trump, but they didn’t report that the information came from researchers hired by Democratic opponents.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/02/08/gop-teachers-union-lackeys-high-standards-best-serve-all-and-other-commentary/