New York’s education cartel has been set back on its heels by a new breed of reformers, and the unions need someone to blame.
The result?
Anti-reformers have trotted out the hoariest bugbear in New York politics — the evil of Wall Street — and constructed a hilarious lie: that the education reform movement is actually camouflage for a hostile takeover of the city’s public schools.
Here’s teachers-union cat’s-paw Zephyr Teachout, the ludicrous left’s candidate for New York governor last year, on the topic:
“A tiny group of powerful hedge fund executives [has] spent historic amounts of money in order to take over education policy [in New York] . . .
“ [This] small cadre of men, including Carl Icahn, Paul Tudor Jones and Dan Loeb, poured more than $10 million into state lobbying and election campaigns [in 2014, and] their campaign bears the signature components of the corporate takeover . . . high stakes, big spending and top-down power plays that are not accountable to the public.”
Teachout is sparse on details — not surprisingly, since the whole plot is a triumph of the imagination — yet some folks take it seriously anyway.
But here are the questions that need to be asked:
- Why would greed-driven money moguls want New York’s schools in the first place? And, if once they took title, what would they do with them?
Set up a market in graduation futures? - Short-sell dropout rates?
- Or is it all a paranoid Occupy Wall Street fantasy?
Especially given that the market is already doing nicely off the teachers-unions’ $35-billion-dollar pension-fund equity investments. This eye-poppingly significant sum underscores what should be obvious: There really is no significant money to be made by tipping over New York’s public-school lunch coach.
Not by the market itself, and certainly not by individual Wall Streeters.
Which has had little to do with the debate that’s ramping up as Albany addresses Gov. Cuomo’s ambitious public-education reform agenda — which includes strong support for charter schools, an expedited process for culling the bad teachers and effective merit pay for the good ones.
Here’s a sally from United Federation of Teachers boss Mike Mulgrew:
“I’m inviting the governor to drop the rhetoric of his hedge-fund pals who hate public education and come visit a real New York City public school, where teachers, kids and parents are working to make education a success.”
Well, give Mulgrew credit for one good idea.
Cuomo should invite him to tag along — and then drop by a few of the 371 New York City public schools where 90% or more of the pupils fail to meet minimal state standards in reading and math.
These are among the schools Mulgrew, Teachout and so many others lie so shamelessly to save — teachers jobs are at stake — and these are the children, some 143,000 overall, whose futures stand to be forfeit.
Next up could be visits to some of the city’s 190-plus charter schools — whose 70,000-pupils almost universally outperform state standards, and their peers elsewhere, and where the names of 50,000 other children are on admissions waiting lists.
The contrast couldn’t be more dramatic.
Mulgrew & Co., fully invested in failure, are reduced to offering lurid conspiracy theories to ward off reform.
Cuomo and his allies — among them, to be sure, a big bunch of Wall Streeters — have glimpsed success in the charter-school movement, and they want to bring reform to the entire school system.
And Cuomo’s crew isn’t at all bashful about spending what it takes the word out.
Some $16 million was invested by reform advocates for lobbying and such last year, according to Capital New York, a good deal of it by Wall Street types. And that doesn’t include the millions invested in charter-school operations, much it by — yes — hedge-fund operators.
But why would they be so generous, if there is nothing material to be gained? Isn’t “Wall Street” code for “greed?”
Well, if there is something tangible there, nobody’s been able to identify it.
So one might just as usefully ask why robber baron Andrew Carnegie built all those libraries — and a certain music hall.
Or why John D. Rockefeller Jr. essentially funded the Museum of Modern Art from scratch, among many other acts of charity.
Or why Bill and Melinda Gates do what they do.
Or maybe it’s just this simple: Some New Yorkers of means have discerned a need, and they intend to help meet it.
This much is clear, however: Those who loudly claim malign motives have an obligation to prove their case.
So far, Mulgrew & Co. haven’t come close — which is shameful, but not at all surprising.