To her chagrin, Leonie Haimson was outed last month as a fake public-school parent by the Web site Gotham Schools. Cornered, she confirmed that she’d enrolled her youngest school-aged child in a private high school last year.
Her supporters went ballistic, attacking the Gotham Schools reporter for doing his job.
It was a significant scoop. For more than a decade, Haimson has presented herself as the voice of public-school parents. She’s the one-woman band behind the group Class Size Matters, pushing relentlessly for more money for the schools to make classes smaller.
And she recently blogged a complaint about the media’s tendency to frame education issues as between the UFT and Mayor Bloomberg, and called out reporters for (she claimed) not including the voices of parents, advocates or other members of the community in their reporting on education issues.
That charge is a hoot: A Google search of her name brings up over 29,000 hits. In story after story, Haimson is cited as a source on education issues ranging from charter schools, co-location, so-called high-stakes testing and privatization to the new Common Core curriculum.
For years, reporters would call her for comments on education reforms, school funding issues and, of course, class size. So what changed, causing her to attack the media that made her the go-to advocate for public school parents?
Well, reporters went to her because she was a public school parent representing other parents; her work with Class Size Matters gave her added legitimacy.
Mind you, I support Haimson’s right to choose a private school for her son. But there is a certain cognitive dissonance in her continuing to write a blog titled “NYC Public School Parents — Voices of independent public-school parents,” when clearly she is neither independent nor a public-school parent. (Nor is her organization membership-based.)
Amazingly, Haimson hasn’t even removed herself as a plaintiff in the lawsuit that’s seeking to force any charter school that uses space in a regular public school to pay rent. But how does she now have standing in that case?
But the dissonance hardly started there.
Haimson loudly opposes the practice of school co-location, which contributes only marginally to increases in class size — because the host schools are usually underused. And she singles out charter schools on a regular basis, accusing them of exacerbating the supposed class-size problem.
Yet she has nothing to say about the greatest, and fastest-growing, impediments to small class sizes: the ever increasing costs of hiring teachers and constructing classrooms.
When it comes to teacher salaries, pensions and fringe benefits, she’s uttlerly and absolutely silent. Same when it comes to things like high “prevailing wage” rates forced on the construction trades, or other laws like the Triborough Amendment and the Wicks law that make building and operating schools more expensive.
When Mayor Bloomberg negotiated for large teacher raises, did Haimson issue a press release on how it would make small class sizes more expensive?
When Gov. Cuomo fought in Albany for Tier VI (which will eventually lower pension costs) did she thank him for taking a step in the right direction?
Has she asked Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to repeal or reform the Wicks law, so the savings from building projects can be redirected to reduce class size?
Has she called for public schools to be non-unionized, following the example of her child’s private school?
No, no, no and of course not.
What do these costs-that-must-not-be-named have in common? They are supported by the unions, tooth and nail.
And the costs that Haimson does want cut — related to charter school co-location and outside contractors — are ones the unions vehemently target.
I know she’s not paid by the unions, so you can’t call her a shill.But she’s hardly a pure advocate for a single cause, either.
I also know that she thinks class size should be paid for with new revenues. But let’s be real: In this economy, with the city facing multibillion-dollar budget gaps, that’s magical thinking, not policy making.
So if class size really mattered to her as much as she says it does, she’d follow her principles even when it upsets her allies.
Remember, she takes the media to task for framing the education debate as between the mayor and the teachers union — even as her positions mirror those of the UFT against Bloomberg.
And now that the media will no longer unquestioningly print her every utterance, Haimson casts them as ignorant.
We are left to wonder if Leonie Haimson is congenitally wedded to hypocrisy.