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Wake-up Call

Post-factual

Posted

The Post yet again attacks teachers' unions for opposing cuts in educational services to kids (“How lavish benefits pushed by NY teachers’ unions ramped up school spending…,” Jan. 17). It practically equates their advocacy for children with extortion and stealing from strapped taxpayers.

It blames the unions for pressuring the city into spending more than their editorial board deems public school students are worth, and regards special-needs children as especially burdensome. It shortsightedly and rashly classifies many programs that may not deliver immediate results according to a conventional business model as being cost-ineffective, which they often narrowly and heartlessly define by discredited measurements.

One City Council member said, "We cannot allow the grifters at the teachers union to again scam us." Another said the union is "up there with the MTA … bleeding our city dry."

They are both outliers.

There is no correlation between unionization and dysfunction, and their assertion of decent pensions, health insurance, workplace rights and reasonable professional autonomy are not betrayals of the public trust. A vow of poverty is not a litmus test for dedication. 

If the city is under duress and its budget is imbalanced, it is not due whatsoever to the greed of labor.

The Post cites a report that New York City public school educators are paid above the national average, not mentioning the higher cost of living here. That's why the federal government provides "locality pay" for its employees in our area. And their view that salaries should be linked to student performance on standardized tests is not only mean-spirited but irrational. 

Should physicians in the public sector be compensated according to the life expectancies in their respective states?

In an example of how a sentence can simultaneously state the truth and be misleading, the Post carps that "teachers continue to get raises even after their labor contract expires.” It would not have required an investigative deep dive to make allowance for the fact that future pay differentials and increments are locked into existing contracts and are based upon years of experience and additional training and academic qualifications, mostly acquired at the educator's personal expense.

Full funding for vital services should not be a divisive issue. That is a fundamental awareness among mainstream New Yorkers as regards police and fire and should be no less so for education.

Among the most twisted and cynical misrepresentations made by critics against teacher unions is the charge that the reason that the unions lobbied legislators and fought in the courts to lower class size was to bolster their membership and rake in dues. If the benefits of being able to provide more individual attention to the learning needs of students is lost on the same "good government" naysayers who send their own kids and grandkids to schools whose lower-class size is their main selling point, then we have a perfect illustration of hypocrisy. 

If, for argument's sake and pity's sake, it was still ultimately imperative to slit the education budget, which is unthinkable, given the massive waste and fraud elsewhere, the incisions should be made within the administrative "deep state" and not among workers who directly deliver or support instructional services to children.

The Post habitually uses the term "special interests" as code for the teachers' union and claims they "rob the public blind.” Quite the contrary: they just want the public to see the light.

Seeing the light presupposes the ability to make sound judgements with a clear head and an unbiased heart. That requires critical thinking skills that have been in short supply ever since ideology-neutral civics education was replaced by curriculum that is marinated in partisanship. That's not due to budgetary constraints but rather to a shortfall of tolerance.

The most basic cellphone holds more knowledge than the world's combined encyclopedias and national libraries, yet despite the quantum leap in accessible sources of information, hardly a dent has been made in the gigantic monster truck of mass gullibility. 

Many years ago, a popular New York clothing store chain's slogan was "an educated consumer is our best customer.” That's particularly true when the merchandise is ideas and critical thinkers are the bargainers.

The flim-flammers never had it so good. Advertisers of false products, false hopes, false promises, false doctrines and, in the case of several of high tech's top moguls, synchronized conversions on a questionably paved road to Damascus.

The saying "buyer beware" usually refers to goods and services, but it can also allude to the beguilements that lead victims of education neglect astray, because they have not been intellectually trained to recognize them. Arbitrary fact-checkers, censors and engineers of search engine algorithms are among the culture influencers who mess with our heads.

It's in our schoolhouses that we first learn to identify these threats to cognitive freedom and later as adults to repel them. That's where we learn to be "educated consumers" of the truths that can set us free. 

Corny, but the shoe fits.

The more complex the world is, the greater the risk of governed people being infantilized and mind-controlled, regardless of peaceful changes of regime. Real "cognitive impairment" exists when we are enslaved by our passions, as much of our polarized population has increasingly become, largely because of flagging scholastic standards that have disabled our capacities of interpretation and analysis. 

Many college students today, when given a major research assignment, haven't a clue about footnotes, bibliographies and paraphrases, but get indignant if they don't get a high grade for typing in a few words into a search bar, printing out the contents of a link whole and attaching a cover with a smiley face. There are chiefs of departments of education in this country who couldn't pass a 7th grade general knowledge test of 40 years ago. 

Is it snobbery to be troubled by this? Does it really matter if people don't know a Stravinsky from a Stegosaurus?   

What matters most is that people are not only empowered but are mentally equipped to distinguish face value from farce value. That can come in handy in voting booths, where low-information is the new elitism.

I began this commentary by rebutting and rebuking the Post's misrepresentation of public schools and teacher unions. My ideological confreres may suspect me of being a double agent for acknowledging that the Post is not always wrong on rare issues unrelated to education, but their hostility to our public schools is more than dyed-in-the wool; it's branded in their editorial bone marrow.

I wish they'd buck up and concede the overall splendid performance of our educators. They've got a tough job: instilling values and deliberative skills in children who in the future will elect our leaders who will have the power to blow up our planet. Let's protect our world. It took a long time to get this far. It would be an unbearable string of epochs to reinvent the wheel or, even more so, to re-evolve from scratch the temperament of golden retrievers.

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