The Awl

The Banks and New York City and the Media

Choire Sicha — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:13:49 +0000

I have had an NYPD-issued press pass twice. In New York City, the press is "credentialed" by the police department, independently of the City, at its discretion. The process is slow and you have to go downtown for quite a while. Both times I have been very careful to play their game. You have to bring published clips, among their required materials, that prove you need to deal with things like "robbery scenes, fires, homicides, train wrecks, bombings, plane crashes, where there are established police or fire lines at the scene." Now I'm by no means a real reporter's reporter, but I succeeded both times by bringing past stories that had, like, scenery of Hillary Clinton in a St. Patrick's Day parade and what have you. On my most recent successful trip, I went with real reporters—and some of them got denied, and most definitely shouldn't have been, while by working the system, I scored. The point that you'd need to be already doing that reporting to get credentialed (by the police!) to do that reporting is a good one. All this is a preamble to pointing out that yesterday we got used by the mayor's office.

In the spirit of looking at what the media is, we talked about positions held by reporters who've been arrested around the country at Occupy Wall Street. I started doing this because I had a suspicion that some media trends were probably evident: were they all interns? Were they all unpaid? Freelancers? All men? Who were they?

The most notable things (to me) that we found were that a majority were non-staff reporters, they were from a wide cross-section of outfits (independent outlets, news wires, student papers) and that one staff reporter had already been laid off since his on-the-job arrest.

I tried to be pretty careful that this wasn't to suggest that any of them weren't "real reporters." (One of those arrested in New York (who informed police he was a reporter), Jared Malsin, working for The Local East Village, was even deported from Israel last year for his reporting there.)

Then last night the mayor's spokesman sent out a memo, citing our little exploration, and going further—cross-referencing the arrested reporters with holders of NYPD press passes.

He was doing this to assert that the NYPD wasn't arresting reporters. He wrote: "We found that only five of the 26 arrested reporters actually have valid NYPD-issued press credentials." Which, well, is basically an admission of arresting five NYPD-credentialed reporters? Or he was doing this to assert that they weren't arresting real reporters. Well, we're pretty much all real reporters now.

I don't think the NYPD are monsters; I also don't think Bloomberg's office is evil. Nor are either of these organizations uniform in their thinking about Occupy Wall Street. I even think they're in a tricky position—I don't know how I'd deal with a large protest movement gathering in the City over the course of two months, especially one that's trying to keep a permanent encampment in a park.

But I do think the City itself and even Bloomberg—despite some of his excellent qualities!—brought Occupy Wall Street on themselves. Throughout his unnecessarily extended tenure, he's always been quick to give up income to benefit the banks. He's done nothing truly effective about job creation, despite his small programs for helping startups and entrepreneurs, and the small creation of affordable housing. For example, everyone knew that Goldman Sachs' "threat" to move to midtown was a bluff; they would never pay those rates, and that the state and the City went nuts on concessions for their new headquarters is still a crime. (Particularly when Goldman spit in their faces at the same time, moving more of their headcount to New Jersey anyway.)

The banks and New York City have always been intimately entwined throughout their history—probably, in the past, in far more unseemly ways than they are now. New York needs the finance industry; it is, obviously, a major "engine," as they like to say, of the City's micro-economy. But we believe that the finance industry and other related corporate enterprises have created a vast inequity, one that is nowhere more visible than in New York City itself. Here is where they have tortured capitalism into a sick thing that is actively bad for humanity. It's only right that Occupy Wall Street has the name and focus that it does. How the rank and file of both the City and the NYPD deal with our mass nonviolent protests is on them, not us, and certainly not on the people reporting the events of the day.

Photo from New York's Occupy Wall Street protests by Jon Tayler, who is both a Columbia J-School student and a reporter.

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Bloomberg's Dumb Tactics Result in Occupation of Wall Street

Choire Sicha — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:00:27 +0000

So Mike Bloomberg's eviction of Occupy Wall Street has actually resulted in a large protest this morning that is actually occupying Wall Street. You just know there's a team of mayoral advisors, familiar with the First Amendment, who are sitting in an office right now with their arms crossed, being all "la la la, told you so." More good pics here. Arrests are already taking place.

Photo by CBC superfox David Common.

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Why Not Occupy The Schools? The Failures Of Bloomberg's School Reform Agenda

Dana Goldstein — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:00:17 +0000

What’s next for the Occupy Wall Street movement as it regroups after its eviction from Zuccotti Park? A small but energetic group of New York City education activists hope the Occupiers will channel their rage toward Mayor Mike Bloomberg by taking a closer look at his local school reform record.

Last Friday at noon, some two-dozen of these protestors, many of them black and Latino parents with kids in the public schools, crowded the sidewalk on the east side of Zuccotti Park. Pack the book bags of our kids! Not the pockets of the rich!, they chanted. They mostly failed to attract the attention of the hard-core Occupiers—the tent-dwellers—who were then preparing to march to Foley Square, where Joan Baez was set to perform in honor of Veterans Day. But the school reformers continued their chants nonetheless; one of their young organizers, a bearded white guy in a leather jacket, rhythmically drummed on a bucket with plastic cooking utensils. Parents of color are the 99 percent! Protect our kids, not the millionaires!

Opponents of Bloomberg’s education agenda see the Occupy movement as an opportunity to call attention to what they consider the “occupation” of the New York City public schools by private interests: charter schools, corporate philanthropists and six-figure school-management consultants, all of whom are promoting expanded testing and “school choice.”

This isn’t the first time the concept of “occupation” has been deployed by New York City parent activists. In 1966, in East Harlem, black parents fed up with the failures of racial integration turned instead to racial separatism, demanding “veto power” over the hiring of a white principal at their children’s middle school, IS 201. Over the next two years, the community control movement gained the support of Mayor John Lindsay and the Ford Foundation, and the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville won control of its local schools. Black Power activists affiliated with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and other groups demanded that black children read books written by black authors; that the school system actively recruit black teachers; and that inner-city students stop being "socialized" into white, middle-class culture, and instead learn the histories and artistic contributions of their own African ancestors.

On May 9, 1968, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school governing board fired 18 white teachers, and the United Federation of Teachers called a strike. While the teachers picketed, parent activists physically "occupied" neighborhood schools, presiding over classes and putting Black Power pedagogical theories into practice.

Forty-three years later, the energy in school reform is coming mostly from the top-down, not the bottom-up. Bloomberg critics complain about politically-connected charter school networks like Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy, which is currently attempting to wrangle classroom space away from a reticent public school in Cobble Hill. In total, about 70 charter schools across the city have been housed within traditional neighborhood public schools since Bloomberg came to office, while 117 traditional schools have been shut down and over 500 new schools opened. Since 2004, eighth-graders and their parents have been asked to rank their top-12 high school choices from a 534-page directory that describes 647 programs at 394 schools. This “mandatory school choice” system has moved thousands of students into higher-quality schools than they would have otherwise attended—but it has also left 10 percent of all eighth-graders “unmatched” and then assigned to low-quality schools of last resort, those that are undersubscribed in this new competitive marketplace.

Despite this foment of change, the state Department of Education declared that in 2010, only 13 percent of New York City black high school graduates, 15 percent of Latino graduates and 51 percent of white graduates met college-readiness standards.

If the top-down education reform movement has been a disappointment, what could replace it? Parent activists represented by organizations like the Coalition for Educational Justice and the Alliance for Quality Education aren’t happy about the growth of the charter school sector, about the ideology of “school choice” more generally, and about test score-based accountability for teachers and schools. They’ve sued the city Department of Education, disrupted meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy—a Bloomberg-controlled board that acts mostly as a rubber stamp—and on Friday attempted a teach-in at Occupy Wall Street.

The dominant ethos of the school choice / Bloomberg / Obama reform movement is one borrowed not from Wall Street, with its desperate lust for profit, but from Silicon Valley, with its commitment to meritocratic innovation.

“We as parents and community are watching Mayor Bloomberg’s failed agenda,” shouted South Bronx father Jose Gonzalez, utilizing the laborious human mic. “A lot of schools are closing and students are failing!” The solution for poor educational outcomes, Gonzalez said, is for Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state legislature to levy a millionaire’s tax and use the resulting funds to lower class sizes; improve teacher professional development; expand access to music and art classes; and provide counseling, pre-K, and other “wraparound” social supports for all children.

Bloomberg won’t embrace this broad agenda because, as a billionaire entrepreneur, “he’s not at our level,” said Minerva Morales, who had come to Zuccotti Park from the Bronx with Kiki, her 13-year old son. “[Bloomberg] doesn’t understand us. He doesn’t understand our children.”

There's certainly a compelling argument to be made that 1-percenters are exerting an outsize influence over our nation's schools, particularly urban schools labeled as "failing." Some of the “school turnaround models" promoted by Bloomberg and President Obama, such as shutting down schools with low test scores or transforming them into charter schools, are those that are trendy among deep-pocketed philanthropists—folks like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, former SunAmerica/AIG chairman Eli Broad and Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow. Focus groups of low-income public school parents in Denver, Detroit and Washington, D.C., convened earlier this year by a Washington public-opinion firm, found that the majority wanted their local schools improved, not shut down or turned over to charter chains; national polling has revealed similar attitudes.

Activists compare school-closings and charter school co-locations to the subprime mortgage crisis. In this analogy, charter school operators like the Success Academy are the big banks, and neighborhood public schools are the small homeowners defaulting on their mortgages. Inner-city schools are "failing," they say, not because of the irresponsibility of their teachers and principals, but because they haven't been given the resources and support they need to succeed with an incredibly challenging student population. Charter schools and Mayor Bloomberg’s new "small schools," meanwhile, have many extra resources: They benefit from the attention of politicians and the wealth of private donors, even while serving fewer disabled and English-as-a-second-language students, whose educations are more expensive.

The trouble with this narrative comes in comparing education reformers with greedy bankers. The dominant ethos of the school choice/Bloomberg/Obama reform movement is one borrowed not from Wall Street, with its desperate lust for profit, but from Silicon Valley, with its commitment to meritocratic innovation that—yes, of course—earns money, but also serves the public. People like Gates and Zuckerberg donate millions to the charter school sector not because they see non-profit charters as business opportunities, but because tech entrepreneurs are powerfully attracted to the ideology of the school choice and accountability movement, which has two main components:

1. An almost religious faith in the ability of data collection to drive positive outcomes. Philanthropists like Gates and Broad have led the charge to institute standardized testing across an increasingly wide range of subjects, from science, reading, and math to art, music, and even “kindergarten readiness." If we have the numbers, the technocrats believe, we can create incentives and processes to improve instruction. It’s true that better, more comprehensive tests can help motivate good teaching and a rich curriculum. A major error of No Child Left Behind was in building accountability systems around only two subjects, math and reading, which led to schools cutting science, art, and theater programs in a quest to devote all resources to testable “basic skills.” But standardized testing is perennially unpopular among parents and teachers, whose political support the education reform movement needs if it is to succeed. Even more problematic, the reformers are devoting billions of private and public dollars to attempts to tie teacher pay and evaluation to student test scores, even though studies of such programs have turned up high error rates, few student achievement gains, and evidence of adult test-tampering.

2. The idea of quality education being a matter of choice for strivers. Hence, the charter school lottery, a spectacle in which parents motivated to search out education alternatives for their children compete for seats in functional schools. Little attention is paid to the students who are never entered into these lotteries in the first place, because the adults in their life are unable to navigate the increasingly complex Bloomberg school choice system.

Indeed, many parents have been led astray by the Bloombergian practice of giving schools impressive names that have little to do with the educational programs on offer.

And then there are students who end up at the growing number of non-elite “choice” schools, which are no better than traditional schools and sometimes worse. Morales, the Bronx mother and protestor, enrolled her son Kiki in the new Science and Technical Academy at Mott Hall. Kiki wants to be an astronaut, and Morales was attracted to the school’s name. But city data show science is actually the school’s weakest subject, and that the majority of students haven’t reached proficiency in math and reading, either.

“I took my son to this school thinking it was going to have the right education,” Morales said. “But it doesn’t have anything.”

Indeed, many parents have been led astray by the Bloombergian practice of giving schools impressive names that have little to do with the educational programs on offer. The principal of the High School for International Studies told GothamSchools he is proudest of his culinary arts program. In Park Slope, the low-performing John Jay High School was reconstituted as the Secondary Schools for Law and Journalism, both of which have been mired in continuous crisis mode, with low graduation rates, student protests, and now co-location with a competitive admissions school expected to cater mostly to upper middle-class students.

It's worth pointing out that the 1-percent school reform philanthropists who support the Bloomberg agenda are largely progressive Democrats in favor of higher taxes on the rich (although Bloomberg himself opposes the millionaires’ tax). A fine example is Whitney Tilson, a Teach for America alum who manages a New York hedge fund, gives generously to charter schools and the politicians who support them, and writes an influential education reform newsletter. Tilson has signed the “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength" petition, in support of raising taxes on people like himself.

This gets at some of the problems with conceiving of American school reform as a story of the 1-percent nastily stomping on the 99-percent: What we're actually seeing is the most socially-conscious elements of the 1-percent attempting to remake public institutions according to the technocratic, competitive principles that allowed these guys to succeed in the business world. The question is whether these principles are applicable to the public school system.

Sure, American schools can learn from the corporate practices of continuous improvement, technological innovation and performance pay. Why not allow gifted students to jump ahead in the curriculum through the use of video lectures from college professors? Why not pair first-year teachers with veteran teacher-mentors, who can sit-it on newbies’ classes and give them detailed feedback on their instruction? Other countries, like exotic old Canada, spend their education budgets paying excellent teachers more—not in exchange for higher test scores—but for supervising colleagues, writing textbooks, sharing lesson plans and even participating in education policy-making.

The hurdle is that the 1-percent education reformers must truly grasp, deep in their bones, that we need to provide every child with a decent education—not just the ones who attend charter schools, or choice schools, or whose parents can afford to move to the suburbs or live in Tribeca. This means we should focus reform efforts on traditional neighborhood schools, which continue to educate over 90 percent of New York City’s 1.1 million public school students.

What the Occupy Wall Street movement gets about education is that it is a universal right, not something for which parents and kids should have to compete, or for which they should go deep into debt. So far, the Occupiers have focused almost exclusively on the cost of college tuition. But if this movement truly wants to appeal to the 99 percent, it should learn what it can about our nation’s struggling public schools, which are about the closest thing we have—in a society without health care or child care—to a shared, 99 percent institution.

Related: The Night Occupy Los Angeles Tore Itself In Two
How I Got Off My Computer And Onto The Street At Occupy Oakland
Why Should We Demonstrate? A Conversation
Occupy Boston: The Glory And Imperfection Of Democracy
What Does The Bonus Army Tell Us About Occupy Wall Street?
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Lessons For Occupy D.C.
Why the Tea Party Hates Occupy Wall Street

Dana Goldstein blogs here, tweets here, and is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Nation Institute. She lives in Brooklyn.

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What Happened This Morning at Occupy Wall Street

Choire Sicha — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 09:00:33 +0000

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Occupy a Four Bedroom at 75 Wall Street for $22,950 a Month

Choire Sicha — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:40:01 +0000

This is a neat bit: Mayor Bloomberg gets to respond to the letter sent by four officials who represent downtown Manhattan and agree that Occupy Wall Street is a Menace 2 Society in the Hood. But the letter has three claims: drumming is too loud at night (that's already fixed), there's public urination (likely not that fixed, but then, welcome to New York), and there are too many police barricades. WHY WON'T OCCUPY WALL STREET TAKE DOWN THEIR POLICE BARRICADES? So Bloomberg's response? “It’s an occupation of a growing, vibrant residential neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, and it’s really hurting small businesses and families." With police barricades.

Also, not really. If you have been to Zuccotti Park—and you should!—you know how many families live right there (barely any). Battery Park City and the Financial District have, according to conflicting accounts, between 40,000 and 60,000 residents now. (I believe the 46,000 number, which I think excludes the South St. Seaport; the financial district is technically anything south of City Hall Park. ) 10,000 of those live in Battery Park City, which is nowhere near the park.

Although! If you wanted to live actually RIGHT there, and be annoyed by barricades (and if you lived right there and you wanted to push your baby in a stroller, would you seriously take the most crowded route UP BROADWAY? No you would not!) you could be home at Occupy Wall Street right now! Here are the 399 rentals currently listed; that $18,000 two-bedroom at 40 Broad Street sounds real nice. Or you could get a $1,795 studio at 160 Front Street. Anyway, sounds like Occupy Wall Street ended up in the right place.

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Occupy Wall Street's Wild Morning in Pictures and Video

Choire Sicha — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:00:37 +0000

It's been quite a morning for Occupy Wall Street, which didn't find out until nearly this morning's deadline that the City was going to back down from evicting the protest for "cleaning." Here's how it all went down for them (and some others too).

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Occupy Wall Street's Big, Difficult Choice

Choire Sicha — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 09:10:53 +0000

Today would be a good day to take a pass on attending Occupy Wall Street's "General Assembly" at 7 p.m. (although the 6 p.m. meeting on "Organizing Effectively Without Hierarchy" sounds cool and the 2 p.m. Structure Working Group meeting is a blessed thing). Because tonight, you're going to find out who's a cynic and who's naive, and it's going to get heated consensus-style, as the group addresses Mayor Bloomberg's demand to come in and "clean up" Zuccotti Park, starting tomorrow. The park's landlord's letter to the NYPD, dated Tuesday, asking for help, is full of practical, liability-insurance-based complaints but also has plenty of nonsense, and it's the "unsanitary and unsafe" claim appears to be resonating. So this is likely to escalate into a real and troubling confrontation; there's almost no way Occupy Wall Street can give up the park—but protesters should know that the City doesn't back down once it's said it's going to do something. (Photo from last night by Harrie van Veen.)

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Bloomberg's Girlfriend Still Ladylike, Despite Career, Says Man

Choire Sicha — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:10:25 +0000

ANGRILY SHAKING MY HEAD. (From Rebecca Mead's subscriber-only Talk of the Town today on Diana Taylor, who is Mike Bloomberg's human companion.) Good grief, go back to undermining unions, Wilbur Ross, before we send in all the mannish professional women who don't care about showing you their legs.

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Engulfed in a Roiling Outcry! This Week's Mike Bloomberg "Fiasco"

Choire Sicha — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 10:10:18 +0000

I get all suspicious when I hear about a "growing outcry," in the classic Times parlance. This particular "outcry" is said to have led to the cancelation of Mike Bloomberg's weekly radio chatfest, and is over the resignation of deputy mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who is at least five different kinds of schmuck. (This is snowstorm removal failure dude!) The mayor's office said he was leaving to pursue private sector work; but when Goldsmith resigned, he himself cited his recent arrest, which has now been made public. This "hiding" of a "crucial detail" (more Times parlance) has "engulfed his administration in controversy" and has "roiled New York’s political world." (Sheesh, sounds like the Hindenburg hit City Hall!) So various future mayoral candidates (from Scott Stringer to Jon Liu) and some nonprofit folks and a couple of newspaper editorial boards are angry.

Goldsmith's arrest was for "simple assault domestic violence." (That's the legal term of art in D.C., where he apparently resides, which...???) His wife (Dan Quayle's cousin, which is so weird) did not press charges, for what that's worth, and called the arrest "over my wishes," which: sister, that's what happens when you call the police and tell them your spouse is assaulting you, and there's reasons for that? No takebacks! Also, perhaps you two should never see each other again, okay? But as for the rest of us? Dude resigned, and he was allowed to resign. And he is going to pursue private sector work! (I mean, he's been pursuing private sector work throughout his tenure as deputy mayor, so.) As for the rest of his personal life (in... D.C.???), not really sure we all need to consume the tabloid report on his totally hideous and grotesque relationship. Is that terribly weird and old-fashioned? It's not like he was hosting pit bull rings in his basement (in... D.C.!). Dude departed. Great, sounds like we're rid of a hot mess. And while City Councilmember Letitia James' point that "They tend to protect their own" is a good one, I do think if they were actually protecting their own they'd have refused his resignation and would be doing the exact same thing they are today (that is, not talking about it) and the administration would be "engulfed" and "roiled" and whatnot anyway.

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Bloomberg Pregnancy Discrimination Suit Thrown Out

Choire Sicha — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:40:07 +0000

The discrimination case brought against Bloomberg LP, by 80+ lady-with-children-type workers, has been dismissed. (Fun footnote: Bloomberg's manner at his deposition was described as "testy and sarcastic.")

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