Chalkbeat Gets It Wrong Again, Finds Out, an̶d̶ ̶C̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶B̶e̶ ̶B̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶M̶a̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶ ̶C̶o̶r̶r̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ and Finally Corrects It (See update below)

Chalkbeat wrote a long piece about the education budget. I was planning to read the whole thing, but had to stop. actually sent a message to a Chalkbeat reporter over this passage:

There is a freeze on new hires within the education department, but schools will be able to hire from the Absent Teacher Reserve, a controversial pool of educators who remain on the city payroll but do not have permanent positions because they face disciplinary action, or because their schools closed or lost enrollment

Here's the message I sent the reporter:

Shouldn't "face" be in past tense? Anyone facing disciplinary action is usually reassigned, but never to the ATR.

I heard back that, no, some teachers are in the ATR while facing charges. That's not at all true. Evidently Chalkbeat has no issue trashing working teachers who don't belong to E4E or work in Moskowitz Academies. They are "a controversial pool of educators." What the hell does that mean? It doesn't sound particularly good to me. Would you want to invite a controversial pool of educators over to your house for spaghetti? I wouldn't.

There are several ways to get into the ATR. One is to have your school closed. The staff is scattered to the four winds until and unless they find jobs. It's hard for them to do that, because publications like Chalkbeat stereotype them, and have been doing so for years. I recall an article there where some teacher or other said she and her principal were horrified at their quality. And that, my friends, is a stereotype. It may or may not have been true what the young teacher and her principal saw, but it in no way represents the group as a whole.

Another way to get in, a particularly popular way in the fun old days of Bloomberg, was to go up on charges and be vindicated, or pay a few thousand bucks for some minor charges that never ought to have been brought up in the first place. I had friends who that happened to. If a principal didn't like you, he'd just bring you up on charges, make up piles of nonsense to accompany it, and hope that one or two things would stick. That happened to a former supervisor of mine who was in a perpetual sandbox fight with my then-principal. He was a good supervisor, but the principal, like many others, had a very fragile ego.

Chalkbeat sets itself up as an authority on education but has no issue making fundamental errors. It doesn't know things that every UFT chapter leader does, and has no problem issuing misinformation as a matter of course. If you want to know the last time Eva Moskowitz sneezed, or what the two-year teachers who lead E4E are doing when they aren't getting fat off the Gates gravy train, Chalkbeat is a great resourse. If you want to see exactly what Mike Bloomberg "got done" in terms of journalistic bias, or what Walton, Broad and Gates bucks buy in journalism, Chalkbeat is your go-to.

I don't always have flattering words for the New York Post, but I will tell you that its education reporters are always interested in fine detail. Chalkbeat doesn't give a golly gosh darn. Publish whatever. Take the Gates money. If it's wrong, who cares? Chalkbeat is certainly something.

But whatever it is, it's certainly not journalism.

Update: Chalkbeat has corrected the paragraph above. It now reads as follows:

There is a freeze on new hires within the education department, but schools will be able to hire from the Absent Teacher Reserve, a controversial pool of educators who remain on the city payroll but do not have permanent positions.