Mr. Solochek:

I see your recent column in Gradebook on class size targeted only one source: the administration's Ken Otero.

You don't do your job of providing balanced assessments of education questions unless you go outside the official board-superintendent spin on issues' affecting education.

This was the flaw that caused the national press people to go along with Bush's run-up to the war. The press acted stenographers for Bush's warmongering and never bothered to check out and give space to other voices.

There are opposing voices to the school spin if a reporter is not too lazy to seek them out or if his boss--that would be Mr. Barnes, I infer--has not let him know that the official line is all the paper is interested in printing.

If so, this practice makes the press like Fox News as outreach for the White House. This narrow view also will lead to the demise of the printed press in favor of the more aggressive blog industry that reports everything, especially the criticism of the government's policy line.

You should make an effort to reach out to teachers, not the CTA, which is in bed with the administration, but to teachers who inhabit the classrooms. Teachers have opinions that the board and administration squelch because their opinions clash with the official line that the superintendent's public-affairs office feeds the gullible, incurious press.

The administration abetted by the board also has a history of punishing teachers with trumped-up charges to fire them if they say anything that conflicts with the administration spin for the press.

My blog leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com has views contrary to the school system's official line and which also has comments from teachers in the comment section.

This blog has a copy of the charges I filed with the Florida Bar's Ethics Commission (last entry on the page) recently against the school lawyer's firm of Thompson, Sizemore & Gonzalez. It targets lawyer Gonzalez's getting his job with no bid from Dr. Lennard; hence Gonzalez's firm has a vested interest in coming down in favor of the no-bid position of the board. The no-bids waste tax money to hire as administrators with bloated salaries unqualified people such as Cathy Valdez, who recommended this no-bid hire to the board. Such unqualified people as Valdez, with an early-childhood degree in a job that needs a business degree, can't do the job without outside help. This burgeoning pool of incompetents and their backup contractors cost the taxpayers, of course; but Mr. Gonzalez says money is no object in this no-bid lala land.

The no-bid recipients are outside contractors who are usually buddies of the school superintendent. So the no-bid ritual amounts to a kind of patronage that the superintendent gets in addition to her bloated salary, which increases more each year until it is now one of the top salaries in the school superintendent racket that afflicts schools nationwide.

The last no-bid windfall went to a former administrator of Elia 's. He was, I believe, in the same department as she headed as her sole administrative experience before her superintendent job and on which department your paper did an expose of the criminal protocols it engaged in for real-estate transactions for the schools.

When the board accepted Elia's asseveration that she didn't know a thing about the criminal activity in her department under her nose that a reporter walked in off the street and spotted, the board accepted Elia's excuse and said, as the board is wont to say when presented with incompetence or even criminality in the administration, "Ho hum, let's move on. We need to get this contretemps behind us and move on to rubberstamping no-bid contracts for administration buddies and engaging in other mischief that harms the schools and the taxpayers but keeps this administration in power."

La Gaceta discovered the recently retired administrator who got the $148 000 no-bid windfall had no phone with a live person answering it and did not answer voice mail. The taxpayers also apparently funded his first job as an entrepreneur. That fact was also a ho-hum piece of data for the incurious, potted-plant board.

The latest board cover up is the affair of Board chair Jennifer Falliero and former public-affairs chief Marc Hart. Ms. Falliero haunted Mr. Hart's office for what she claimed was a need for "mentoring" until she lighted the fuse of the poor fellow. Even Dr. Lennard told her to stay away from the public-affairs office. The current superintendent and her myrmidons decided the solution was to cook up a drunkenness charge against Hart for which to fire him to cover up the tawdry behavior long tolerated by the administration and board and to save Falliero's reputation.

The press has some kind of fetish against reporting sexual misconduct and bad administration control of it when it involves sex.

Cotton Mather could be no more reticent to mention sex than the mainstream press. I'd like to know from what philosophical newspaper-ethics arcana this strangely repressed practice originated. I have read all of Freud; and he doesn't say a word about this psychosexual pathology of newspaper people. Perhaps I should have moved on to the animadversions of the Reverend Jerry Falwell for the sourc of newspaper angst about mentioning sex.

Five of the board--Edgecomb, Olson, Lamb, Faliero, and Kurdell-- voted to hand over this $148,000 bid to the former administrator with minimal discussion and on the advice of the attorney, who himself enjoys a no-bid contract of fifteen years' duration and, hence, whose advice was interested, not disinterested. Perhaps my memory is faulty on Ms. Falliero's participation in the vote because that may have been the night when syncope overcame her, resulting in an ambulance trip to the hospital. Valdes and Griffin voted against the no-bid handout and as a result Kurdell and Olson attacked them for "disloyalty" to an infallible administration.

Your partial and biased coverage of the schools in the state reminds me of the faculty-lounge historians whom I used to audit in their arguments that premised male historians had covered only the top layer of history and paid no attention to other peripheral but potent influences. The feminist historians argued on the basis of routine history's shutting out women; the minority historians argued the lack of inclusion of blacks; the historians with a social bent argued that the middle and lower classes got no representation in standard history books. Extrapolating this argument argues a parallel to the gullible, incurious reporters who quote Bush or official school spokespersons such as Dr. Otero-- but nobody else; and thus the press contributes itself to the run-up to the Iraq war or to the incumbency of, in this case, school officials--both administration and board-- who are derelict.

I urge you to broaden your base for reporting on the schools. The teachers are pivotal as a source for a balanced view. So are the students in many instances. The board won't give teachers and students a settled slot on the board because the board and administration want to de-emphasize the importance of teachers and students and have the press think only the administration and board are sources for it to consult. The press plays along, alas.

If you bothered to quote teachers on issues, you would present a more balanced, more sophisticated, more useful view for the public that you are supposed to serve. Newspapers are supposed to be the first draft of history; yours is an incomplete, biased draft.

Ask your boss Tash if there are any limits on the sources you consult for your articles. If he says "no," then one must infer that you were like too many of my students: too lazy to do the research needed for a complete view of the topic under discussion.

Tampabaygrammargrich.blogspot.com's recent entry presents the deconstruction of your boss Mr. Tash's rhetorically and grammatically shallow skills. That may dispose him to tell you to ignore me, that I am a crackpot. Everybody in history has garnered the label of crackpot if he or she had an idea that fell outside mainstream-in-a-rut-that-it-abandons-kicking-and-screaming thinking. Look what happened to Galileo.

lee drury de cesare

Comment on leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

Of course Elia wants to lower the standards for FCAT now, b/c she wants more students to pass so that more schools get rated higher, so that she can get a big, fat bonus again. She has no concerns about students. Her only concern is getting more money for herself.

11:37 AM