I wrote a column earlier this month entitled “Anatomy of a Brutal Tax Beating” to highlight how an expert at the Tax Foundation completely dismantled a silly and unlearned article by a writer for Vox.
Well, we now have an “Anatomy of a Brutal Education Beating.” Except it’s not right-on-left violence. It’s left-on-left violence. Jonathan Chait writes for New York magazine and he formerly had stints at The New Republic and The American Prospect, so he’s definitely not a libertarian type.
But he’s ethical and doesn’t have a high level of tolerance for other leftists who launch dishonest ideological attacks on charter schools. Here’s some of what he wrote while debunking an article by some guy named Charles Pierce.
Esquire’s Charles Pierce, a fervent charter critic, …does not dispute the findings that urban charters in Massachusetts provide dramatic education benefits. He simply doesn’t care. …In the sentence, Pierce goes on to assert that the cap on charters serves a vital purpose. But the Brookings study, which I doubt he’s read, shows the opposite. …The cap in Massachusetts is completely perverse, in fact. It allows more students to enroll in charters serving suburban students, where the charters do not outperform the neighborhood schools, and prevents more students from enrolling in urban charters, where the schools doexceed the traditional neighborhood schools. …Presented with evidence that certain schools are providing a clearly better education to low-income urban students, Pierce argues that education should be denied because … somebody is making money off of it. It is more important to him to stick it to the capitalists than to allow low-income, disproportionately nonwhite students to have a chance to have a better life. …What’s even more perverse about Pierce’s argument is that it is factually wrong. Charters in Massachusetts are not for-profit vehicles. State law prohibits for-profit operators from running a public charter school… The notion that charters are “companies” and an “industry” with “profits” — that is, the entire basis for Pierce’s opposition — is a figment of the imagination. …Pierce rails suspiciously against the donors to the anti-cap side. …It is strange to accuse people who are giving away their money to the cause of educating poor children of not “giv[ing] a rat’s ass about educating children in Roxbury or Mattapan”.
Wow. Chait drove over Pierce, then hit the brakes, put the car in reverse, and then drove over him again just for the fun of it.
A perfect example of the difference between a sincere person of the left and a hack who is probably just flacking for teacher unions.
