Waste of Ink: Front-Page News at the Post

by Bryan Joiner

The New York Post's lead story today compared New York City schoolchildren with guinea pigs after it was reported that the Department of Education sells student data to research companies. The crux, as reported by education reporter Carl Campanile:

City education officials last year quietly approved more than 50 research projects related to health, psychology, race, ethnicity, gender and religion - mostly on kids in the poorest neighborhoods, a Post investigation has found.

This ain't shocking.

New York City being New York City, researchers in the bunk fields of "health, psychology, race, ethnicity, gender and religion" studies probably learn quite a bit by studying the school system here. Campanile absurdly implies that the researchers are in it for the money, because we all know Gender Studies is a booming white-collar field.

Campanile ominously writes that some of the studies were, "financed by multimillion-dollar grants" without mentioning that grants are given to academics because they have no way of raising money from whatever they will find out. That's the biggest joke of all: any results culled from these studies will go toward trying to make life better for schoolchildren when they are published. We learn things, and then we try to apply them. It's the basis of the entire education system.

The "guinea pigs" crack comes from a "parental activist," Granville Leo Stevens, whose daughter attends MS 104 in Manhattan. Stevens did not allow his daughter to participate in the studies, for fear she would be treated like a "piece of meat." Stevens's "guinea pigs" quote was the front-page headline, despite his complete lack of credentials.

But maybe he's right to shield his daughter from this type of filth. It's probably especially reassuring that she wasn't involved in the eyebrow-raising sentence "Some of the studies target students by race and ethnicity." Campanile writes,

Maria Kromidas of Columbia Teachers College is doing a project about "Children and Race in New York City" by observing kids in a Queens elementary school with a largely immigrant student base. She wants to find out how children of different races get along.

Ho-ly shit, that's vicious.

In Campanile's defense, he got both sides of the issue, like any good reporter. A DOE spokeswoman said sternly "Our children are not guinea pigs." Too bad it was in the last paragraph of the story.

NYP: 'Guinea Pig' Kids Stir Furor

Comments

[alley]

If only to integrate the resultant thesis's from Dumpster Diving 101, (to be mandated for NYC high schools) with the DOE selling the harvested data to research companies. It could be the new, new bunk field. The rage, as you say. Garbage in, garbage out. Students could never again claim they didn't learn shit in school. Hurry, the nation is watching. Excelsior, or for you mortals, "ever upward"