Hyperbole and Misinformation

Before I start in, I want to say that I’ve had a lot of interactions with a lot of reporters in this city, and the vast majority of the interactions have been good. This includes several staff reporters from the Boston Globe.

But when it comes to the editorial departments, let’s say I have some concerns.

Because the mayor has chosen to not fully fund BPS at a level that accounts for rising costs, the schools are experiencing devastating cuts. $50 million dollars in cuts to be exact.

So how do the editorial pages of the Athens of America respond?

First up, we have the Boston Herald on Monday editorializing that the “cuts are off the table.”

Now this is simply mystifying to me. A very simple google search would inform the editors of the Herald that the cuts are not off the table. Alternatively, they could have picked up the phone and called BPS to find out that the cuts are still very much on the table. But apparently fact checking is not within the purview of the editorial board.

Now today, we get something interesting from the Globe’s Farah Stockman. The cuts are happening – but they’re the teachers’ fault! And then she accused me of hyperbole and misinformation on Twitter.

@GoogieBaba To correct hyperbole and misinformation put out by pple like u.

— Farah Stockman (@fstockman) February 26, 2016

Now, that was an interesting to say to me. Because honestly, I can’t once remember seeing Ms. Stockman at a Budget Hearing, School Committee Meeting or Town Hall. Not once. Now if she had gone to Monday night’s Town Hall Meeting, she would have heard a few things. Such as:

The O’Bryant, the city’s STEM school, has a $340,000 cut. They are losing their computer science program.

The Jeremiah Burke has a $300,000 cut and will lose their Spanish teacher. The school will have no foreign language instructions.

A librarian who serves as the only librarian for four schools has lost her job.

Boston Latin School is losing 7 teachers.

My daughter’s tiny school, the BTU k-8, is losing $250,000 which results in the loss of 2 teachers. In last year’s budget cuts, we lost our Spanish teacher.

And on and on. There isn’t a single high school that hasn’t been affected. Very few schools have not been affected by this round of budget cuts.

I storified the entire town hall meeting in case you are interested. It chronicles the severity of what BPS is experiencing.

I have not once seen a Boston Globe columnist question why the city can’t fulfill the teacher contracts that it has agreed to. I have not once seen an editorial questioning why the city cannot fully fund the public schools. I have seen plenty of columnist and editorials promoting the need for more charter schools. But not a single one questioning the state on why it has not taken the recommendations of the Foundation Budget Review Commission. The FBRC is the state’s own report that it is underfunding public education by billions of dollars. My guess would be no one on the editorial staff of either paper even knows what the FBRC even is.

We deserve better than this Boston. We are taxpayers and we spend money on the newspapers. We deserve fully funded schools for all of the kids not just a select few. And we deserve newspapers that know something about the educational environment before their Opinion pages spout off nonsense.