"Everybody wants some money, and nobody wants to get left behind"

Jennifer Medina does such a good job on the City Schools beat that she has surely earned a ticket out of the journalistic purgatory of big city education coverage. I'll be sorry to see her go.

She had three stories the past week that should be put in a time capsule labeled NYC Schools Sad But True, 2000-2010.

One deals with the possibility of limiting the powers for Mayor Gradgrind and Chancellor McChoakumchild (could Council be questioning the wisdom of their monarchical appointment?);

The harshest criticism came from Councilman John C. Liu, who suggested that several of the mayor’s education-policy changes had been politically motivated.

“Mayoral control was not meant to be martial law,” Mr. Liu said.

The words provoked a terse response from Mr. Walcott, who said that policy changes were not politically motivated and added, “I totally disagree with you.”

and one on Gradgrind's failure to follow state law governing the teaching of the arts (he will make those scumbag teachers pay for this);

“We are moving in the right direction,” he [Gradgrind] said. “We will hold them accountable for teaching the arts just as we have established holding them accountable for English and math.”

and a third piece on the City's transformation of school learning into the lowest-paying kind of dead end production work (a guy from Harvard was hired to come up this shameful scam):

Would it be better to get the money as college scholarships? Shouts of “No way!” echoed through the room. “We might not all go to college,” one student protested.

Read them all. Nice job, Ms. Medina.