The "public lives" profile of the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Sandra Feldman, that the Times offers up this morning falls into the classic trap of dwelling on the appearance of a powerful woman at the expense of substance. The piece begins with the phrase, "Resplendent in her brand-new heathery indigo pantsuit," and proceeds to a discussion of the union leader's newly blond hair. The article acknowledges, "Maybe Ms. Feldman is right, and it is a superficial -- even sexist -- detail hardly worth mentioning."
A Times metro columnist devoted an entire column a few month back to the ridiculousness of such attention to the appearance of public figures who happen to be women. The column pointed out that men hardly ever get that kind of treatment, and if they did, we'd realize how ridiculous it is. But that column appears to have been roundly ignored by the writer and editors responsible for today's profile of Ms. Feldman.
If the Times article had spent a little less space dwelling on Ms. Feldman's hair, pantsuit and supposed fondness for salsa dancing, it might have a little more space to explore the implications of the following sentence, which comes at the end of the profile: "The enemy, she says, is the growing legion of entrepreneurs eyeing the $3 billion educational industrial complex, and the Republicans who want to give parents public money for private-school tuition." This is apparently a Times paraphrase of something Ms. Feldman says, but it contains so many flawed assumptions that it's hard to know where to begin. To begin with, an imaginative union leader would see entrepreneurs eyeing the education industry as an opportunity, not an enemy. Even the head of Ms. Feldman's New York local affiliate union, Randi Weingarten, has been quoted as being open to the idea of contracting with private companies to run some public schools, so long as the private companies permit the organization of unions for teachers. This seems like a much more reasonable position than viewing such private firms as "the enemy"; in the long run, teachers' jobs will be more secure if they have union jobs in a successful privately run system than in the current, troubled government-run one. Then there is the Times-Feldman description of school vouchers as a plan to "give parents public money for private-school tuition." Wait a minute. It's not "public money"; money doesn't belong to the public, it belongs to individual taxpayers. And if a voucher plan allowed "private" schools to accept more poor students, they'd be less accurately called "private" schools and more accurately called "privately run schools that are open to the public." What the Times-Feldman camp now calls "public schools" would then be more accurately called "government-run schools."
So what the Times-Feldman terminology calls an attempt to "give parents public money for private school tuition" would in fact more accurately and fairly be called an attempt to "allow parents the choice of using their money to pay for a government-run school or for a privately run school that is open to the public." Again, an argument can be made that from the long-term perspective of the union, it's better to go along with a voucher plan and try to unionize the teachers in the privately run schools than it is to link the fate of the union to the troubled government-run school system. Alas, however, the Times doesn't have time or space this morning for these sorts of subtle distinctions. It is too busy paying attention to Ms. Feldman's pantsuit and her hair.
After Deadline: The big news of this morning is the failure of a test by the Pentagon of a missile defense system. Wire service stories this morning reporting the failure say the Pentagon disclosed the test results at about 1:10 a.m. eastern time. That's too late, apparently, to make the deadline for my "late edition" of the New York Times; all it contains is a story inside the paper reporting that "Pentagon planners monitored weather patterns" and that the test "is being watched around the world."