Off the Hot Seat, on the Record
The public schools, he knows now, do not need defending: the one thing the system does well is perpetuate itself. “I discovered after many years of heading the system–and this was something I adopted almost as my reason for living during my years as president–I underestimated its ability to be clever, to survive.
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“The whole reform movement has basically been concentrating on who shall hold the decision-making power,” Munoz said. “The main problems–strikes, dropouts–aren’t being addressed because they are too sensitive and insoluble. The public doesn’t want to hear more money’s needed. A strike is a pure product of the finances of the school system, and nobody wants to talk about that.”
The immediate virtue of new school systems would be the chance to wipe out the ancient contracts that paralyze the old one. Munoz has in mind contracts that compensate teachers for poor pay and horrendous working conditions with nearly absolute job security based on seniority; contracts that the cafeteria help and building engineers negotiate separately, putting them outside the authority of the principals of their schools.
Munoz sounded to us like a guy who hopes against hope. We’ll have to read his columns to find out. He made it clear that radical change, however unlikely, remains urgent.
We hear Baim had told investors that McCourt was bored and burned out. The Times was in trouble; Chicago needed a gay newspaper with quicker blood.
She has a point. The papers were never mirror images of each other, the Times being newsier and Outlines more meditative. But the critical distinction was economic: Outlines never broke even; and the Times, according to McCourt, enjoyed “our greatest period of growth” in the paper’s three-year history.
