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Not His Style
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Business New Haven
4/20/1998
By: BNH
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A few issues back I read an excoriating letter from Mayor John DeStefano (BNH, March 9). While I have met the mayor only once, I've followed his political career, catch his show weekly on local radio, and otherwise view him as a pretty decent guy, and an able administrator. Why he chose to personally attack Michael Bingham and Mitchell Young of this business publication is far beyond me.
I know both of these men, and have for many years. They exemplify fair and accurate reportage, and while the editorial that the mayor responded to in his letter (“Where's the Outrage?” February 9) criticized the administration and the New Haven school system, their editorial comments were indeed just, if the results of the 1997 Connecticut Mastery Tests are accurate.
To reconstruct: New Haven students scored 171st out of 172 school districts, or virtually at the bottom of the think-tank barrel. BNH's point was this: If about one half of New Haven's $300 million annual budget is spent on education, where's the return?
Also, New Haven school administrators appear to “comprise nearly 90 percent of the top-paid city employees.” So where are Michael and Mitchell off-base? Isn't this, in their words, “non-performance”? And if indeed the mayor appoints people to the Board of Education, what's the board all about - non-education?
If, as Simeon Timoshenko, the old master Soviet infantry general, once put it: The best defense is an offense, then the mayor's letter is right on. In attacking (in very personal invective) two of this city's finer journalists, I think the mayor discredits himself, because it doesn't seem like his style. But there it is: a letter beheading two men who really do tell it like it is.
As a city-educated person (Hillhouse) I can recall when the school's masthead, the “Academics,” meant something. Can any teacher, board member or the mayor look in the mirror and affiliate today's Hillhouse with Academia. I don't think so. But what does it take, as Bingham and Young ask, where's the leadership?
Perhaps that's the rub. Their editorial made it quite clear that “new and competent leadership for our schools” is needed. Is that not true? Are the Connecticut Mastery Tests so much garbage? To gain one more ranking up the educational ladder from 171 to 170 - does that take, annually, $150 million or so? If so, that's fiscally nuts. New Haven's students will take the city to the poorhouse.
So, Mitchell and Michael, keep your independent point of view. Voices like yours are still vital in New Haven.
- Russ Madison
President/Creative Director
Lone Wolf Advertising
Woodbridge
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