The New York Times today has a big piece about New York City hedge fund guys and their involvement in charter schools….and, er….wait a minute…..in the Sunday Styles section??!? Sample quote:
Hedge fund managers may be better known for eight-figure incomes with which they scoop up the choicest Manhattan penthouses and Greenwich, Conn., waterfront estates. But they also dominate the boards of many of the city’s charters schools and support organizations.
“If you’re at a hedge fund, this is definitely the hot cause,” DFER’s Joe Williams tells the Times. “These are the kind of guys who a decade ago would have been spending their time angling to get on the junior board of the Met, the ballet.”
It says something that this piece is in the part of paper famously dubbed the “Ladies’ Sports Section,” right next to the wedding announcements and mint julep recipes. I’m not sure what, exactly, but it says something.
[H/T Andres Henriquez on Twitter]
For what it’s worth, I DETEST the commercials for the New York Times here in NYC. They’re full of half-completed thoughts and pitches and sentence fragments, and they’re like a live-action short film of the blog Stuff White People Like.
Comment by Miss Eyre — December 6, 2009 @ 4:11 pm
When I saw the article, what came to mind was Bernard Shaw’s comment (via Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion) that philanthropist were only interested in the “deserving poor.”
It strikes me that one of the purposes urban charter schools serve is to select for the children of the “deserving poor,” the families interested working hard, being nice, and finding the best school for their kids. And as they were a century ago, wealthy philanthropists are interested.
Maybe in some urban districts this sort of sorting is necessary to ensure that at least some poor children get a good education. But to those of us working in schools that try very hard to educate all children, and haven’t caught the attention of a hedge fund manager looking for a worthy, high profile cause, it’s a bit galling.
Comment by Rachel — December 6, 2009 @ 4:55 pm
I stumbled upon the article this morning as well and was very encouraged to discover the educational knowledge base of many of these young financial whiz kids. It described a number of them getting down and dirty with the school’s spreadsheets in an attempt to figure out what was and what was not working. Very refreshing.
One (Raffkin?), a 30 year old VP in one of Goldman Sachs departments, who grew up poor in a single parent household, was quoted as saying, the charter school movement is “…the civil rights struggle of my generation.”
That put a bit of a different light on this class of previously thought to be unscrupulous narcissists for me. Maybe it’s all a big act or nothing more than a write-off for their exorbitant portfolios but not according to much of what the article described.
I honestly didn’t believe most of them had the ability to think beyond their next bonus. A bit of a pleasant surprise to discover otherwise.
Comment by Paul Hoss — December 6, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
Paul- you’d be surprised how many folks in the financial services industry come from modest upbringings. The stereotype is that it’s all rich kids but while there are certainly plenty of those (one of my DH’s colleagues when he worked as an investment banker was the son of the CEO of a major retail bank), there are also many who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. One of the reasons my DH got his current position was because he’s a self-made man. The founder of his firm has a similar background and knows that those who got where they are purely through their own merits are better performers than those who had things handed to them on a silver platter by virtue of Mummy and Daddy’s connections.
Comment by Crimson Wife — December 7, 2009 @ 11:39 am
One hears a lot about needing to educate all kids, not just the “deserving”, but many kids are in classrooms constantly disrupted by those kids who have no interest in learning. At the middle and high school level, most of those kids are unlikely to change and get on the right path. Allowing hard-working kids to escape this kind of situation is a worthy goal, in my mind. To argue that no one should have a better option until everyone has a better option just leaves a bad taste.
Comment by momof4 — December 7, 2009 @ 12:14 pm