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9486 in the collection
To Speak Out Against the City’s School System, One Man Turns to the Power of Parody
Three cheers for Gary Babad. Of course the staid New York Times won't tell you where you can find GBN. It appears periodically on the NYC Public School Parents blogspot.
Enter Gary's name in 'search' on this site and you will find a couple of his parodies. Here's his lataest:
Bloomberg LP to Acquire Major Snake Oil Company
July 28, 2008 (GBN News): Bloomberg LP, the company owned by NY City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, announced today that it has agreed to acquire the country’s largest snake oil company, Python Snake Oil. The actual takeover will not be in effect until January 1, 2010, when Mayor Bloomberg will leave office and resume full time control of his company. At that time, Joel Klein, whose tenure as Schools Chancellor will almost certainly end with the Mayor’s, will take over as CEO of what will be known as the Snake Oil Division of Bloomberg LP.
In a statement to the press, a company spokesperson touted the acquisition as “a marriage made in heaven” between the world’s premier snake oil company and the world’s best snake oil salesmen, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein. After the announcement, Python Snake Oil stock doubled in value within hours. Noted financial analyst J. Fredrick Muggs, Dean of Manhattan University School of Business, told GBN News that despite the current bear market, “Investors obviously believe that if the Mayor and Chancellor can sell a bunch of flat test scores as significant progress, they can sell anything, even snake oil, in massive quantities.”
Sources at Bloomberg LP told GBN News that speculation within the company is that the profits from the new snake oil division will be used to fund the development of a number of charter schools in New York City. There was no direct comment on this from either Mr. Bloomberg or Mr.Klein, though a source at the DOE told GBN News that the Chancellor was sporting a “particularly venomous look” today.
By Jennifer Medina
Nearly 50 New York City school principals were fired immediately in what Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein declared a “warning shot across the bow.” Blackwater USA was awarded a no-bid contract to take over school security. And a national education foundation offered a $100 million endowment to any university that established a degree in “high-stakes test-taking.”
Those satirical news items, which appear on an education blog, are always slightly off-kilter, but several have seemed believable enough to prompt inquiries to the Education Department’s headquarters from parents and journalism students asking to follow up on a story they saw elsewhere.
“The best part is when people can’t distinguish their reality from the reality that is made up,” said Gary Babad, the writer of dozens of mock news items dealing with the Education Department. “I think of it as a kind of therapy and my form of quiet dissent. And it’s a stress reliever.”
Soft-spoken with a strong sarcastic streak, Mr. Babad, 56, hardly seems like a rabble-rouser; more like the kind of man who would rarely raise his voice. He is a social worker with two daughters who have attended city schools since kindergarten. But he has a bit of a protest pedigree: Grandma was a Communist, and Mom was the president of the local teachers union in Ardsley, N.Y.
It was shortly after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took over the school system in 2002 that Mr. Babad started to speak up, because, he said, things struck him as paternalistic and overly controlling. He recalled a PTA meeting at which someone said a particular bylaw needed to be changed to comply with a request from administrators downtown.
After a heated debate broke out, one of Mr. Babad’s daughters, who was about 10, came by to ask what the commotion was about.
“I explained to her that they were telling us our votes don’t count and that’s what some countries of the world do all the time,” Mr. Babad remembered. “She said right away, ‘Well, Dad, that’s not fair.’ ”
To Mr. Babad, who earned a teaching certificate but then decided to pursue social work because he thought it would make more of a difference, that was the start of a long line of offenses from Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein. The proverbial back-breaking straw was when Mr. Bloomberg began enforcing a ban on cellphones at schools in 2006; like many city parents, Mr. Babad thought it necessary, for safety reasons, for his daughters to carry cellphones as they commuted to and from school.
Soon, Mr. Babad was exchanging messages with dozens of parents through a citywide Listserv about ways to fight the ban. Several weeks later, he penned his first mock news release, announcing that Alvarez & Marsal, the consulting firm whose recommendation to change school bus routes midyear left dozens of students literally out in the cold, was taking over the reconstruction plans in Iraq.
“If we can’t beat the insurgents militarily, we’ll cut off their transportation and starve them out,” the parody quoted Tony Snow, the former White House press secretary, as saying.
Other parents with similar criticisms of Mr. Klein’s policy decisions and leadership style howled at the release. When Leonie Haimson, a frequent outspoken critic of the Education Department, created a blog for parents last spring, nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com, she tapped Mr. Babad to regularly contribute so-called news tidbits.
“There’s such an ‘anything goes’ mentality at Tweed that people are prepared to believe the absolute worst,” Ms. Haimson said, referring to the department’s headquarters.
Mr. Babad, who went to public school in Edgemont, N.Y., a suburb in Westchester County, has hardly become a full-time school activist; many of the familiar gadflies at board of education meetings would not recognize him. He said he planned to keep imagining the news as long as it entertained him.
He is likely to stay interested at least another four years, since his younger daughter, Janna, 13, is entering Martin Van Buren High School in Queens Village, this fall. His other daughter, Adina, graduated from Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Bayside, Queens, in June and plans to attend Temple University in the fall.
“Even though it is creative, it just feels like any of it is believable,” Adina Babad, 17, said of her father’s writing. “The way they handle cellphones, the way they handle a lot by just telling people what to do without a discussion — it kind of makes it easy to make fun of them and laugh.”
Mr. Babad, for his part, said that he enjoyed writing satire, but that his biggest satisfaction came when people mistook his parody for reality. Last fall, when Mr. Babad wrote that Blackwater USA, now named Blackwater Worldwide, was taking over security duties at the city schools, one member of a local Community Education Council wrote to Ms. Haimson demanding to know whether it was true — but only after taking his complaint directly to one of the deputy schools chancellors.
In another instance, a graduate student at Columbia University called a press spokeswoman at the Education Department for details about Mr. Klein’s plan to allow the military to recruit teachers who had been removed from the classroom and placed in so-called rubber rooms, where they are paid but do not teach until their cases are resolved. It took the spokeswoman several hours to realize that the source had been one of Mr. Babad’s spoofs.
David Cantor, the chief spokesman for the department, said he had nothing to add about Mr. Babad’s hobby.
To clear up any confusion, each of Mr. Babad’s posts is now accompanied with the notation “GBN” — as in Gary Babad News — to signify that it is fake.
“The Education Department folks don’t do irony, or at least they don’t think they do irony,” Mr. Babad said. He paused, and then mentioned a real announcement last school year that the department would experiment with a program to give students cellphones as an incentive and reward them with free minutes if they did well in school — despite the citywide cellphone ban.
“You can’t get them to understand how ironic this stuff is,” he added. “But they have actually taken irony to the extreme.”
— Jennifer Medina
New York Times
2008-07-30
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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