Does The Buffalo News Realize the Tide Has Turned?

According to several of my FB colleagues the Buffalo News has published 3 letters this week critical of the Little Appointee Who Couldn't aka Chicken a la King aka Lil John King the anointed one of NYSED hired without a search and lacking the minimum 5 years teaching experience required by law. I'll leave it to you dear reader to go see for yourself, I'd sooner link to Nova Scotian Senior Circuit Curling than that useless fishwrap.  Not that the News is going to pick up on this Gordian Knot of a thread mind you and actually send one of their intrepid scribes to Albany with some ball kicking questions. Naaaah, they will continue to blunder ahead in their myopic misdirected stagger with Donn Esmonde writing trite hagiographies of all the local reformers even the ones he owns houses with in Florida that he forgets to disclose.  Remember this paper waited all of three days after the Sandy Hook Massacre to accuse Buffalo Teachers of "abusing" their students. So now that an obvious tide of revulsion and anger is rising I have to wonder how they go about admitting that their blind defense of this data nerd with zero people skills has been over his head since Steiner flipped him the keys as he parachuted into the lucrative edubiz world. 

I wonder if it's going to be the same strategery they used to admit James Williams our disgraced shitheel of a Superintendent here in B-Lo was not who they claimed he was. Remember though he'd all ready shitcanned the attendance teachers and tried to use their re-hiring as a bargaining chip with the unions. He'd threatened to kick Phil Rumore's ass in an alley but not until Rumore had left the room of course. He'd insulted the female VP of the administrator's union with some stupid sexist remark and generally carried on like a drunken frat house boor while the News stood by tapping its toe and whistling a little ditty. Finally he escorted a gang of thugs back into Performing Arts Academy giving each of them his personal digits with instructions to call him immediately if any of the adults hurt their feelings. The fact that the four of them had surrounded and stomped a kid into the hospital and done a teacher up too in the melee sending him out on medical leave didn't seem to concern the Sup as much as the fact they they were black and troubled and this was his chance to score some hood cred by looking out for his peeps. At this point public furor reached a boiling point and even the Buffalo News, whose publisher at the time, Stan Lipsey was an old Harvard pal of the banker whose  extremely narrow search brought Williams here, was forced to admit we had a turd in the Super's office. It was the high minded antics of pro charter school, anti union M&T CEO Bourdeaux Bob Wilmers who stepped in and offered to fund the Superintendent search (at least one former Board of Ed member claims he never did send them the check he promised) and settled on Williams who decimated the Dayton OH Public Schools, opening and closing charters like Paladino's Rite Aides, provoking a teacher's strike, double dipping with a no show gig at Wayne State College and leaving behind a smoking crater of a school system topped off with an $18 million dollar shortfall he was able to keep hidden until he'd stuffed his briefcase with linen and silverware and shuffled off to Buffalo. 

With all of that to recommend him Wilmers thought he's be a great fit here in B-Lo and as Paladino said correctly his being black was good enough for the idiot Sorority Majority of the Board to hire him on. In King's case he's never really had anything to recommend him. He was Steiner's poop boy who trailed along in Steiner's wake sharpening his pencils, laughing at his unfunny jokes and keeping his Blackberry charged.  A data nerd who prefers to eat lunch alone with take out food and his precious data. A Teachers College (how ironic) classmate of Meryl Tish the Chancellorette of the flatulent Regents and a limousine liberal of the first order who no doubt trembled at the thought of a  compliant spineless minority Commissioner as the hood ornament to her Regents Bentley. And since he's taken the job he's proven he has no people skills, no empathy and no spine. He sneaks in and out of Buffalo with the stealth of a George W Bush trip to Baghdad lest any "stakeholder" button hole him and say "Listen here you little twit, kids are puking on your goddamned test days and you think it's fine? This crap needs to stop."  That would be so far off script now wouldn't it?  These people like their scripts, for teachers, for parents, for kids, as long as nobody speaks up it all goes their way. Well folks it looks like King has just walked the goons back into Performing Arts. Hard to say how much longer they can hold out against the siege up there in the News Editorial bunker but my guess is they're running out of peameal and powder. Keep the pressure on. We are going to win this battle and John King is going to end up counting circles at Pearson.