Let's review, starting form the end. The Boston Finance Commission turned down a request by Boston school superintendent Dr. Carol Johnson to hire a consultant, Dr. Rudy Crew, at a reported $1500 per day. Because the total contact was above $10K, the FinCom gets a chance to review the proposal. They decided against it. As a result, Dr. Crew probably won't be hired.
The rest of the story is as follows:
- Dr. Crew would have charged $1500/day. Beaudet used the number in the sub-headline and six times in the story.
- Dr. Crew, a nationally recognized education leader, was "fired" from two jobs.
One, in the Miami-Dade County system, was for, as Beaudet reported, "after being accused by critics of mismanaging the budget."
Beaudet didn't report that Crew and the school board agreed to sever his contract, that the district is one of three finalists in a national competition. (Awards will be announced on October 14.) Beaudet also didn't report that Crew, according to A U.S. News and World Report article, removed under-performing principals and corrected previously wasteful construction practices. - Dr. Crew would have charged $1500/day. Beaudet wishes he was making that kind of money.
With all due respect Dr. Johnson, $1,500 a day. I'd love to be making that much money. Is he really worth all that money?” asked Beaudet.
- Dr. Crew lost his job with the New York City school system in 2000 after repeated run-ins with Mayor Rudy (no relation) Guiliani over the issue of school vouchers to private schools. The mayor wanted vouchers; the superintendent refused.
- There's no disputing that the daily rate is a lot of money. It's also in the range of his 2010 Miami salary, The New York Times reported. Salaries at that level are reserved for the superintendents of the largest school systems. Miami-Dade is the fourth largest system in the nation. According to the survey by District Administration magazine, a CEO of a comparably large company would make more than $1M annually.
We want outstanding schools on the cheap. We want to have schools run efficiently and meet goals, just like businesses must do, but we'll only pay one-third the going rate for the education, skills, and experience.
I can't make the determination if Dr. Crew is worth that kind of money. Neither, it appears, can Mike Beaudet. We learned very little about Dr. Crew's past work as a consultant or the value of consultants in reforming education. We learned nothing about what consultants and professionals earn in education or any other field. What we heard was a number that Beaudet envied. (The average salary for a news reporter in Boston in $42K.)
For the locals: Dr. Crew worked as a teacher in the Worcester school system in 1972-73.
2 comments:
Mike Beaudet and his Fox 25 Undercover team once again hit the airwaves with partial facts skewed to render a potentially speculative and fallacious conclusion. I had the exact same reaction, noting that because a consultant is high paid does not mean that they are not worth it.
Where is the factual information on the cost of educational consulting and the potential benefits, instead just inviting people to once again whine and complain and shake their heads in agreement with this highly aggressive reporter and his adolescent series of character assassinations.
Aside from some recent and somewhat relevant stories on true government corruption which focused on actual endemic issues, there is a consistent theme of assassinating the character of an individual person. Beaudet comes across as mean and abrasive, but the actual story isn’t usually relevant to a big picture issue (such as the millions of dollars that are being wasted by two man cop teams standing over man holes chatting with construction workers) and often reeks of some angry informant wanting revenge.
Beaudets stories provide sensational trailers to run during high rated Fox shows like American Idol (or now X Factor) to drag people into watching Fox 25 low rated local news (other than from a Herald poll of course). When Beaudets story didn’t completely destroy his target, he runs more stories on that PERSON. In the case of Sheriff James Diapola, Fox Undercover didn’t have to keep running stories because the Sheriff took his own life after one of Beaudet’s aggressive spots.
Beaudet calls himself relentless, but I see that word more as reserved for things such as cancerous tumors and terrorists and doesn’t seem like something to brag about. I would guess that that type of relentlessness was what brought News Corp into the mess that it is in right now, crossing the line of needing increasingly more sensational fodder.
He also appears to lie on his website, claiming that he always asks his subjects for an interview first when it seems pretty obvious to me that nobody that he is running stories on is prepared for the discussion (Beaudet seems to jump in front of them, unsuspectingly) and while a relentless reporter is distasteful a deceptive one is untrustworthy (and this guy teaches journalism at Emerson too!). If you just corner someone you are never going to have a balanced and insightful story but you will always have someone looking sandbagged.
For me, the biggest selling points for news are accuracy and integrity. Secondly, it should also be tasteful, interesting and occasionally endearing. I do want to hear the good with the bad, but
I don’t trust someone whose news stories are predicated on surprising an interviewee. I suppose there are viewers out there who really want their news to be as shocking and as hard hitting as possible but other than for entertainment value (which wanes over time), I don’t really get that.
Mike Beaudet has been caught lying on a video that he seems to have made a few years back. He has also obstucted the protection of children by asking informants (and given them an incentive to) keep alleged risk to children a secret so he could make a big hit on the 10pm news months later. This is unacceptable an unethical.
Mike Beaudet needs to be fired from Fox 25 and Fox 25 needs to appologize before I will ever trust them again.
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