Newspaper “The Sun” and its Problems
The Sun, a traditional newspaper, gave in print a front-page piece of writing on Thursday in which it assigned letter grades to the city’s best confidential schools, from one A+ (for Brearley, an all-girls school) to five D’s. The manuscript stated that its solitary criteria were “the school’s net assets and the number of students it sends to Harvard.”
The scheme, the document said, was an attempt to imitate Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s contentious move to give community and contract schools grades last year. Other than the confidential schools — which have by now been clutching their communal heads over the TV send-up “Gossip Girl” — complained noisily, saying that The Sun was only making an attempt to gather readership with a journalistic shortcut.
“This is too easy — it’s mean-spirited since these are all outstanding schools,” said George P. Davison, head of the Guild of Independent Schools, and friendship of metropolis confidential schools. “Try to employ something that actually was concerning wealth more than anything else does an enormous damage to the whole group of people.”
“I believe lots of the schools, even the schools that got the high grades, were extremely let down by the reporting,” said Linda Mac Murray Gibbs, the leader of the Hewitt School on the Upper East Side, which has got a D. She criticized “the fallaciousness of trying to grade and give rank to schools based upon admittance to one university and their possessions.”
Ms. Gibbs, who pronounced that no one from The Sun had contacted her in reporting the piece of writing, as well pointed to a truthful mistake: Hewitt’s Web site mentions that its 2007 graduates matriculated at schools comprising Harvard, other than the commentary, which said that it had used “The Harvard Freshman Register” as its basis for adding each school’s sum, said that “all of the ‘D’ schools had no graduates scheduled” in the yearly book.