I’m of two minds about the closing of Tariq Ibn Ziyad Academy, the Muslim-centered charter school which went bankrupt over the summer.
The good news? All the lefties who’ve been sniffing their derision about Katherine Kersten’s “lack of reporting experience” will have to eat their words (or would, if being a “progressive” didn’t mean never being held accountable in the media); as Scott Johnson notes, Kersten broke the story at a time when the Strib as a whole, along with the rest of the media, wouldn’t touch it.
Thanks to the work of Katherine Kersten, the Star Tribune has owned this story. Yet it cannot have been a pleasant experience for her to have worked on the story while inside an organization that would sooner have served as TiZA’s public relations arm than investigator or whistleblower. In its pathetic editorial postmortem on TiZA, the Star Tribune jumped straight to the ACLU lawsuit without including in its chronology the fact that one of its own writers broke the story. By contrast, the ACLU Minnesota acknowledged Kersten’s role in uncovering the scandal from the outset of the lawsuit. Wouldn’t a genuine newspaper want to tout its key role in the events? Why is this story different from any other story
Isn’t that what “journalism” is supposed to be about?
Well, maybe once upon a time…
TiZA went bankrupt? You don’t say! Both of my kids were/are going through to Charter Schools and no chance of bankruptcy there due to the way those schools are ran. I would suggest Kersten’s next assignment should be to investigate “why” TiZA went bankrupt. I bet there is a story there.
Legal fees would be one answer.
Also, the Somali community is not all that affluent.
Affluency has nothing to do with survival of Charter Schools – at least not in case of the two my kids went/are going to. As for legal fees – this would likely have been a pro-bono (sp?) case. My tin foil hat is tingling – there is definitely more “there” there.