GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Educators from across East Asia posed with GothamSchools advisory board member Genevieve Wachtell and editor Elizabeth Green Friday.

“Any questions?” I asked last Friday, staring at a room full of educators who’d just watched my standard 15-minute meet-GothamSchools presentation. A hand went up.

“What,” the woman asked slowly, “is the main function of your organization?”

I didn’t think this woman was asking the kind of existential question that sometimes keeps me up at night.* She just wanted the main function.

What was going on here? The person who’d brought the room full of educators offered me an explanation, delicately describing GothamSchools’ mission of offering independent news coverage of public education as “something of a surprise” to the group.

After all, the educators were all senior officials and professors from East Asia — countries including China, Thailand, the Philippines, Fiji, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore. They’d come to GothamSchools as part of a visitor program organized by the U.S. State Department. Their tour, which began January 17 and will go through February, focuses on what the state department describes as “innovations in primary and secondary education.”

Our guests, the official explained to me, had struggled to understand us from the moment they stepped out of their tour bus and into our building’s elevator. “Is this part of the state or the federal government?” one person asked him. They had trouble conceiving of how or why a non-governmental organization would take any interest in public schools, he said. Understanding that journalists could also be independent was even more of a stretch for many. (more…)