… is a new tracking group in New York City. Come again, you say? Is she carrying on about a CIA op? Or maybe some clandestine intel blitz by the NYPD?

Nah, at issue is only a unit at the city’s heftily staffed press office at the Department of Education. Named without appropriate humility or irony, these press staffers busily ferret out and correct perceived errors on various education websites often critical of the DOE.

One party being monitored, Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute, laughingly compares this effort to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. I react in kind to parent organizer Leonie Haimson, whose blogs are also being tracked. Unperturbed by the project, Haimson seems instead surprised that the DOE “actually hears our complaints,” adding, “because [Schools Chancellor] Joel Klein doesn’t seem to.”

What is inconvenient for Klein to hear is that education in New York cannot substantially improve without reforms far more radical and threatening to the union-dominated status quo than those he has ordained. Let him deploy squadrons of press “truth-seekers.” No matter their diligence or meddlesomeness, city children will continue to be educationally deprived until leaders such as Klein have the courage to institute full parental school choice, a knowledge-rich curriculum, sound and proven pedagogies, rigorous and open performance-based assessment, and a longer school day.