By Joseph Batory

When I became the Upper Darby School District’s superintendent of schools in 1984, I began publicly reacting to the misinformation and inaccuracies about public education being disseminated by many national politicians and corporate gurus. Too many of these elected officials in government and many private sector CEO’s had self-serving agendas without any intellectual basis, speaking down to the American people as if they were lemmings who were too dumb to understand the propaganda being fed from above.
And so, I used the superintendent’s “bully pulpit” and became a frequent public critic of obfuscation and untruth spread by the powerful. For 15 years, my vocal positions at public School Board meetings in support of public education and justice and egalitarianism were regularly covered by local newspapers. This did not make me popular with politicians and private sector big shots. And the news media loved me as a controversial figure.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/29/95 The school board was engrossed in a night of mundane discussions….members stared listlessly at each other…..then a man popped out of his chair. First, he accused the State of Pennsylvania of deliberate underfunding of public education and the children it serves. He attacked the State’s new funding policy as an unconscionable, immoral scam. A maverick Board member? Hardly. An irate taxpayer? Not quite! This flame thrower was Upper Darby’s School superintendent Joe Batory! In an age when school superintendents measure their words with the caution of a driver education student behind the wheel, this guy prides himself on bluntness, regardless of the sting. It’s a professional risk he’s willing to take because he believes in what he says and is willing to fight for it.

Then, when I retired in 2000, I decided to continue my attempts to express viewpoints. Over a period of several years, I sent more than 60 different op-ed pieces on a wide array of topics to The Philadelphia Inquirer. To my dismay, the vast majority of ,y writing on politics, education and history, despite being acknowledged as received, was never published by the Inquirer.

Not giving up, beginning around 2006, I began sending my op-ed pieces to The Delaware County Daily Times, the newspaper circulating in the county just west of Philadelphia. Since that starting point, more than 200 of my articles on different topics have found their way into print. And so, I am grateful to the Daily Times for its openness in sharing my writing on politics, education, history and culture with the public over more than one decade.
However, unfortunately for me, as of July of 2021, the Daily Times adopted a new editorial policy to be more restrictive re periodic guest columnists. Four of my subsequent submissions for publication were ignored, so I surrendered.

Obviously, my stint as an op-ed writer had ended!

As for The Inquirer, its universal rejection of so much of my writing has been disappointing and disturbing, but more importantly, unworthy of a “free press.”

Jack Nicholson’s famous movie line (below) might be applicable: