News Cycle is Downward Spiral
January 15, 2016
I’ve come to distrust most of what I read, hear and see in the news.
This is the result of reading, hearing and seeing reports about topics I know a lot about. When I read, hear and see how badly the facts are mangled and otherwise misrepresented by media reporting about my world, I figure the same must be true of news coverage of most everything else.
It is rare that coverage is factually accurate, fair and free of bias. I have to confess, this can be true of the complimentary stories about school sports; it is not only true of the critical stories.
The loss of long-form reporting by professional media who have spent many years with the topics and persons involved has affected all news reporting; but nowhere have the cuts been deeper than the always under-funded programs of lower profile, like media attention to school sports as compared to college and professional sports.
Into the void created by cutbacks in professional media coverage at the local level are newcomers with self-appointed titles and self-made websites and little relationship to the history of the topic, rationale for the rule or respect for people who gained authority by devoting lifetimes to that which the neophyte has discovered expertise overnight and without effort.
And now, fueled by social media, misinformation goes viral. Often without understanding of or accountability to facts. And usually with anonymity.
Tough Love
October 9, 2015
A young Korean woman has lived with my wife and me for two years and will for two years longer. Grace is a graduate of the international school in China where our son and his wife were her teachers; and since living with us, she has graduated from Lansing Community College and moved on to Michigan State University.
Having this student in our home and a son and daughter-in-law as educators in China, living with my wife who once was in charge of refugee resettlement for a large agency in mid-Michigan, and my serving for seven years as president of the board of the Refugee Development Center in Lansing, makes me understanding of and sympathetic to international students.
However, I expect that is not the reputation I enjoy among those who work for student exchange organizations and even among some in our schools who work with the increasing number of international students who are enrolling in Michigan’s secondary schools. They probably view me as an advocate for more restrictive transfer rules for international students, especially regarding F-1 visa students and nonpublic schools.
Guilty as charged. Indeed, I do advocate for higher standards for exchange programs, more vigorous oversight of student placements and more equal application of rules, regardless of the type of visa the student has or the type of school in which that student enrolls.
It is because I see great value in our interaction with people from other nations that I want to assure international student exchanges remain popular in our schools. Nothing jeopardizes the future of international student exchange more than sloppy or shady placements of international students, including last-minute dumping of students by agencies, athletic-related direct placements by agents, and school districts loading up on international students as backfill for declining local enrollments.
As some youth escape brutal hardship in war-torn or impoverished countries and more well-off foreign students stampede to the U.S. to attend U.S. secondary schools, colleges and universities, it will require high doses of tough love. If problems related to athletics increase, so will the chances that all international students will lose all opportunities to participate in varsity level sports in this state.