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.
Scandalous Schools
April 19, 2013
One of the bad features of the school reform movement that was cited in our posting of March 29 (“Hit Again”) is the obsession over standardized testing and the linkage between children’s scores and adults’ salaries. The length to which some so-called educators have gone reached new highs (or perhaps lows) in Atlanta recently; but that’s far from the only school testing travesty we’ve seen, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post Writers Group reported on LSJ.com on April 4, 2013:
“It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform – requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores – is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket.
“I mean that literally. Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday for an alleged cheating scheme that won her more than $500,000 in performance bonuses. Hall, who retired two years ago, has denied any wrongdoing.
“Also facing criminal charges are 34 teachers and principals who allegedly participated in the cheating, which involved simply erasing students’ wrong answers on test papers and filling in the correct answers.
“In 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named Hall ‘National Superintendent of the Year’ for improvement in student achievement. For educators who worked for Hall, bonuses and promotions were based on test scores. After a day of testing, teachers would allegedly be told to gather the students’ test sheets and change the answers. Suddenly a failing school would become a model of education reform. The principal and teachers would get bonuses. Hall would get a much bigger bonus.
“State education officials became suspicious. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote probing stories. There seemed to be no way to legitimately explain the dramatic improvement in such a short time, or the statistically improbable number of erasures on answer sheets.
“Sonny Perdue was governor at the time, and in August 2010 he ordered a blue-ribbon investigation. Hall resigned shortly before the release of the investigators’ report, which alleged that 178 teachers and principals cheated over nearly a decade. Those findings laid the foundation for Friday’s Grand Jury indictment.
“My Washington Post colleague Valerie Strauss, a veteran education reporter and columnist, wrote Friday that there have been ‘dozens’ of alleged cheating episodes around the country, but only Atlanta’s has been aggressively and thoroughly investigated.
“Standardized achievement tests are a vital tool, but treating test scores the way a corporation might treat sales targets is wrong. Students are not widgets. Even absent cheating, the blind obsession with test scores implies that teachers are interchangeable implements of information transfer, rather than caring professionals who know their students as individuals.
“School reform has to be something that is done with a community of teachers, students and parents – with honesty and, yes, a bit of old fashioned humility.”