Chalkbeat is a news organization that covers New York City and recently expanded to Memphis. It was previously called Gotham Schools.
Daniel Katz of Seton Hall University recently complained that Chalkbeat is biased in favor of charter schools. He notes that it is funded by the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation, both of which are strong supporters of charter schools.
Katz quotes a letter written by Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters and other community leaders, pointing out Chalkbeat’s unfair coverage of pro-charter and anti-charter activities. Chalkboard failed to send a reporter to cover a citywide rally organized by Community Education Councils.
Chalkboard published the letter of protest in full, with the signatories.
Haimson wrote:
“Rather than sending one of your reporters to cover this event, you only posted a short blurb clearly taken from the press release after the fact. Chalkbeat’s failure to assign a reporter to the event glaringly contrasts with your close and detailed coverage of every move made by the charter operators and their backers. Indeed, you published two different stories on the charter march across the Brooklyn Bridge, three different stories on the Albany rally for charters (though you failed to disclose that Gov. Cuomo was actually behind it) , and on March 29 you ran two stories on reactions to the budget bills, BOTH from the point of view of the charter operators.
“Even more importantly, you have failed to cover any of the substantive issues and reasons behind our anger, including how unprecedented these charter provisions are, how they apply only to NYC, how they will detract from the city’s already underfunded capital plan and cost the taxpayers millions of dollars, while thousands of public school students will continue sit in trailers or in overcrowded classrooms, without art, music, science or therapy and counseling rooms, or on waiting lists for Kindergarten.” (Full disclosure: I am an unpaid member of the board of directors of Class Size Matters, but had no role in writing this letter.)
Chalkbeat responded that they wished they had attended the event in question.
This exchange reveals the serious problem that journalistic outlets face today. Can they survive without outside funding when so much information is available for free on the Internet? Can they be independent when their survival depends on funding from foundations or funders with a strong point of view?
To my knowledge, Gates does not support any organization–journalistic or think tank or advocacy–that is critical of charter schools or high-stakes testing. I would love to be proven wrong. To my knowledge, Walton does not support any organization or think tank or academic program unless it is a strong supporter of charter schools and, in many cases, vouchers. Both foundations are supporters of privatization of public education. There are good reporters at Chalkbeat, but like Katz, I worry about the publication’s capacity to be independent when funded by the billionaire boys’ club.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is true that Chalkbeat has some excellent reporters and reporting, but it is equally true as you point out that full independence is in danger when funding sources have very obvious agendas beyond contributing to the public discourse.
Thank you very much for helping to highlight this issue! It has become a difficult aspect of our new media environment that critical and investigative skills are more essential than ever for citizenship.
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There is some good reporting in Chalkbeat. We need to look for the funding of all of the Pro Common Core entities. I suspect that Class Size Matters is funded by the union and reluctant to take a stance against them. All of the Anti Common Core entities need to come forwards with their funding sources, if any, publishers, etc.
In her new book, Indian author, Arundahti Roy, says:
“Armed with their billions, these NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations)
have waded into the world, turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding artists, intellectuals, and film makers, gently luring them away from radical confrontation, ushering them in the direction of multiculturalism, gender equity, community development- the discourse couched in the language of identity politics and human rights.”
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I began boycotting Gotham Schools before it became Chalkbeat for some of the very reasons cited here – bias toward corporate reform and charter schools.
At about that same time I began boycotting Gotham Schools/Chalkbeat, Capital NY began to cover education issues.
When you compare the coverage at Capital NY to Gotham Schools/Chalkbeat, it’s like night and day – the Cap NY stories are fair, unbiased, and informative while the Gotham Schools/Chalkbeat pieces almost always are framed with a reform-friendly perspective.
The best way to handle bias at a site like Gotham Schools/Chalkbeat is to not go there – give them no traffic, starve them for hits, make them irrelevant, nothing more than an echo chamber for a small, reformy audience.
Gates will fund Gotham Schools/Chalkbeat only so long as the site is relevant. If people stop going there and starve them for hits and traffic, making them irrelevant to other news outlets and cites that cover education, then the Gates Foundation will decide to put its propaganda money elsewhere and Gotham Schools/Chalkbeat will have to shut down and the propaganda writers there might have to go earn an honest living.
To me, that’s the best way to handle a propaganda like Gotham Schools/Chalkbeat and their biased writers – no point in complaining about them, since there is no way they’ll change. Best to boycott, starve them for traffic and make them irrelevant.
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Capital NY does seem to be pretty good.
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They are biased in Colorado too. Thank goodness for people like Anthony Cody!
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Chalkbeat has a small staff. It’s not the New York Times. So it can’t be everywhere for every story. And it regularly posts stories that are critical of charter schools–for example, and excellent story on “backfill” about a month ago. It had a story on test prep at Harlem Success Academy this week that was very critical. They covered the UFT contract negotiations more thoroughly and better than any other news outlet. Overall, they do seem to do a lot more pieces on charter schools than you would think is merited by the relative size of the sector. Maybe that reflects a small bias in their outlook, or maybe it’s a reflection of the fact that charter school principals and teachers are more interested in getting press than public school principals and teachers (who are generally terrified to talk to the press). But I’ve never seen a story on Chalkbeat that suggested it was written because a funder told them to write it or because the subject of the story was a friend or ally of the reporter’s.
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Whatever their limited resources, they’re somehow always able to devote a disproportionate amount of them to largely uncritical charter school coverage.
They also never find a press release by the astroturf/ fifth columnist group E4E unworthy of being classified as “news.”
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Chalkbeat writes a disproportionate amount of material on the charter sector for the same reason that almost all outlets do–it is an extremely popular topic with readers and with the public at large. My understanding is that it is also difficult to do reporting within DOE schools: in theory no DOE employee is supposed to go on the record without clearing it with central DOE media relations first. Perhaps there will be a joyful thawing of this policy soon.
I found their explanation of their decision not to cover the group CEC march to be plausible and acceptable, and it should be noted that plenty of other local outlets didn’t cover it, either. I detect very little bias in what they actually do write, and I think much of the criticism of what they don’t choose to write overlooks the fact that they don’t practice advocacy journalism.
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Like inBloom, non-profit organizations, US Department of Corporate Education, Chalkbeat, Data Quality Campaign, StudentsFirst, etc. are becoming toxic as parents follow the money to Gates and Walton. VAM and high-stakes testing are as harmful as the Data Quality Campaign that champions “non-profits” like the defunct inBloom student/family data mining machine.
Governors and state legislators need to pay attention and listen to parents and educators.
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“Having worked out how to manage governments, political parties, elections, the courts, the media and liberal opinion, the neoliberal establishment faced one more challenge; how to deal with growing unrest, the threat of “peoples’ power”. How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protestors into pets. How do you vacuum up people’s fury and redirect it into blind alleys?”
Arundhati Roy (2014)
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Clever of Gates to buy their way into what seems like virtually most of the media and both teacher unions. The natural constituancy that normally would oppose ReformEd have been neutralized.
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FYI — PBS/wnyc was bought off by Walton. Which may explain why WNYC NEVER says an unkind word about Eva and her ilk. Next time you get a request for money from wnyc, tell them you won’t give them a dime until they drop Walton as a sponsor.
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I only contribute money to Bill Moyers and I give nothing to NPR.
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I look at Chalkbeat religiously to see that is going on in Albany. They also have news that is not found in other sources. If it is receiving such funding, then it will be a great resource to perceive their agenda. Not gong to cut off my nose.
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Chalkbeat Colorado does an excellent job of covering the state legislature. The person who writes about the goings-on is a journalist, hence comprehensive, unbiased reporting. The rest of the reporting is heavily weighted to the reformers’ view of the world. But as mentioned above what else could you expect? Like npr with its Arnold pension story uncovered by Colorado’s own David Sirota, and like again npr’s “coverage” of Washington states’s loss of NCLB exemption which the network erroneously blamed on the teacher’s union, when the funding for programming comes from vested interests (the Arnold foundation itself and the Walton Foundation in these cases) what else can you expect? Chalkbeat is bought and paid for by the reformers. Sadly, this is “journalism” in the USA in 2014.
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on another note of private influence, Here is the Governor’s frat club.
Here is how they are going to privatize education totally
turning teachers into drones..
http://www.campphilos.org/schedule
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I love this one line from the agenda:
“Adequacy, Fairness and Equity: School Finance in the Age of Austerity” . . . .
Yes, we have so much austerity because hedge fund managers and corporations are not paying any fair share of taxation.
Would anyone out there like to provide a list of all the wealthiest individuals and companies who either paid no taxes or received tax refunds?
Anyone?
Mercedes Schneider to the rescue . . . . . .
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I stopped reading Gotham Schools long ago because it was trying to be too many things to too many people.
That’s the worst kind of media you can read . . . . . . .
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