Peter Greene examines in this post why education journalism is biased towards the reformy narrative.
Why do education writers call pundits in think tanks instead of teachers?
Then he analyzes a guide to sources, and the reason for bias becomes clear.
Why talk to a teacher when Reformer pundits are standing by?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
NYC Educator, always hilarious! And he elucidates part of the problem. Most teachers don’t have the time or inclination for this. But, having said that, I think this is a mere symptom of a greater bias from both without and within.
NYC EducatorAugust 31, 2018 at 10:12 PM
I applied, mostly because you asked, but I’m not remotely sure I want to be associated with that bunch. On reflection, I particularly don’t want them calling me.
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I’m a working newsroom journalist with a background (during a long career sabbatical) as an education activist. I’ve decried this tendency endlessly, while giving due respect to my newsroom colleagues — plus I’m their union rep as San Francisco Chronicle unit chair for the Pacific Media Workers Guild, so that further motivates me to support rather than criticize them.
Reporters working on deadline often desperately need a quote from a source FAST and NOW. And a punchy, quotable and eloquent source. The vast array of “reform” “think tanks” (actually propaganda operations — “think tank” is a propaganda term in itself) have made their spokespeople readily available and made sure they know just what the press needs (that is, a punchy, eloquent, quotable comment). By contrast, tracking down a working teacher who’s reachable on the spot at any time, press-savvy and free to speak her/his mind is a challenge.
The solution would be for teachers’ unions to set up media outreach shops as effective as those run by the “reform” operations. The fact that teachers’ unions don’t do that (and IMHO don’t even seem to recognize the need) is eternally frustrating and helps empower the “reform” sector even more. Sorry to blame the victim, but in this case it’s just such a strategic failing.
To be clear — savvy education reporters are well aware just what these propaganda operations are, but newbies, the less savvy and reporters parachuting in to cover a field they’re not versed in generally believe they’re quoting some kind of scholarly research source. I’ve seen this in other areas besides education as well*, so I know it’s true.
*For example, I’ve seen a number of reporters covering immigration issues quote the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant operation listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — and I know those reporters were not anti-immigrant and truly believed it was a scholarly research source. One young reporter, daughter of immigrants herself, was genuinely horrified when I enlightened her. This happens with education “think tanks” too.
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Just what I figured. But that solution only covers teachers by way of the hugely vilified and often machine-like, if not entirely mechanized, teachers’ unions.
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Well, then, the Badass Teachers Assn.? Individual teachers/teacher advocates creating their own publicity operation? Anyway, you get my point. The sources that are reachable and that provide what reporters need are much more likely to get their views reflected — it’s just the nature of the beast.
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Yes, I totally got your point.
Before you made it.
Thank you, though.
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So what you are saying is that the vast majority (99.99%?) of reporters are too ignorant and too lazy (maybe time constrained in their minds) to actually find other sources than a few “media outreach” setups??
Fine. Give em my name. My info is easily available through a god-box search.
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These are my co-workers, and I don’t think the problem is that they’re lazy or that they’re time-constrained only “in their minds.” They routinely work on deadline. I won’t argue against ignorant, because in many cases they are deceived by a calculated attempt to appear to be a scholarly research source — something that the “reform” forces have spent decades creating.
The problem is that I don’t have a way to give the entire education journalism force your name. The apparatus that the “reform” forces have spent decades building is readily available, easy to find and media-savvy — and carefully disguised as impartial scholarly research. EWA, which steers its members ot those sources, is part of that, obviously.
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One thing the Reformers excel at is media presence. Marketing, branding, spinning.
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You are correct in that the edudeformers have spent decades building that apparatus, just as the Kochs have spent almost a half a century building their thinly disguised xtian fundie white supremacist networks, stink tanks and underhanded, illegal legislative “councils” and even buying politicians to do their backhanded business.
But, I did sign up for the EWA list. I’d bet a dime to a dollar that nothing will come of it.
Be that as it may, if you haven’t gotten a copy of my book please contact me at duaneswacker@gmail.com and we’ll make arrangements to get you one.
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Thank you Peter for splendid research.
I looked at the categories of “expertise” in the online sign-up for consideration as a writer or expert. The categories are, in fact, also controlling the narrative, not just the individuals whom they accept and then rely on. The “Solutions Journalism Network” has two-hour training sessions for journalists in education and trainers of such journalists. Mercedes Schneider had a recent post about the Spin handbook offered to charter school operators or would-be operators.
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A reporter for an Ohio city newspaper told me that Fordham had a “quotable” guy. With Arnold paying Fordham, with Fordham writing the foreword for a research paper and claiming findings that aren’t in the research, it’s Trump’s style of “truth” pervading local education news.
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If you want to know why they are biased, just look at their donors. They have received over a million dollars from Gates Foundation since 2012 and it is no accident that they changed their requirements for membership soon after Anthony Cody criticized Gates Foundation thereby excluding bloggers like Cody and Mercedes Schneider.
http://www.livingindialogue.com/education-writers-association-independent-bloggers-need-apply/
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Anthony Cody (in the above piece)
“The Education Writers Association is patrolling the boundaries of acceptable discourse, and excluding those of us willing to cross those boundaries. In a time when education reform is driven by groupthink, the “mindguard” sets the limits on what can be said and what must be declared out of bounds. Clearly, Schneider and I fall outside of those limits.”
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The Education Writers Association could make the list of sources balanced by simply dividing it into two lists: one of experts and one of policy advocates, or one of scholars and one of Bill Gates minions.
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You mean one list of experts and another list of nitwits (Gates and his minions)?
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Yes, truly. One list of distinguished, highly educated, civic-minded subject authorities; one of gullible, corporate advertising nitwits. Admittedly, union presidents would not all make the first list, but neither would private foundation presidents. Many research bloggers would make the first list; think tanks would not. Discourse would be intelligent instead of the cable news style, back and forth sound bite repetition of, well, nitwits.
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Intellectual prostitutes.
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bingo
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It’s called “Quid pro Bill” (something for Bill)
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Signed up to be on the list. Any bets that I make it??
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!
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Everybody needs snappy encapsulations of Wilson, every ding dong day.
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A “snappy” from page 47(Symbolic Violence):
“…Some young people are denied the right to
continue their studies. Schools deny them access to further education and hence exclude
them from a number of occupations. This is obviously a violation and unjust, even
before we look at the inequalities of exclusion in terms of social class, gender and race.
How is this exclusion achieved? Schools impose what specific knowledge and skills will
be taught, and in so doing define what is useful and legitimate knowledge, and how it
will be taught, learnt and assessed. And these processes discriminate against certain
groups, and certain particular sorts of people.
The exclusions are legitimated supposedly through the professional judgment of the
teacher, who is able to distinguish a “pass” from a “failure.” In fact, this is not true. It is
the institution itself, the school, that legitimises the exclusion, and inclusion. For the
teacher outside the institution, no matter how highly qualified professionally, cannot
accredit. On the other hand, the institution can accredit with a multiple-choice, computer-marked assessment system that completely bypasses the professional teacher.
So what are in fact rather arbitrary impositions by the school are disguised as
professional judgments about skill, ability, and intelligence, and then codified pass or
fail with the appropriate label attached to the student. These judgments are then accepted
as legitimate by all parties involved, including the great bulk of excluded students, who
know at one level that they have been duped, but don’t know how.”
Bourdieu’s (1990a) more general proposition that:
“Every power to exert symbolic violence, ie. every power which
manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by
concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds
its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations. . . . . All
pedagogic action is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the
imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power.”
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What’s a “ding dong” day?
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Nice, NoBrick, nice!
Most refuse to see that violence and/or violation of student being that occurs on a daily basis in all but perhaps a handful of schools whether public, private or religious.
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A Schopenhauer “snappy”:
“To imprint ideas or opinions, in the strict sense of the word,
PREJUDICIES (exceptionlism/god shed his grace on thee),
on the mind of a child, is NOT
education…” but a dose of social theory, a profoundly
inconvenient truth for those who persist in the delusion
that an alienated institutionalization of life, is the path to
human liberation.
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This is a personal beef of mine, so good for Peter for raising it.
I wish Ohio news outlets would occasionally interview someone who works in a public school or attends a public school instead of interviewing people from Fordham.
They exclude public school voices and set this up according to how ed reform wants it set up, which is “evil labor unions versus ed reformers”
In 25 years as a public school parent I have yet to hear another public school parent define public schools as “teachers unions”. It isn’t how we think about public schools. It’s how ED REFORMERS think about public schools.
I want someone from our schools interviewed about our schools. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
I don’t care what Jeb Bush thinks about my son’s public school. I want to hear from someone else. Someone relevant to PUBLIC schools.
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Count the Democratic politicians who are ed reformers marching in labor day parades today and be sure and ask them why they happily accept labor union votes and money yet never actually support labor unions.
They talk a good game during campaign season but when is the last time any of these people supported an actual existing labor union of ANY kind? When is the last time any of them lifted a finger on behalf of any working person, anywhere?
They pretend to object to “teachers unions” or “public sector unions” or whatever the excuse is this week but what they really object to is working people having any actual power.
Democratic ed reformers “support” some abstract idea of workers rights. When they actually have to deal with working people with some negotiating power and contract rights and (God forbid) DEMANDS all of their phony “support” disappears and they are indistinguishable from Republicans.
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It’s sort pf amazing how incestious ed reform is- you can right now read an article promoting the latest Gates initiative in a Gates-funded outlet, written by a Gates employee who came up in Gates-funded orgs.
It’s basically a clique. All roads lead back to Gates, Walton or Bloomberg.
And there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference BETWEEN Gates, Walton or Bloomberg with the exception of vouchers, and even that small difference is disappearing as the echo chamber (increasingly) all embrace vouchers.
If ed reformers were 7th graders we would insist they sit with someone else at lunch, hoping they’d expand their horizons a little 🙂
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Gates’ main problem is that he sat with the school’s mainframe computer at lunch rather than his fellow students.
And he is STILL sitting with the computer nerds who think there is a technofix to every problem.
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Here’s the bottom line. Lots of those connected to the Education Writers Association are just lazy, lousy journalists. They don’t do their homework, and they know who betters their bread.
The Education Writers Association claims that it provides ” high-quality education coverage.” Sometimes, it probably does. Many times it doesn’t come close. Which begs the question, why not?
Perhaps it’s because it’s “generous support” coms from The Gates Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Kern Foundation and the Walton Foundation, among others.
The Gates Foundation is neck deep in education “reform,” corporate-style. So are the others.
For example, the Dell Foundation (think Dell computers) invests in charter schools and “data-driven education.” Its a primary backer of the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI), along with ExxonMobil, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, the College Board, the Gates Foundation, and JPMorgan Chase. The NMSI tells us that “STEM education matters…our country’s student performance must improve in order for America to remain globally competitive.“ The problem, of course, is that it’s simply not true.
The Kern Family Foundation is based on what it calls “the traditions of free enterprise…ordered liberty and good character.” The Kern Foundation applauds Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute for explaining in his book The Battle, that the “free enterprise is fundamentally a system of moral values such as honesty, courage, diligence, thrift and service to others.” Tell that to all of those who were hurt and cheated and swindled –– and left without homes and jobs –– because of the rampant fraud and corruption on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms.
The Walton Foundation focuses on “competition”, “charter school choice,” “private school choice,” and teacher effectiveness. It funds groups like Teach for America, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and the Charter School Growth Fund. It is no friend of public education.
If the EWA is to – in fact – provide “high quality education coverage” so that reporters can get the story “right” and help “to create a better-informed society,” then it may have to shed the money it rakes in from those who have a very different agenda.
But no one should hold his breath.
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The root cause of this is the 501(c)(3) deduction which hurts public education in two ways: it erodes the tax base AND enables billionaires to fund foundations and “think tanks” that hammer away at the message that public schools are failing and the only way to improve them is to compel them to compete for “customers” in the marketplace.
The result? There is no right or left argument to be made. Instead, the debate is between those advocating non-sectarian “school choice” and those advocating a pure voucher system that can incorporate sectarian schools. NO ONE IS ADVOCATING FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION GOVERNED BY ELECTED SCHOOL BOARDS. When it comes to public education, the “bi-partisan legislation” draws from the “reform” think tanks that draft public education policy.
Unions and professional organizations are the only groups advocating for public schools, and they have two strikes against them. They are painted as self-serving by those who can buy ink by the barrel and they lack the billions needed to lobby Congress, fund “think tanks”, and, in some cases, buy media outlets. Consequently their arguments are drowned out.
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Why talk to a teacher? GREAT TITLE FOR A BOOK.
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Agree, Ciedie! Now–write that book!!
(This calls for a poem, a swell, Some DAM!)
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Aww…it’s late, so I’ll have to give it a go:
Oh–& typo–wasn’t calling you “a swell,” SDP, meant to type “as well.”
Beyond my bedtime (2:19 AM, CT)…goodnight…
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