One of the regular commenters on the blog signs in as NYC Public School Parent.
She wrote the following:
The ed reformers have set up a game with rules in which they always win.
If 100% of students in public schools are meeting standards, then the standards are too low.
If 50% of students in public schools are meeting standards, then the schools are terrible.
If a charter comes in and cherry picks from the 50% of students who meet standards, then the charter is performing miracles because 100% of their students meet standards.
If a public magnet comes in and cherry picks from the 50% of students who meet standards, then the public school is wrongly cherry picking students and look, the 50% who are left are still not meeting standards.
If a charter has 100 students in 9th grade and 4 years later only 60 of them make it to 12th grade, the charter has a 100% graduation rate because all 60 seniors graduate.
If a public school has 100 students in 9th grade and 4 years later has 90 students and “only” 70 of them graduate, the public school is a failure.
The ed reformers could not get away with this if the education reporters at major newspapers did not demonstrate their incompetence every single day when they accept every press release and study put out by ed reformers as the gospel truth. Too many overprivileged education reporters are so terrified of numbers that they cannot even envision that a charter that starts with 100 students in 9th grade and graduates 60 is not performing the miracles in which 100% of their students are high performing scholars. It is beyond their very limited ability to take a deep dive into numbers. These reporters write as if they were simply acting as stenographers for the PR groups. Their stories are as ridiculous as if a medical/science reporter kept reporting: “This brand name cough medicine cures 100% of the children with serious coughs, as proven by this never peer reviewed study which started with 100 children taking this brand name cough medicine in which 50 children disappeared from the study. We know that the number of kids who disappeared from this brand name cough medicine study is irrelevant because the people at the brand name cough medicine company explained to us that all those children who disappeared had parents who – once they saw that their child would be miracle-cured – decided that they would rather see their children suffer.”
Would science reporters simply report that the cough medicine had 100% cure rates because they accepted as gospel that there were large numbers of parents who had enrolled their kids in that study and then decided they’d prefer their child suffer and stop taking this miracle medicine? Would science reporters say “it doesn’t matter if 25% of the kids disappeared, if 50% of the kids disappeared, or if 80% of the kids disappeared from this study because the people running it told me these missing kids’ parents wanted them to suffer with coughs once their kid started experience the miracle of our cure.”
Would science reporters ignore all the parents publicly explaining how their kids were pushed out of these studies? Would science reporters say “we already know from the cough medicine maker that you just wanted your child to suffer from the cough so we are still going to report that this medicine miraculous cures 100% of the kids who take it.” Or would they listen to parents and say “hey, it’s clear something very fishy and corrupt is going on”.
Would a science reporter make that judgement based on the race and class of the children who leave the study, and if their parents are white and middle class, then reporters are skeptical of the cough medicine company’s claims that they want their children to suffer more instead of being cured. But if those parents are African-American, do those science reporters simply accept as gospel what the cough medicine company tells them is true, that those parents prefer to see their children suffer than be cured and that’s the only reason their kids disappeared from the study?
It seems like education reporters don’t feel the need to ask any questions when the kids who disappear are African-American and Latinx with few other resources. They accept as gospel that their parents prefer to see them suffer, and it never occurs to those white education reporters that perhaps their parents are pulling them BECAUSE the charters are making their kids suffer. I have no doubt that those white education reporters would ask a whole lot more questions if all the missing students were white.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
I’m a veteran newsroom journalist, and in general I’ve discovered that whenever it looks like there’s some kind of concerted plot to twist or bias a story, it’s actually obliviousness/cluelessness.
But that said, quite a number of education reporters have left the struggling news field to move into careers in the billionaire-funded education “reform” sector, which seems to offer plenty of jobs (never involving contact with actual children) that work well for a former journalist. So that calls the integrity of the previous reporting by those journalists into question — how do we know they weren’t angling for those nice jobs all along? — and makes you wonder about the integrity of current education reporting. Those former reporters really taint the work of all education reporters.
Journalists who read this are likely to argue with me here, but a basic standard in journalistic ethics is: Avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. Taking a job in a field you previously covered very strongly creates the appearance of conflict of interest.
Of course, there’s no way to prevent this, so all we can do is be aware of it.
carolinesf,
I am a big fan of your fair-minded approach to issues. (I truly don’t understand why more journalists don’t ask the obvious questions you ask when presented with hyped up miracle results.) I do give journalists the benefit of the doubt as simply being clueless or oblivious up to a point. But when their first reaction to pointing out an error is to justify and rationalize it, it goes beyond cluelessness.
For example, when Diane Ravitch and others pointed out errors in Eliza Shapiro’s hyping of charter schools’ claims of success, Shapiro doubled down on it as if her life depended on pushing the false narrative. No thoughtful replies, merely Trump-like claims that her reporting is perfect.
Shapiro actually tweeted something to imply that her critics didn’t care about the poor African-American families who were being helped by charters!
In other words, imagine if Eliza Shapiro had written an article promoting a cough syrup that worked miracles for every child and insinuated that the children who began taking this miracle cough syrup but then stopped taking this miracle cough syrup had terrible parents who wanted their children to keep suffering instead of being cured.
Imagine if Eliza Shapiro tweeted at her critics that it was unnecessary for her to do real journalism and find out how many children started taking this miracle medicine and then stopped because such reporting would be “harmful” to the children whose parents liked that they were taking it and believed it cured their child!
Imagine if Eliza Shapiro accused her critics of “wanting those poor children to keep suffering with coughs” as her justification of why she had to hype how wonderful the cough syrup is and why she absolutely could not spend the time to closely examine how many children were really helped and why she refused to investigate why so many parents who eagerly enrolled their child to take that medicine would “change their mind” and decide that they would prefer their child suffer with a cough instead.
No child suffers when a good journalist closely examines whether the new medicine their parents believes works miracles actually works miracles. On the contrary, all children are helped when a good journalist doesn’t push the false narrative that a new medicine works miracles. And all children are helped when a journalist doesn’t depend on the racist beliefs of the public to get away with the false narrative she is pushing about how it doesn’t matter how many parents have their kids stop taking the cough medicine because she wants the public to assume that they all want their children to suffer.
When Eliza Shapiro hypes charter schools and justifies the hype because some parents are happy, she is no different than a reporter that hyped a new cough syrup because some parents were happy about it.
And as I am sure Eliza Shapiro knows full well, it isn’t the children who benefit when journalists write big articles hyping a medicine that is not particularly effective as a new miracle cure for a cough. It is the people who are getting very rich by manufacturing and selling that medicine who benefit.
Journalists with far more integrity than Eliza Shapiro – like Michael Winerip – paid a price for acting like journalists so perhaps Shapiro just wants to keep her job by not asking any questions that might be inconvenient to those in power. But her overly defensive tweets attacking all critics of her reporting makes her look more like an advocate than a journalist.
Can you imagine a journalist tweeting angrily that her story praising the miraculous new cough syrup was fine because she simply presented uncritically the beliefs of a group of parents who thought it cured their kids? Can you imagine a journalist tweeting angrily that she also “presented the other side” because she included a disclaimer that “some anti-cough medicine advocates disagree with the 100% cure rates”?
Can you imagine a journalist who doesn’t investigate the huge red flag of extraordinarily high attrition rates for children using the cough medicine with the 100% cure rate? Can you imagine a journalist who insisted that attrition didn’t matter because there are “long waiting lists” and lots of parents who believed the cough medicine cured their kid and it would be harmful to those kids to report on whether the cough syrup was as effective as their parents believed?
Thanks, NYCPSP — your comments are informed and perceptive!
There’s another dimension to your cough-medicine analogy. The parents whose views Eliza Shapiro and her co-worker Erica L. Green were hyping are paid mouthpieces for the charter/”reform” sector, not just parents speaking from their hearts because they appreciate what charter schools have done for their children (or truly saw that the cough medicine had cured their kids).
Green was also snide to commenters who pointed that out. Both those reporters’ responses to critics — informed, thoughtful critics, not trolls, and for that matter not paid mouthpieces — were appallingly unprofessional. They chose to hype the paid mouthpieces as though they were sincere, and then respond with open, public contempt to critics who pointed that out. I’m pretty shocked.
The hostile review of my new book in the NYT linked to the NYT article you cite, which in turn linked to a five year old press release about mythical “charter waiting lists,” released by a charter advocacy organization (Walton-funded, like the “protestors”).
I offered to meet with Eliza Shapiro of The NY Times but she refused my offer because I am not trustworthy. Unlike the paid Walton protestors.
“never involving contact with actual children” — a telling point
Excellent analogy to health and science reporting, the latter characterized by greater skepticism about industry reports crossing news desks.
One significant problem in ed reporting is the buy-in to (a) “non-partisan”, missing the issue which is not Dem vs. Republican, but, oligarchy vs, democracy and, (b) buy-in to “non-profit”, when the degree of separation to profit = one.
A second significant problem is the action networks who launch attacks against reporters at the instigation of leaders like those from religion.
The mainstream media keeps trying to put the “he’s not electable” message on Bernie’s campaign. I recently heard Fareed Zakaria, a respectable journalist, claim that Bernie “essentially supports open borders.” This is a lie.https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/08/bernie-sanders-open-borders-1261392
In 2018, Politico got a big chunk of change from the Waltons.
Thanks for the link.
Negative stories about Bernie are likely false, spoken and written because wealthy people prefer his detractors..
On the other hand, positive stories have a huge likelihood of being true.
I wouldn’t put it past reporters to write a positive article just to be able to follow it with a proportionately more damning story, a sly attempt at the pretense of objectivity.
If he is propagating a falsehood, is he a respectable journalist?
I think not, not even if he is doing it unknowingly because it means he did not take the time to research his subject before making the claim. Respectable journalists don’t do that.
If he is doing it knowingly he is just a liar. Nothing respectable about that.
Poet-
irrefutable logic
This numbers game is routinely pushed by the Ohio arm of Thomas B. Fordham Institute/Foundation. Oped’s written by employees at criticize the Fordham routinely criticize teacher unions for pointing out the debilitating affects of poverty on students. In a typical rhetorical move, the Fordham “expert” will find one exceptional school with an “A” rating of the state report card rigged to ensure few schools are rated A. Then when you read in detail, you will see that the most exceptional thing about this school is really rare. The same principal has been there for 18 years, lives in the community, and has an uncommon level of trust from her community, the teachers, and students. Test scores were a byproduct of that not the aim of her work as an educator.
In Ohio, the writer most responsible for this misleading journalism and “research” is Aaron Churchill, the Institute’s Ohio Research Director. The Institute says this: Since 2012, Aaron has worked on “strengthening” Ohio policy on standardized testing and accountability, school evaluation, school funding, educational markets, human-resource policies and charter school sponsorship. He writes for the Fordham’s blog, the Ohio Gadfly Daily and contributes op-eds to the Columbus Dispatch, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Dayton Daily News, and Cincinnati Enquirer. Aaron previously worked for Junior Achievement.”
He has not an ounce of documented experience in teaching or studies of education as an undergraduate or graduate student. He gets a free pass on almost everything he submits to the Columbus Dispatch, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Dayton Daily News, and Cincinnati Enquirer. These local newspapers are shrinking and have few if any staff available for questioning this “throughput” of misleading but ready to post news.
As example, newspaper coverage of Fordham’s spin on Figlio’s Ohio voucher research.
Ohio newspapers never tell readers that Fordham is funded by out-of-state oligarchs to craft education policy, to promote the agenda of the wealthy, to influence state agencies and employees and, to get buy-in from politicians.
The worst part of Fordham’s lobbying is how they don’t support public school students or public schools, yet our kids get stuck with their ever-changing measurement schemes.
If they’re not going to support our students and schools in any way, could they possibly refrain from writing public school policy?
Charter and voucher schools would never accept this. They would never accept policy drafted by charter and voucher opponents.
If the only thing your “movement” contributes to public school students is labeling them all as “failing” then stay out of public school policy. Our kids get the downside of ed reformers lobbying against their schools AND the downside of bad ed reform policy.
TB Fordham actively opposes public schools.
The movable cut scores on standardized tests are a ploy to game the system. The results will reveal what the wealthy interests want them to indicate.
Chiara
Your 3rd paragraph nails the ed. oligarchy.
“A Deformers take on cut scores”
Set the cut core high at first
So it seems they’re dumb
Move the cut score down in bursts
So it seems we’ve won
Linda, the oligarchs who fund Fordham also Fund your ALEC legislators in Ohio.
The wealthy interests behind privatization are always at work trying to promote schemes to undermine public education. Some journalists simply act as a agents of privatization propaganda. Even the trusted big name newspapers are guilty of broadcasting falsehoods. A competent journalist would vet any claims they make. Errors often include omissions, repeating lies as facts and gaming the data. Jersey Jazzman and other researchers continuously debunk many of the claims of privatizers. “Miracles” become myths, and those lengthy charter wait lists become hyperbole. As for all the missing students in New Orleans, somebody should make an effort to find out what happened to them.
Once the information falls into the hands of the privatizers, there is a hodge podge of private opaque walls to climb in order to get access. The information is often inaccurate since many slipshod charters fail to keep accurate records. Parents are becoming aware that much of what charters claim is smoke and mirrors. Turning students over to charters often is turning children over to an uncertain future. Unlike charters public schools are accountable, transparent and generally operated by professionals in education.
Valerie Strauss who writes for a national publication has fellow journalists with similar integrity, exposing the underbelly of privatization at city and state newspapers. I offer in nomination for a roll of honor, Linda Blackford of the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Yes! Linda Blackford of Lexington Herald Leader! Send me her columns as I am not a subscriber.
Thank you very much for thinking this comment was worth re-posting.
Your comment has generated many tweets and conversation.
Who cares about the truth anymore anyway.
Those who try to report it are kicked in the teeth.
Newscasters must be getting extra points this week for echoing the Republican talking point, “Democrats are in disarray.”
Speculation- Republican Bloomberg steers the PR.
Disarray feeds Bloomberg’s rise in polls.
“Democrats are in Disarray” is the code of the DNC and their sycophantic media for “Sanders has pulled ahead of Biden”
Let the handwringing begin.