Multi-Culpability in K-12 Education >>>>> Print, Radio, and Television Journalists (Third in a Series)

Included in the complicit multitude, culpable for the state of K-12 education in the United States, are journalists working in print, aural, or visual media.

 

In Minnesota, this includes those working at the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, Minneapolis Public Radio (MPR), and various local television stations.  The complicity includes major personalities such as MPR’s Keri Miller and Tom Weber.  Nationally, culprits churn out facile reports for publications and venues as august as the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and the various news shows of national network television. 

 

What journalists have in common is a propensity to let the education establishment and high-profile figures wag them like a dog wags its tail.  Very little attention is given to independent voices, except as conveniently packaged by the big-splash personality, as was the case for a while with Michelle Rhee, who purported to be taking her reformist zeal displayed during four years as Chancellor of Washington, D. C. public schools into the formation of the now effectively moribund StudentsFirst.

 

On the local level, one rarely observes large amounts of print space or much on-air play given to leaders of organizations such as MinnCAN , Teach for America, or the smaller reform and dissident groups and individuals who show up with varying degrees of frequency to articulate viewpoints at school board meetings.  Even a well-funded and locally influential organization such as the Minneapolis Foundation got little notice for the RESET Education campaign waged under the leadership of former president/ CEO Sandy Vargas a few years back.  Vargas did get one article published on the back page of the Business Section of the Star Tribune, but over the course of a four-lecture series that included rhythm and blues heart-throb singer John Legend (who financially supports a network of charter schools for economically challenged young people in New York) not a single story pertinent to RESET events ran in the  Star Tribune.

 

In the case of decision-makers at the Star Tribune in response to the Vargas-led effort, the snub was notable given their enthusiasm for R. T. Rybak and his erstwhile leadership at Generation Next, a well-funded organization that took two years to make the astonishing recommendations that children should be reading by the age of three and that well-directed tutoring helps.  Rybak is one of those types to whom journalists gravitate for their name recognition and often self-cultivated reputation as the go-to reformer.  In Rybak’s case, the enthusiasm on the part of Star Tribune editors for his potential as an education advocate was either cynical or ingenuous:   After twelve years as mayor, Rybak expressed regret that he had not committed more energy to education issues, vowing to redress that neglect as head of Generation Next;  he is now, with multiple ironies, serving in the higher profile and better paid position formerly occupied by Vargas at the Minneapolis Foundation.

 

A similar phenomenon may be witnessed in the case of Diane Ravitch, who gets a lot of play as the go-to education commentator at the national level.  If one carefully examines her 180-degree transformation in the course of the first decade of the new millennium, though, symbolized in her books Left Back and Reign of Error, the examiner becomes witness to a vacillating prevaricator seemingly willing to assume the position of those who currently sign her paycheck or provide backing for her campaign to stay in public profile.  Time after time, otherwise adept journalists and moderators such as NPR The Takeaway host John Hockenberry fall for the Ravitch ruse, turning to her views on education, whether she is posing as No Child Left Behind program advocate while serving in the George W. Bush administration or denigrator of standardized testing now under the sway of the National Education Association (NEA). 

 

In the Twin Cities, decision-makers at the Star Tribune are deeply capable for the space that they give to the latest news to emanate from establishment leadership at the public schools of Minneapolis and St. Paul while failing to probe very deeply into the miscues of such leadership, whether yet another failed effort on the part of a superintendent or the foibles of the latest iteration of a school board bought and paid for by local teachers unions (Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, St. Paul Federation of Teachers, both tied to Education Minnesota, the state hybrid organization affiliated with both the NEA and the AFT [American Federation of Teachers]).   At the Star Tribune, education beat reporters such as Steve Brandt and Alejandra Matos come and go as mouthpieces for the education establishment before yielding to another dog-wagged tail (now Beena Raghavendran) presenting the latest flash from the ever-failing Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

The real problems that vex our public schools are found in the nature of teacher training and the approach to curriculum that begin with education professors and then become manifest in the approaches and programs of the teachers and administrators whom these incompetents produce.  The incompetence thereby is transmitted as policy and program in districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools, whose leaders are as ineffective as they are politically well-entrenched.

 
But root causes that vex public education get short shrift in Star Tribune reporting.

The propensity to let the education establishment dog wag them like a tail makes journalists among the gravest culprits in the travesty that is the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized schools districts.  Journalistic complicity, whether willing or naive,  keeps our precious young people waiting every day that their eager young feet hit the ground, in quest of an education of excellence ever sought, never received.