No Distortion Left Behind; Who Got The Raw Deal in Gotham?

With the New York Times FINALLY getting the joke and reporting on what's REALLY going on in K-12 public education, it's easy to forget how bad the reporting was not so long ago (this was true across the American media, not just the NYT).  Below are two articles from 2005, the first written by DFER board member Andy Rotherham, and the second by DFER ED Joe Williams, that take former NYT ed reporter Micheal Winerip to task for horribly biased and inaccurate reporting about NCLB.  Who knows whether this played a role in Winerip moving on, but regardless, it's critically important that reformers hold the media accountable. 

 

Here's the beginning of Andy's article:

Let's stipulate that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the federal education law signed by President Bush in January of 2002, is a complicated piece of legislation. The law's official conference report runs to 1,080 pages and covers a host of issues, many not even related to the law's central thrust. But let's also stipulate that many, many other laws -- from taxes to environmental regulation -- are no less challenging to understand and interpret, which is why journalists at the nation's best news outlets often have areas of specific expertise.

So, is it asking too much to expect those in the media charged with writing about education and NCLB to make some effort to describe them accurately? And shouldn't we expect one of the nation's most visible and influential education journalists to get it right?

I'm sympathetic to the myriad challenges that journalists face, but NCLB's heft and the political battles around it are no excuse for someone like Michael Winerip, who writes the weekly "On Education" column for the New York Times (he is currently on a sabbatical to write a book), to distort the law into a vague semblance of reality. Take his September 24, 2003, column, for instance. Under the headline "On Front Lines, Casualties Tied to New U.S. Law," Winerip reported that NCLB funding shortfalls were "devastating" for New York City. But he neglected to mention that the city had received more than $260 million in new dollars for poor students alone under NCLB in the previous two years (see "Who Got the Raw Deal in Gotham?" page 72).

It is especially problematic when the distortion is in the nation's putative "newspaper of record." As former Los Angeles Times education writer Richard Colvin, who now heads the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, says, Winerip's "On Education" is "agenda setting" because of its influence on policymakers: "Editors across the country read what's in that column and it informs their decisions."

And here's the beginning of Joe's column:

When public schools opened in New York City in September 2003 amid reports of widespread classroom overcrowding, parents, educators, and policymakers demanded an explanation. And there, at the ready, was Michael Winerip, the education columnist for the New York Times.

The crowding, wrote Winerip in the first of a series of hard-hitting columns in September and October of that year, was caused by the "new students with challenging problems" whose parents took advantage of the No Child Left Behind law allowing them to transfer from a persistently failing school to one that was better. The 1,000-word reports were so convincing that even Mayor Michael Bloomberg began blaming NCLB for what Winerip called the "overloading" of Gotham's middle and high schools. "What the federal law says is that if you are in a failing school, you have a right to demand that your child go to a good school," the mayor said. "There aren't any seats in the good schools. Those are full already anyway."

Unfortunately, it wasn't true. Months after the Winerip columns appeared, after the federal law had been trashed by editorial writers, teachers, and parents, city education officials released transfer tallies showing that kids looking for better schools under NCLB had gotten a bad rap. If there was new overcrowdingâ€"and even that was doubtful in many casesâ€"the federal law had not caused it. (In many cases, in fact, overcrowded classrooms turned out to be in school buildings that had additional space, suggesting that the problem was one of local management.)

Of course, the Times columnist wasn't alone in fanning the flames of the anti-NCLB hysteria, but his influential columns made it easier for city officials to avoid talking about the real reasons for the problems, namely, a demographic bubble that was moving its way through the city's middle and high schools, combined with the city's new initiative to create experimental "schools within schools" in certain buildings, a policy that required a cap on enrollment in some schools at the cost of crowding elsewhere.

For some reason Winerip was intent on finding fault with NCLB.

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No Distortion Left Behind

The New York Times education columnist gets it wrong

By ANDREW J. ROTHERHAM

http://educationnext.org/nodistortionleftbehind/

Winter 2005 / Vol. 5, No. 1

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Who Got The Raw Deal in Gotham?

The kids or New York Times readers?

By JOE WILLIAMS  

http://educationnext.org/who-got-the-raw-deal-in-gotham/0 Comments | Print | PDF | Share

Winter 2005 / Vol. 5, No. 1

Checked:

Michael Winerip, "On Education"
columns for the New York Times,
September and October, 2003