The Columbia Journalism Review has a lengthy article on NCLB and education reform, and how education reporters are often hampered by a lack of understanding of policy, psychometrics, and the reality of life inside the schools:
...Not surprisingly, these reforms, which have more to do with managing school systems than teaching kids, work best when they operate in a centralized, businesslike manner. Since management systems depend heavily on measuring tools, the standardized test — education’s most popular assessment measure — takes on added importance. All this exacerbates the press’s tendency to rely on official sources, and on the seductive power of the test score as the sole measure of success. To avoid the trap of oversimplification, reporters need a working knowledge of everything from psychometrics to education theory in order to untangle where the numbers end and the truth begins......Unfortunately, like No Child Left Behind, the story of social promotion is rarely reported from a student’s or school’s perspective. Even more surprising, stories about the campaign against social promotion barely hint at the raft of research showing that retention in grade does more harm than good. Philadelphia has tried it, as have Baltimore, Houston, Washington, D.C., and New York City (three times), along with about twenty-one other school districts nationwide, all with similar results. Instead of infusing coverage with knowledge of the past, reporters hungry for some excitement on the beat tend to embroider official pronouncements, writing as if the policy is a new idea...
The authors clearly understand that education reporting improves substantially when stories are presented "straight up from local schools, where the voices of teachers and children bring the national policy home to readers," and when reporters dig "behind the data, analyzing their origins and putting a human face on their percentages."
And yet the one word you won't find in this article is "blog."
Nothing about edublogs, blogs by teachers, blogs by parents interested in reform, blogs by parents who are fed up and now homeschooling, even blogs by psychometricians (like me). Nothing about the revolution in education reporting that has resulted from those fed up with biased and uninformed reporting. CJR, there's a whole revolution in education reporting that's right under your nose, and while some newspapers are doing a splendid job of explaining NCLB, the impact of great reporting is greatly enhanced thanks to the edubloggers who link to these articles, like Joanne Jacobs, the Education Wonks, The Education Gadfly, EduWonk, and dozens of others.
Posted by kswygert at April 1, 2005 03:24 PM