Scanning my local newspaper the other morning ? it usually takes about ten minutes, including Police Blotter ? I stopped at the editorial headline, ?You can help support Newspapers in Education? and immediately thought, How about a little education in the newspapers?
I know that there are efforts made at educating journalists (and their editors) about education? ? we have the Education Writers Association and the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College Columbia University, which make fabulous efforts on that front ? but my sense of things is that your local news outlets (whether it's newspapers, TV, or the new hyperlocal web experiments) barely cover education beyond sports, school lunch menus, and the photo-ops occasioned by scholarships, building dedications, and managerial changes.? Of course, there is the ?bad news,? which invariably makes the front page ? in my town, the other day,? it was, ??Oil tank dug up at school: Fines likely to be leveled?? ? and reinforces the common belief among teachers and staff that the paper ?only writes the bad things.?
I did an informal review of six months of education coverage in my local paper?and ?good? news stories ? we call it ?puff? ? far outweighed the ?bad.? But the most notable characteristic of that reporting?was silence (i.e. the occasional?school board meeting?and nothing?about curriculum or academic issues and programs), with a dash of ignorance and?ennui scattered about.? This would seem to mirror the national trends.? Amy Fagan reported here last December on a?Brookings report?showing that just 1.4 percent of national news coverage from television, newspapers, news Web sites and radio dealt with education.
How's that for a national priority?
Returning for a moment to that editorial in my local paper, the Newspapers in Education project sounds like a nice enough thing and I know it brings stacks of the daily paper into the schools every day ? no doubt a form of torture if staff really does believe the paper only reports the bad news.? (According to a 2003 study done for the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, says the editorial, ?students in schools with an NIE program scored 10 percent better on standardized tests than students in schools without an NIE program.? ??News desk, get me Caroline Hoxby!)
I don't know how many papers buy into the NIE program, but the Seattle Times has an entire web page dedicated to the project, including ?even offering curriculum guides and lesson plans.? Unfortunately, the NIE in Seattle may be a perfect example of what's wrong with education journalism: its curriculum consists of subjects like ?diversity and multiculturalism,? ?life skills,? ?conflict resolution,? and ?linkage to real world concepts.?? (I like the Lesson Plans page, which includes ?100 Ways to Use the Newspaper.?)
No doubt basketball buddies Obama and Duncan have quickenened some educational pulses (see my ?Gray Lady Goes Back to School?) and, of course, the dustup in LA (see here and here) has added a blip to the graph.? But my sense is that there is something going on here that is deeper than print journalism's current malaise and the Internet's information explosion. School consolidations, for instance, have created pockets of education that are not anchored to any single place, in the traditional sense, and the loss of that anchor may entail more than a metaphorical deficit.? And, ironically, as the news business goes hyperlocal, the education business (e.g. common core, race to the top) is going national.? Go figure.
?Peter Meyer
