StickWithANose

The New York Times offers up another example of the continuing failure of the Fourth Estate to fulfill its prescribed role in reporting on education policy. With rapidly shrinking budgets, the news stories emanating from the ‘Old Grey Lady’ are constructed from a mish-mash of press releases and vapid interviews with a narrow subset of educational actors that results in an empty narrative that inverts concrete realities into hollow images. Case in point:

As chief executive of the Chicago public schools, Arne Duncan closed more than a dozen of the city’s worst schools, reopening them with new principals and teachers. People who worked with him, and some who fought him, say those school turnarounds were worth the effort, but all aroused intense opposition…

Now Mr. Duncan, President Obama’s education secretary, wants to take school turnaround efforts nationwide on a scale never tried before. In speeches and interviews, he said he would press local authorities to close thousands of the country’s worst schools, the dropout factories where only a tiny fraction of students are reading at grade level, and reopen them with new staff members…

Mr. Duncan wants to see 250 schools closed and reconstituted next year. That would mean dismissing thousands of teachers next spring, hiring replacements and opening newly reconstituted schools in fall 2010.

Formal closure is necessary for chronically failing schools, Mr. Duncan said, to reset the learning environment more dramatically than simply tweaking the curriculum and retraining the old staff.

The narrative that emerges is the time-honored tale of the tough administrator overcoming the inertia of a bureaucratic system through HIS force of will. In this case, Arne’s tough insistence on closing down failing public schools and turning them over to the private sector in reconstituted form has led to academic success in those schools, and this model must be implemented on a national scale. The crux of the narrative lies in the unstated assertion that Arne’s closing down of failing schools resulted in increased academic achievement. The question is: Is this true?

The most recent data out of Chicago that I can find backs up what the research literature in general says about the efficacy of charter schools in raising student achievement. There is little, if any, statistical difference between student achievement in public schools and charter schools. Arne’s success in Chicago serves as the cornerstone in his push to remake public education, and it is the job of the press to flesh out the legitimacy of this claim. Too bad the paper of record can’t be troubled with such tasks.