Education Reporting IS Dismal

Outside of a few people like Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post and Michael Winerip of the New York Times, the latter now off the "beat," education reporting in this country is dismal, to put a good spin on it. At worst it is absolute propaganda on behalf of the "reformers."

Reporters will lie and twist facts in order to support the "reformers'" agenda, when in fact these "reformers" have no facts to back up their assertions, only the neoliberal anti-government ideology. While public schools keep rising up to the occasion and attaining the goals privatizers think they should attain, it's not good enough, so the privatizers keep moving the goal posts for "accountability" and "quality." Someday public schools WON'T hit the mark, and the ideologues will come out and say, "See! See! Our public schools are failing! Time to get rid of them!"

"Failing schools" has always been a recurrent theme throughout the history of the public school system in the United States. This time, however, there is a pile of money behind the propaganda, and it's becoming more and more difficult to counter it. Essential to public school destruction is the infiltration of the Democratic Party with neolibs like Obama and Cory Booker to do the job Republicans until recently could not do.

It takes somebody writing for an "alternative" publication to tell the truth:

In fact, no such migration ever happened. In 2000, when that perception was being pushed by critics of public education in the presidential campaign and journalism was swallowing it whole, New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein checked the actual figures (something other journalists should have done) and found the opposite—parents and students were actually leaving private schools for public schools. He reported that “the proportion of students in private schools has been falling nationwide.” The decline was uniform, with the numbers down in upper, middle, and lower income groups.

That journalists, by playing games with the facts, were actually affecting public policies and influencing lawmaking and thus hurting good people who depend on us for good information, seemed never to occur to us.

The migration trend is still holding. U.S. Department of Education figures show that between 2006 to 2010 private school enrollments dropped by about 174,000. Public school enrollments increased by 718,000.

Since most private schools are religious, predominantly Catholic, enrollment has gone down drastically over the past fifty years. That's mostly because the purpose of Catholic schools was undermined as prejudice against Catholics decreased and they were assimilated into the general population, including the public schools. As for the rest of private schools, it is expensive to operate them. The only ones doing well are those catering to the rich and powerful. Naturally, those rich and powerful think their experiences with schools that can cherry pick students at the front door and whose staff can cook grades in order to appease the tuition payers can be extrapolated to the population at large.

Lots of other myths are exposed in the Myers piece, most of them regarding violence in the schools.