Way To Go, Zack Morris!

By the time they fill our classrooms, students have endured more than a decade in an educational system where learning has been reduced by testing advocates, eloquently labeled “Standardistas” by writer Susan Ohanian, to the mastery of purportedly essential skills. They have, for the most part, successfully muddled through an experience injected with intensity practically from the second they entered kindergarten. Ohanian suggests the media are a key purveyor of this intensity. Coverage of education, she argues, comprises “mostly refried press releases from the Fordham Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the Education Trust, and other public-school-bashing enterprises.” Reading or viewing a news story in which a reporter has gone “beyond the corporate chants and charts” about our crumbling public schools and the need for more stringent measures of teacher accountability is a rare occurrence.

Reporters are always on the lookout for “a pro national-testing piece” usually built on a comparison of how students in the U.S. perform compared to students in other countries, or a “feel good” story about a diligent, caring teacher who urges and cajoles students – who often come from poor neighborhoods – into generating improved test scores. But by and large, journalists are content to give voice in their coverage to members of what the late educational activist Gerald Bracey called the “schools are awful bloc,” made up of like-minded business leaders, think tanks, and educational reformers. These twin tendencies, contends Beatrice Motamedi, a former reporter who now teaches high school in San Francisco, stem from an editor's desire to attract readers: "finding one heroic, inspiring teacher who is beating the odds...makes for much better copy than the long, slow slog of teaching, grading, reteaching, coaching, and assessment that is the real work of teaching."