Democrats For Education Reform Play the Indentity Politics of Division in California
Writing in American Journalism Review, Paul Fahri blisters his media colleagues for easily buying into education reforms “sweeping generalizations.” Fahri, a Washington Post reporter takes articular aim at CNN host and analyst, Fareed Zakaria. A foreign policy expert and member of the Council on Foreign Relations made the leap into domestic education policy with a CNN special titled, “Restoring the American Dream: Fixing Education.”Zakaria has somehow has become an instant domestic education policy expert. Writes Fahri:
Zakaria’s take, however, may be a perfect distillation of much of what’s wrong with mainstream media coverage of education. The prevailing narrative – and let’s be wary of our own sweeping generalizations here – is that the nation’s educational system is in crisis, that schools are “failing,” that teachers aren’t up to the job and that America’s economic competitiveness is threatened as a result. Just plug the phrase “failing schools” into Nexis and you’ll get 544 hits in newspapers and wire stories for just one month, January 2012. Some of this reflects the institutionalization of the phrase under the No Child Left Behind Act, the landmark 2001 law that ties federal education funds to school performance on standardized tests (schools are deemed “failing” under various criteria of the law). But much of it reflects the general notion that American education, per Zakaria, is in steep decline. Only 20 years ago, the phrase was hardly uttered: “Failing schools” appeared just 13 times in mainstream news accounts in January of 1992, according to Nexis. (Neither Zakaria
