Why Is Eva Moskowitz Taking On John Merrow Over Discipline Practices Widely Discredited?
If I were Eva Moskowitz, CEO of New York’s Success Academy Charters, I wouldn’t want to mess with John Merrow, the just-retired reporter from the PBS NewsHour. Merrow is the dogged reporter who investigated Michelle Rhee’s test score cheating scandal in Washington, D.C., and created the momentum in the press that eventually discredited Rhee as a school leader. (You can see summaries of his reports on Rhee here and here.) But Eva, New York’s charter school diva, seems determined to get the news slanted according to her own wishes, so earlier this week she sent an eight page letter to Judy Woodruff of the NewsHour to complain about John Merrow’s recent report on Success Academies’ far-above average rates of out-of-school suspension of very young children in Kindergarten and first grade. In her letter, Moskowitz demands a correction and an apology.
Moskowitz writes: “We allowed Mr. Merrow and his team to spend many hours videotaping our school as well as interviewing me on camera. We answered every question he had. However, towards the end of this process, it came to our attention that he intended to cover the allegations of a parent whom we knew to be unreliable, but he refused to give us any opportunity to address these allegations.” In a press release when the letter was made public, Success Academy’s spokesperson Amanda Powell explains, “The letter, sent on Friday, October 16, details Merrow’s “willful disregard for journalistic ethics and refusal to allow Success Academy to respond to false allegations of a former parent and student, who represent that the student was suspended for not tucking in his shirt and wearing red shoes and ‘losing his temper.'”
The PBS NewsHour has released a statement that it stands by Merrow’s report, though acknowledging that, “the NewsHour regrets the decision to include that particular mother and Why Is Eva Moskowitz Taking On John Merrow Over Discipline Practices Widely Discredited? | janresseger:
