Make Ed Reporting Reporting Again
Alexander Russo has used the recent bout of reportorial navel gazing about the role of journalism (or the lack thereof) in the last election as an opportunity to ask if education reporting can also use a bit of a reboot. He has four specific recommendations which are worth considering, but I think he missed the hugest one of all.
Reporting with Greater Authority
Folks have noted that a little fact checking might have been useful during this dumpster fire of an election season, just as many folks have called out the media's repeated insistence on false equivalency, insisting that two viewpoints are equally valid, as if the Flat Earth Society is just another point of view.
Says Education Writers Association executive director Caroline Hendrie, “We need to report when people are saying things that are wrong. We do not want to pass them along.” And, well, yeah, that's true, it's a measure of how lost journalists have become that such a thing even needs to be said out loud. It is only half a step less obvious that, "We need to report using words in the native tongue of our readers."
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| Did he once ask where all the women went? |
Russo asked on twitter if anyone had seen or passed on stories that were not true. My first thought was, yeah, how about several years of stories insisting that Common Core was written by teachers, then developed and adopted freely by states with no federal involvement. And that's before we get to the kind of spin and selectivity routinely used for a new "study" on various testing results. So, yes, this attention to accuracy issue is definitely a thing.
Resisting the Illusion of Certainty in Numbers
I will give Russo a big Standing O for this one. The entire reformster movement has made a deliberate CURMUDGUCATION: Make Ed Reporting Reporting Again:
