Education in the Media, 2012: Hits & Misses

Charter schools are tax-funded schools operated by nongovernmental groups under a contract or charter from an authorizing agency. State law exempts charter schools from many commonly encountered regulations. Nearly all are nonunion.

The national unions are the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. Each has state and local affiliates.

Special education refers to K–12 programs and policies regarding students with disabilities.

Early childhood education concerns pre-kindergarten or preschool.

The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) is the major statute governing federal aid to K–12 education.

This was the principal missing story on school finance. Public education faces its own fiscal cliff as baby boomers retire from the classroom. Decades of severe underfunding have put teacher pension funds in far worse jeopardy than reported by the media because the figures reported by states are premised on unwarranted, rosy assumptions. To cover their true costs, states and districts will need to find hundreds of billions of dollars that might have gone toward a better teacher salary structure, including extra compensation for high performers.

In mid-2012, a national poll asked Americans what they have seen, read, or heard about the Common Core standards. Sixty percent said they had heard nothing; 21 percent said, “Not much.” This is an astonishing level of public ignorance of a policy that already commands hundreds of millions of tax dollars, has Washington and all the major education groups buzzing, and is driving officials in forty-six states to prepare their schools for compliance.

Advocates believe the Common Core will profoundly transform the central features of modern schooling: curriculum, teaching, testing, and accountability. The nationwide standardization that accompanies the Common Core is also a major change for a country that has emphasized state governance and local control of education. When 80 percent of the public knows little about such a policy, the news media are not doing their job.

International test results are well covered by the media when new scores are released, but then coverage disappears. That vacuum is filled by pundits who distort the scores for their own agendas. It is particularly troublesome when one policy is singled out as the cause of a nation’s success, followed by education tourism trips and glowing onsite accounts of schoolchildren in foreign lands. Serious analytic work on education policy has moved far beyond this. The media could help by giving broader and deeper coverage of international assessments, describing, for example, the characteristics of the various tests (TIMSS, PIRLS, and PISA) and how they differ and, most important, educating the public about what these tests can and cannot do in pinpointing influences on national achievement.

The school of the future will not look like the school of today. (It may not even have a building.) What goes on inside—and outside--will be different too. Education tomorrow will be altered by the digital revolution and online and blended possibilities, much as other parts of our lives have been. Although it’s too new to be sure about all aspects of its feasibility and effectiveness, digital learning looks to be an education revolution in the making.

Yet the media tend to treat technology (at least in education) as an add-on, somewhere on the periphery of business as usual. Instead, they should help the public imagine schools in which the traditional brick-and-mortar building, classroom, and teacher are not at the center.

Public education in post-Katrina New Orleans is taking place almost entirely in charter schools (see hit number 1, above). Disabled children there are served with the help of multischool co-ops and risk pools. Troubled schools in that city (and elsewhere in the state) have been gathered into a new governance arrangement called a recovery school district. Louisiana also has (if the courts assent) a full-blown statewide voucher program. In 2012, Louisiana was the most interesting—and fastest-changing—education reform state in the land. But you wouldn’t know that from the general media.