New rules to speed teacher discipline cases

Cost reduction also expected as governor praises changes

By Scott Waldman

Updated 08:13 a.m., Wednesday, April 11, 2012

ALBANY — Provisions included in the state budget should speed up teacher discipline hearings and bring down costs.

The changes will limit the pay of the hearing officers who decide the cases and force both sides to shorten the process.

Though extremely rare, hearings required to fire a public school teacher in New York are notoriously slow and extremely expensive. The average "3020-a" hearing takes 502 days and costs $216,588. The state Education Department fund that pays for the process is almost $10 million in debt, and it takes more than a year to pay the arbitrators who hear the cases.

"For too long, the teacher arbitration process was a classic example of waste and dysfunction in our education system," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a statement. "Cases would drag on for years, costing taxpayers and taking resources away from the classroom. With this reform, we finally have a process that will help achieve resolution in a timely fashion, while protecting our students, schools and the rights of teachers."

The state Education Department can now set the rates for hearing arbitrators, who make up to $1,800 for a five-hour day. Hearing officers who fail to meet deadlines can be disqualified, and the number of study days for which they are paid is now limited.

Stenographers, whose services can cost $1,000 a day, are no longer required because the changes authorize the use of new recording technologies.

In addition, evidence must be presented by both parties within 125 days of charges being filed. Districts and those subjected to a hearing have 15 days to agree on an arbitrator.

Of the more than 2,000 cases brought in the last five years, just 167 teachers were fired, the vast majority in New York City, according to a state Education Department database of cases filed between 2006 and 2011. Only 38 cases brought by schools districts upstate and on Long Island ended in termination, though a number are still undecided because it takes so long for a case to be completed. Statewide, 593 cases were simply settled and another 164 were withdrawn or consolidated.

Although the changes are not as strong as those pushed by some advocacy groups, they are the first controls imposed on the cost of the hearings. Previous attempts to bring down their price tag and duration enacted in 1994 and in 2004 actually dragged them out and made them more expensive, said Jay Worona, general counsel at the New York State School Boards Association.

For years, the association has called for reform of the 3020-a laws, including an equal burden of evidence imposed on both sides and hiring hearing officers more willing to issue stronger penalties. Worona said it remains to be seen if the new changes will have the desired effect. But he called them an important first step because the state is finally willing to take on the cumbersome process.

"We are very pleased that the state has acknowledged that there is a serious problem with the disciplining of teachers," Worona said.

Before the budget was passed, the state Education Department pushed for a change that would have placed some of the financial burden for the cases on the teachers' union. The effort failed.

swaldman@timesunion.com • 518-454-5080 • @518Schools

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/New-rules-to-speed-teacher-discipline-cases-3473027.php#ixzz1rkZQHuOy

TC: Disappearance of Black Teachers

Sealey-Ruiz Co-Edits Special Journal Issue on the Disappearance of Black Teachers

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Published in Research/Publications
10/25/2011

http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleID=8253

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Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Assistant Professor of English Education (TC file photo)

By Patricia Lamiell

Would fewer Black male students drop out if more Black men were teaching? The question, which has provoked much discussion and research by educators and academics, is now the focus of a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Negro Education (JNE), guest edited by Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, TC Assistant Professor of English Education. JNE, published by the Howard University School of Education, is considered the leading academic journal of scholarly research concerning Black academia.

The special issue, “Preparing Teachers to Teach Black Students; Preparing Black Students to Become Teachers,” ties the 50-year decline in academic achievement of Black students to the virtual “disappearance of Black teachers, particularly Black males,” according to Sealey-Ruiz and her co-editor, Chance W. Lewis, the Carolyn Grotnes Belk Professor of Urban Education and Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. 

Sponsored by the Ford Foundation, the peer-reviewed issue contains a “significant presence of TC faculty scholarship,” Sealey-Ruiz said, noting that TC President Susan Fuhrman has called teacher preparation an important area of focus for the College in the coming years. “I think this issue positions TC's faculty on the pulse of important discussions that are taking place nationally and brings a specific connection to TC's mission and focus for the College.” Sealey-Ruiz added that “the research reported provides strategies and insights for meeting the needs of all students, and therefore it’s for all teachers.” 

With American classrooms becoming ever more diverse, the dearth of Black male teachers has become an especially pressing concern. Last January, the filmmaker Spike Lee (who received TC’s Medal for Distinguished Service in 2010) and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for more Black men to join the teaching profession. In a speech at Morehouse College, the only all-male, historically Black college in the country, Duncan said less than two percent of the nation's three million teachers are Black men. More than one million teachers are expected to retire in the next decade, which presents a good opportunity for Black men to help fill those vacancies, Duncan said. 

A section of the special JNE issue titled, “Preparing Teachers to Teach Black Students,” includes pieces written or coauthored by TC faculty members Mariana Souto-Manning, Associate Professor of Education; Christopher Emdin, Assistant Professor of Science Education; Felicia Moore Mensah, Associate Professor of Science Education; Thurman Bridges, (2009 Minority Postdoctoral Fellow), TC alum Darrell C. Hucks; and Sealey-Ruiz, who also collaborated with Lewis on the guest editorial and epilogue for the issue.

The special issue “provides commentary on the causes and consequences of having a majority White and female teaching force in diverse school systems, as well as strategies to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion among P-12 teachers and students,” writes JNE Editor-in-chief, Ivory A. Toldson, an education school faculty member at Howard. “It is our hope that this special issue sparks discussion and action among policymakers, educators, and students alike.” The issue was released with “Breaking Barriers 2,” a research report authored by Toldson about the education of Black males.

The shortage of Black male teachers has also caught the notice of Black politicians and lawmakers. In September, Sealey-Ruiz, along with Toldson, was asked to speak on the issue at the Annual Legislative Conference of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. Together with Ernest Morrell, Professor of English Education at TC and the new director of the College’s Institute for Urban and Minority Education, Sealey-Ruiz is also partnering with other universities to promote the issue at next year’s American Educational Research Association in British Columbia, Canada.

Teachers' retirement board; membership; elections

Are you happy with the Tier 6 pension? Or the way the UFT has managed this issue?
Teachers gets reps on the retirement board -- the UFT/Unity Caucus picks their people and they are ratified by the Exec Bd and possibly the DA. What if a candidate came from the ranks? An election would have to be conducted. 

The rub? You need at least a 1000 signatures from TRS members.
Rub 2: The sigs have to be in by 5PM on Thurs. Apr. 19.
Imagine if a hundred UFT members each got 10-15 sigswuuuuuuuu
Someone should toss their hat in the ring but activists would have basically the first days back to school post vacation

ADMINISTRATIVE CODE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK 

TITLE 13: RETIREMENT AND PENSIONS (Continued) 

CHAPTER 4: TEACHERS' RETIREMENT SYSTEM

NYC Administrative Code § 13-507

§ 13-507 Teachers' retirement board; membership; elections.

MORE below

The Gulen Movement’s connection to the largest US charter network

My claim to fame is having introduced the amazing Oakland based Sharron Higgins, who has been a blogging buddy from almost the day I started, to Leonie Haimson at a luncheon I set up when Sharron was visiting the east coast in Dec. 2009. As a matter of fact Julie Cavanagh was at that luncheon where she also met Leonie for the first time. After that, Kismet. While they all chatted, I ate.


Parents Across America
http://parentsacrossamerica.org/2012/04/the-gulen-movement%E2%80%99s-connection-to-the-largest-us-charter-network/

Apr 1, 2012 No Comments ›› leoniehaimson
 
By Sharon Higgins, founding member of Parents Across America
 
Note: This is an expanded version of a guest post published in The Washington Post under Valerie Strauss’s column, The Answer Sheet, on March 27, 2012.
The largest charter school network in the United States is operated by people in and associated with the Gulen Movement (GM), a secretive and controversial Turkish religious sect. With 135 schools enrolling more than 45,000 students, this network is substantially larger than KIPP, the well-known charter management organization with 109 schools.
A lack of awareness about this situation persists despite it being addressed in a national paper and in articles about Gulen charter schools in Utah (also here), Arizona, (also here), Illinois, Tennessee, Pennsylvania (also here), Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma (and here), Texas (also here), Arkansas, Louisiana (also here), New Jersey, Georgia, and North Carolina.
It has also been reported that the FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education are investigating hiring practices at these schools, and the practice of replacing certified American teachers with uncertified Turkish teachers, who often speak limited English and are paid higher salaries, through the use of visas that are supposed to be reserved for workers in shortage areas.
Other concerns that have raised about their charter schools relate to questionable admissions practices; the channeling of school funds to close associates; abuse of contractors; participation in biased, GM-created competitions; incidents of bribing; using the schools to generate political connections; science fair projects being done by teachers; unfair hiring and termination practices; and more.
The NY Times this year focused on the way in which Texas Gulen charters have funneled funds to a network of Turkish construction companies. A class-action lawsuit is also being considered. Despite all of this, authorizers continue to approve charter applications, parents continue to send their children to them, and taxpayers keep funding the schools – all without much discussion.
The Gulen Movement originated in Turkey in the late 1960s and has become increasingly powerful. Its members are followers of Fethullah Gulen (b. 1941) a self-exiled Turkish preacher who has lived on a secluded compound in rural Pennsylvania since 1998. Members of the GM call themselves hizmet, meaning “volunteer services” movement. The GM conducts four primary activities around the world: a media empire, business organizations, an enormous number of Turkish culture-promoting and interfaith dialog organizations, and a network of schools in over 100 countries, a large portion of which are US charter schools.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the GM began to establish schools outside of Turkey, first in the newly established republics of Central Asia and then beyond. One expert noted that the “…worldwide extent of Fethullah Gulen’s educational network testifies to the internationalist, even imperialist, nature of the movement.”
The first Gulen charter school was opened in 1999. US officials have known about the movement’s involvement in charter schools since at least 2006 when our Istanbul consulate noticed that a large number of Turkish men, suspected to be GM-affiliated, were seeking visas to work at charter schools. A company specializing in geopolitical analysis reported in 2010 that the GM was running “…more than 90 charter public schools in at least 20 states.”
Board members of Gulen charter schools are primarily Turkish or Turkic and often can be tied to other Gulenist organizations. GM schools around the world emphasize math, science, and technology, and always provide Turkish cultural instruction, as these are subjects favored by Fethullah Gulen. Turkish or Turkic individuals, almost all male, are imported (referred to as “international” teachers) to teach these subjects and serve as school administrators. They sometimes transfer to other schools, but only those within the movement’s network. Around the world, local teachers are usually hired for elementary grades and the non-Gulen favored subjects. The charter schools have been criticized for importing so many teachers, but defend their practice by claiming that they are unable to find qualified Americans.
Although there is little awareness in the United States about the GM’s charter schools, major daily Turkish newspapers have acknowledged their existence for some time. Readers of Milliyet were informed in 2010 that the Walton Family Foundation had given $1M to Gulen’s charter schools in California (translation here). The Gates Foundation has given millions in funding to the chain as well.
And in 2009, readers of Sabah were presented with an account of GM insiders discussing how the US charter schools serve the movement’s goals: “…through education, we can teach tens of thousands of people the Turkish language and our national anthem, introduce them to our culture and win them over. And this is what the Gulen Movement is striving for.” GM-associated news agencies periodically feature reports about Gulen charter school students participating in movement-sponsored cultural events (e.g. here, here, and here).
As recently revealed by WikiLeaks, last year an analyst with the “global intelligence” company Stratfor who met with various Gulenists in Turkey in 2010, sent emails home about his discussions and findings. One message discussed how one of these Gulenists claimed that the organization had managed to gain influence through the “penetration of military …He gave an example of the Gulen school influence — he met with the Algerian ambassador – trained in a Gulen school, spoke fluent Turkish, extremely friendly to the Turkish government. A very well-oiled system.”
The Gulenists discussed their goals for their schools:

We also discussed the Gulen schools that are spreading across the globe, expanding Turkish influence. Of course these are the schools with teh best resources, facilities. Students will learn how to speak Turkish, the national anthem, how to be the ‘right kind of Muslim’, etc. In essence, it buys them loyalty. We are still working on getting a complete  database of Gulenist schools.  They claim that have more than 2,000 in 200 countries so far.

Nevertheless, when school operators have been asked if their schools are tied to the Gulen Movement, the responses have been either flat denials (also here, here, and here)  or highly ambiguous (also here, here, and here). One newspaper reporter explained that strategic ambiguity was a GM style.
As one expert stated, “… [the Gulen Movement’s] structure, ambitions, and size remain opaque, making assessment of its impact and power difficult…” and added, “Fethullahci are often loath to declare themselves openly as such.” Another noted, “…some [Fethullah Gulen Community] members publicly deny affinity or membership with the movement.” And a Turkish observer remarked, “No society would tolerate this big of an organization being this untransparent.” When the GM has been exposed involuntarily or criticized, it has been known to respond with evasive measures or defensive attacks (e.g. see the comments that appeared under the Washington Post piece).
Because of our charter school system, the US is the only country where the Gulen Movement has been able to establish schools which are fully funded with public money. In other countries the movement’s schools are private, supported with tuition and himmet. A researcher explained that himmet is a religious donation collected from members who are assured “…that it goes to a ‘faithful’ cause (e.g., to pay for a student’s scholarship, to provide start-up capital for a new school, to send a group of influential Americans on a two-week trip to Turkey, to sponsor an ‘academic’ conference devoted to Fethullah Gulen, etc).”
Gulen charter schools regularly take students to Turkey. The movement’s interfaith dialog and Turkish culture-promoting organizations also provide Turkey trips to academics, journalists, politicians and other public officials (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here). Tours include sightseeing as well as visits to GM-affiliated institutions (news outlets, schools, etc.). A special feature of these guided “cultural immersion” trips is at least one visit to the home of a Turkish family, with up to three different home visits within nine days.
Gulen’s official website contains many articles about his teachings and opinions, including those on education and secrecy. The movement portrays itself as a promoter of dialogue, tolerance, and understanding, but the fact of the matter is that the GM is intensely controversial in Turkey. As a well-respected journalist recently wrote, “[Gulen] is reviled and feared by much of Turkey’s population.”
Controversies include the GM’s involvement with creationism, restriction of women’s rights ,and other issues connected to its conservative religious agenda, to claims about framing political opponents, intimidating the press, infiltrating police and military forces, and  the arrest of several prominent journalists in Turkey last year (also here).
As a reporter for the Lebanon Star wrote, “Celebrated for their investigative work, at the time of their arrests the journalists were investigating a shadowy Islamic group known as the Gulen Movement, founded in the 1960s by Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who left Turkey for the United States in 1998.” Prior to his arrest, one of the journalists had completed a book called “The Imam’s Army,” which detailed allegations of how the movement sought to cover up its infiltration of the police force during an internal investigation.
Concerns about this group have arisen in other countries about their schools being used to recruit members, and spread Turkish culture and fundamentalist religious ideas (e.g. in the Republic of Georgia here, Central Asia here, and in the EU here).
There has been wide speculation on what the Gulen Movement really wants (e.g. here and here) and this particular topic is in need of serious research and discussion. One expert suggested: “The movement, which is rooted in selective vision of the glorious Ottoman past, has its own imperial vision of turning Turkey into a global power.”
Although the topic is a sensitive one, there are good reasons for education officials and the public at large to learn more about the Gulen Movement and take a good look at how taxpayer funds are being used to fuel the rapid expansion of its charter school network.

Esquire Magazine: Writer wanted to help convert class war into generational war. No skills required; pays top dollar.

Michael Fiorillo comments: Expect the 1% and those pushing for the privatization of Social Security to fund many "Greedy Geezer" and "Generation Greed" stories and reports, in an effort to pit the generations against each other. Larry Littlefield, who comments frequently on Gotham Schools, obsesses about teacher pensions, and invariably frames his arguments on the basis of inter-generational conflict. You'll be hearing a lot more of this. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/esquire-magazine-writer-wanted-to-help-convert-class-war-into-generational-war-no-skills-required-pays-top-dollar   Esquire Magazine: Writer wanted to help convert class war into generational war. No skills required; pays top dollar.

Friday, 30 March 2012 22:06

This could well have been the want ad Esquire used to attract a writer for its story titled, “War Against Youth.” This lengthy piece is the best compendium of warped logic and misplaced facts on this topic since the Peter Peterson financed film, IOUSA. The whole story is given away in the first paragraph: “In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.” That sounds really awful. Thankfully it is not true, as readers could find by looking at the chart that accompanies the article. This is a ratio of wealth not income. This is a huge difference. Wealth adds up a household’s total assets. This means the value of their home, their 401(k) and other savings, their checking account and car. The calculation the n subtracts liabilities: mortgage debt, car loans, credit card debt, and student loans. This is very different from income, which for most people means their wages and for older people their Social Security. If the writer, the editor, the fact checker or anyone at Esquire had a clue, they would have caught this mistaken first paragraph and killed the piece. As their chart shows, the median net worth for households over age 65 was $170,494. That merits repeating a couple more times. The median net worth for households over age 65 was $170,494. The median net worth for households over age 65 was $170,494. Again, net worth refers to total assets minus liabilities. This means that if we add up the home equity of the typical household over age 65, their 401(k) and all other savings, the value of their car and any other possessions they might have, it comes to just over $170,000. This is a bit more than the price of the median home. In other words, if the typical household over age 65 took all of their wealth, they would have enough money to pay off their mortgage. After that they would be entirely dependent for their living expenses on their Social Security benefit, which averages a bit more than $1,200 a month. To take another comparison, the lifetime accumulation of wealth of the typical household over age 65 would be approximately equal to what the CEO of Goldman Sachs earns in two days. A top hedge fund manager, who makes $3-4 billion a year, can pocket this much money in ten minutes. Yet, Esquire tells us that it is the high living retirees getting by on their $1,200 a month Social Security checks who are responsible for the questionable future facing the young. Even this comparison of net worth is misleading. It shows that the net worth of households over age 65 increased from $120,000 in 1983 to $170,000 in 2009. However these numbers do not include pension wealth. A household over age 65 in 1983 was far more likely to be receiving money from a defined benefit pension than a household today. The loss of pension wealth would offset much of this modest gain in wealth over the last quarter century. Also, using the ratio of the wealth of households over age 65 to the wealth of households under age 35 is just a foolish exercise. Households under age 35 never had much wealth. Their 1983 median wealth of $11,500 was not going to carry them far in life. The fact that it fell to $3,660 is not of great consequence compared to their career opportunities. This would be like saying that homeless people are in trouble because the median amount amount of money they had in their pockets fell from $1.20 to 60 cents. Just as the main factor that will determine the well-being of homeless people is not the amount of change in their pocket, the main factor that will determine the well-being of the young is not their wealth. A 25-year-old Harvard MBA with $150,000 in student loan debt will do just fine. The relevant issue for young people is their career prospects. These will not be very good if the 1 percent continue to get most of the gains from economic growth. But the first paragraph is just the beginning. This piece is a true cornucopia of bad logic and misinformation. It tells readers that: “The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers' deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there's just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety.” Social Security is projected to first face a shortfall in 2036, according to the Trustees projections (2038 according to the Congressional Budget Office), but it does not “run out in 2036,” even in the absurdly unlikely event that Congress never does anything to address the shortfall. (The share of beneficiaries in the voting population will be about 50 percent larger in 2036 than it is today. Any bets that Congress won’t pay full scheduled benefits?) There will still be plenty of tax revenue being paid in 2037. This will be sufficient to pay about 80 percent of scheduled benefits. With benefits projected to be close to 40 percent higher (after adjusting for increases in the cost of living) in 2037, the payable benefit in 2037 would still be higher than what the typical retiree gets today. Perhaps even more importantly, today’s beneficiaries paid for their benefits. The return on their payroll taxes is reasonable (@1-3 percent, after adjusting for inflation), but hardly excessive. This is why it is absurd that Esquire tells us that: “According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, ‘The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget.’” Yes, using the Brookings Institution methodology the United States spends about 1000 times as much on billionaires as on children, measured on a per capita basis. Figure it out yet? Billionaires own government bonds. The government pays them interest on these bonds. A billionaire like investment banker Peter Peterson might well get tens of millions of dollars a year in interest on these bonds. It’s true that Peter Peterson paid for these bonds, but the Brookings Institution and Esquire says this does not matter. The next golden nugget of ignorance comes in the very next paragraph: “But the government's future ability to pay is decreasing rapidly precisely because the Boomers splurged so heavily during the Bush and Clinton years. Public debt per person in the United States currently stands at $33,777. George W. Bush inherited a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of 32.5 percent and brought it up to 54.1 percent during a period of economic growth.” If the measure of splurging is the public debt, then Esquire is on the wrong planet here. The gross debt of the federal government was equal to 64.1 percent of GDP at the end of 1992. It had fallen to 57.3 percent of GDP by the end of 2000. How could they get something so simple so wrong? Of course the debt is not a measure of intergenerational equity. At some point everyone alive today will be dead. The bonds that they hold will end up in the hands of the next generation. This means that the debt will be paid from some members of younger generations to other members of younger generations. There can be an issue of intra-generational equity, for example if Bill Gates’ children and grandchildren own all the debt, but there is no issue of inter-generational equity here. What matters for inter-generational equity is the overall state of the economy and the physical and natural infrastructure that we hand down to future generations. By the first measure, we are doing quite well. Productivity is increasing at the rate of close to 2.5 percent annually. This means that after 30 years, the average worker will be producing more than twice as much in an hour of work as they do today. If this gain is relatively evenly shared (i.e. the distribution of income gets no worse), then the typical worker in 2041 will enjoy a standard of living that is close to twice as high as what workers today enjoy. It's true that if we ignore global warming then this may not be the case. Similarly, if the U.S. manages to antagonize the rest of the world with its foreign policy, people here may not be able to enjoy the fruits of productivity growth. But this will have nothing to do with the Social Security and Medicare benefits received by baby boomers. There is way too much other nonsense to address in this post, but one item is too delicious to pass up. There is a box with the heading: “How to disenfranchise a generation.” The box then discusses the measures proposed by Republicans in many states to impose more restrictions on voting, most importantly requiring a government issued photo ID card to vote. Incredibly, Esquire tells readers that this rule is aimed at young people, as though they expect these measures to keep the children of Wall Street traders and Fortune 500 CEOs from having a vote. In fact, these laws are quite obviously targeted at minorities of any age. The Republicans are not trying to keep their kids from voting. There are trying to keep the kids of African Americans and Hispanics from voting, as well as parents and grandparents. Does Esquire really not know this? This article is a shameful effort to transform the realities of class war, where the wealthy have been rigging the rules to secure themselves most of the gains from economic growth, into a generational issue. The combination of ignorance and dishonesty in this piece is truly extraordinary.

HOW THE MEDIA PORTRAYS THE STATE OF AMERICAN ED

Flunking the Test    The American education system has never been better, several important measures show. But you’d never know that from reading overheated media reports about “failing” schools and enthusiastic pieces on unproven “reform” efforts.  Fri., March 30, 2012. By Paul Farhi Senior contributing writer Paul Farhi (farhip@washpost.com) is a reporter for the Washington Post.

Fareed Zakaria is worried about the state of American education. To hear the CNN host and commentator tell it, the nation's schools are broken and must be "fixed" to "restore the American dream." In fact, that was the title of Zakaria's primetime special in January, "Restoring the American Dream: Fixing Education." Zakaria spent an hour thumbing through a catalog of perceived educational woes: high dropout rates, mediocre scores by American students on international tests, inadequate time spent in classrooms, unmotivated teachers and their obstructionist labor unions. "Part of the reason we're in this crisis is that we have slacked off and allowed our education system to get rigid and sclerotic," he declared.

This is odd. By many important measures – high school completion rates, college graduation, overall performance on standardized tests – America's educational attainment has never been higher. Moreover, when it comes to education, sweeping generalizations ("rigid and sclerotic") are more dangerous than usual. How could they not be? With nearly 100,000 public schools, 55 million elementary and secondary students and 2.5 million public school teachers currently at work in large, small, urban, suburban and rural districts, education may be the single most complex endeavor in America.

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 nor CNN would comment for this story.)

Have the nation's schools gotten noticeably lousier? Or has the coverage of them just made it seem that way?

Some schools are having a difficult time educating children – particularly children who are impoverished, speak a language other than English, move frequently or arrive at the school door neglected, abused or chronically ill. But many pieces of this complex mosaic are quite positive. First data point: American elementary and middle school students have improved their performance on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study every four years since the tests began in 1995; they are above the international average in all categories and within a few percentage points of the global leaders (something that few news reports mention). Second data point: The number of Americans with at least some college education has soared over the past 70 years, from 10 percent in 1940 to 56 percent today, even as the population has tripled and the nation has grown vastly more diverse. All told, America's long-term achievements in education are nothing short of stunning.

As the son and husband of schoolteachers, I can't say I'm unbiased on this subject. But as a journalist, I can't help but see the evident flaws in some of the reporting about education – namely, a lack of balance and historical context, and a willingness to accept the most generic and even inflammatory characterizations at face value. Journalists can't be faulted for reporting the oftentimes overheated rhetoric about educational "failure" from elected officials and prominent "reformers" (that's what reporters are supposed to do, after all). But some can certainly be faulted for not offering readers and viewers a broader frame to assess the extent of the alleged problems, and the likelihood that the proposed responses will succeed.

Check out some of the 544 articles that mentioned "failing schools" in January; they constitute an encyclopedia of loaded rhetoric, vapid reporting and unchallenged assumptions. In dozens and dozens of articles, the phrase isn't defined; it is simply accepted as commonly understood. "Several speakers said charter schools should only be allowed in areas now served by failing schools," the Associated Press wrote of a Mississippi charter school proposal. The passive construction of the phrase is telling: The schools are failing, not administrators, superintendents, curriculum writers, elected officials, students or their parents.
The running mate of "failing schools" in education stories is "reform." The word suggests a good thing – change for the sake of improvement. But in news accounts, the label often is implicitly one-sided, suggesting that "reformers" (such as proponents of vouchers or "school choice") are more virtuous than their hidebound opponents. Journalists rarely question the motives or credentials of "reformers." The Hartfort Courant hit the "reformer-failing schools" jackpot when it reported, "Like most people seeking education reform this year..the council wants policies that assure excellent teaching, preschool for children whose families can't afford it, and help for failing schools."

One reason schools seem to be "failing" so often in news accounts is that we simply know more than we once did about student performance. Before NCLB, schools were measured by averaging all of their students' scores, a single number that mixed high and low performers. The law required states to "disaggregate" this data – that is, to break it down by race, poverty and other sub-groups. One beneficial effect of the law is that it showed how some of these groups – poor children and non-English speakers, for example – lag children from more privileged backgrounds. But rather than evidence of a "crisis," this new data may simply have laid bare what was always true but never reported in detail.

What or who was responsible for the poorest performing schools? Quite often, news media accounts have pointed the finger at a single culprit – teachers. In late 2008, Time magazinefeatured the District of Columbia's then-School Chancellor Michelle Rhee on its cover wielding a broom to symbolize her desire to sweep out underperforming instructors. The magazine endorsed her approach not just as prudent but as scientific: "The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching," wrote reporter Amanda Ripley, citing "decades of research." This view – a favorite of wealthy education "reformers" such as Bill Gates and real estate developer Eli Broad – was also a theme in the critically adored documentary "Waiting for 'Superman,'" which featured Rhee.

But like "failing schools" and "crisis," the phrase "ineffective teachers" has become media shorthand (it appeared 136 times in news accounts during January alone, Nexis says). And given the many factors that affect learning, it also looks like scapegoating. NPR's Tovia Smith, for example, concluded her story in early March about a program that holds back third graders who are having trouble reading this way: "As another academic put it: This policy flunks kids for failing to learn, but given how widespread the problem is, maybe it's the school that should flunk for failing to teach."

The notion that education is in "crisis" – that is, in a moment of special danger – is another journalistic favorite. While few reporters ever mention it, anxiety over the nation's educational achievement is probably older than the nation. Zakaria's concern that American students aren't being prepared for the modern workforce echoes the comments of business leaders at the turn of the century – the 19th century. Then as now, they worried that schools weren't producing enough educated workers for an economy undergoing rapid technological change.
Nor are the fears that international competitors are bypassing us without precedent. Five months after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in October 1957, Life magazine contrasted the rigorous academic workload and extracurricular activities of a Moscow teenager (physics and chemistry courses, chess club) with the carefree lifestyle of a Chicago schoolboy (sock hops and soda shop dates with his girlfriend). The cover line: "Crisis in Education." Cold War worries gave way to fears that Japan was gaining on us in the 1980s; the Reagan-era education reform manifesto "A Nation at Risk" warned that "a rising tide of mediocrity" was threatening "our very future as a nation and a people."

"The idea that we have a crisis in American education, that there is pervasive failure, starts with policy makers," says Pedro Noguera, the eminent education researcher and New York University professor. "This is the line we hear in D.C. and in state capitals. There are certainly areas in which we're lacking, but when you report it that way, it doesn't at all acknowledge the complexity of the situation [and] where we're doing quite well. The discussion is quite simplistic. I'm not sure why exactly. My suspicion is that the media has trouble with complexity."

Noguera praises some of the journalism about education, such as work by the New York Times and NPR, two outlets that have full-time, veteran reporters covering the subject. He also noted a "Dan Rather Reports" program on the little-seen HDNet channel last year that explored the link between school performance and poverty, a subject often ignored or noted only in passing in many stories about academic achievement.

The news media's general portrayal may help explain a striking disconnect in public attitudes about public education. Since 1984, a year after the publication of "A Nation at Risk," the Gallup Organization has asked parents to assess their local schools, and the public to rate schools generally. In 2011, the percentage of parents who gave their children's school an A grade was at its highest ever (37 percent), whereas only 1 percent of respondents rated the nation's schools that way. Why the disparity in perceived quality? Gallup asked people about that, too. Mostly, it was because people knew about their local schools through direct experience. They only learned about the state of education nationally through the news media.

The leading, or at least most widely viewed, source of education reporting is NBC News, which covers the topic on multiple programs and platforms – "NBC Nightly News," the "Today" show, MSNBC and Telemundo, among others. It is the only commercial broadcast network to employ a full-time education reporter, Rehema Ellis. NBC is so devoted to education reporting that in 2010 it began branding its coverage under its own banner, "Education Nation." It has also gone beyond mere reporting by hosting an annual education "summit" that last fall brought together 10 governors, former President Bill Clinton, former First Lady Laura Bush, educators and other dignitaries at its Rockefeller Center headquarters to discuss ways to improve education.

"We've really tried to put a very bright spotlight" on this topic, NBC News President Steve Capus said in an interview. "We felt the subject matter was important, and it wasn't getting as much attention as it deserved." Result? Capus, who used to cover school board meetings in the Philadelphia area as a young stringer, proudly points to an Aspen Institute study showing that one in five Americans has heard of "Education Nation" and almost one in 10 has seen some of its reporting.

But while "Education Nation" occasionally escapes the "crisis-in-education" paradigm, its gaze is squarely on perceived flaws and, yes, failing schools. "America's public school students are struggling," said Ellis, beginning a "Nightly News" story during the NBC-sponsored summit in September. The segment included an NBC-commissioned poll showing widespread public dissatisfaction with public schools. Gallup's multiyear findings on the same topic weren't mentioned.

In the past six months, NBC has done "Education Nation" stories on online public schools; on the success of Shanghai's students on an international exams; on "unschooling" (a less structured version of home-schooling); and on a "wave" of new "parent trigger" laws that allow parents to petition for dramatic changes in "troubled" local schools, including firing teachers (in fact, only three states have enacted such laws).

Yet NBC and "Education Nation" have rarely looked closely at the effect of poverty and class, the single greatest variable in educational achievement. Academic research has shown for many years that poor children, or those born to parents who are poorly educated themselves, don't do as well in school as better-off students. More recent work by, among others, Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University, suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children has grown wider since the 1960s, reflecting in part the nation's growing economic disparity. The problem is vast – some 22 percent of American children live in poverty, the highest among Western democracies.

Instead, NBC has concentrated on initiatives favored by self-styled education reformers. The network has been particularly generous to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting teacher merit pay proposals and privately run charter schools – an agenda strongly opposed by many public school teachers, labor unions and educators. (Zakaria also featured Bill Gates on his CNN special.)

During its first "Education Nation" summit in 2010, for example, "NBC Nightly News" aired a profile of a Gates Foundation initiative, "Measures of Effective Teaching," which seeks to create a database of effective teaching methods. The reporter was former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw. During the second summit last fall, Brokaw showed up on "Today" with Melinda Gates to discuss the same Gates initiative. Turning from reporter to advocate, Brokaw told host Natalie Morales, "So what Bill and Melinda have done, and it's a great credit to them, and it's a great gift to this country, is that they have taken the kind of episodic values that we know about teaching and they've put them together in a way that everyone can learn from them. So that's a big, big step."

Brokaw also put his gravitas behind Gates and other billionaire education reformers in a syndicated column that appeared in newspapers during the NBC summit in 2011, writing that "Entrepreneurs and captains of industry such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, home building tycoon Eli Broad, hedge fund billionaires in New York's Robin Hood Foundation, have put education reform and excellence at the top of their personal and financial agenda." Brokaw didn't mention the objections to these "reforms" from teachers, nor ask why billionaires should be accorded expert status on education policy in the first place.
(An NBC spokeswoman declined to make Brokaw and Ellis available for comment, saying that the story sounded "negative.")

NBC News does more than just report on the "reform" movement; it's also in business with those who are promoting it. Among the corporate sponsors of its "Education Nation" summits are the for-profit education company University of Phoenix, the book publisher Scholastic Inc. and...the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Remember that Aspen Institute study showing broad public awareness of NBC's "Education Nation" efforts? It was funded by the Gates Foundation.

Capus says such a relationship doesn't pose a conflict of interest for the network's journalists because an editorial "firewall" prohibits sponsors from influencing coverage. Nevertheless, representatives of each of these sponsors, including Melinda Gates and Scholastic Senior Vice President Francie Alexander, have appeared repeatedly on "Today" and "NBC Nightly News" to discuss various education proposals and ideas (their financial connection to NBC News has never been disclosed on the air, according to a Nexis search). Meghan Pianta, an NBC spokeswoman, defended using the billionaire couple as a news source because of their "prominence and importance in the education debate."

Some teachers, on the other hand, can't help feeling that the network has stacked the deck in favor of the "reform" agenda. NBC's approach "is beneficial to those who promote privatizing schools, those who peddle tests and tests to prepare for tests, and curriculum based on tests to prepare for tests," wrote Randy Turner, an English teacher in Joplin, Missouri, on The Huffington Post last fall, as he watched the network cover its own summit. "It is also beneficial to those whose chief goal is to eliminate unions of all kinds, including those representing teachers."

On a more prosaic level, veteran education reporters say they face a simple yet profound barrier to doing their job: It's hard to get inside a classroom these days. They say administrators are wary about putting potential problems on display, particularly in the wake of No Child Left Behind and the Obama Administration's initiative, Race to the Top.
"School systems are crazed about controlling the message," says Linda Perlstein, author of two books about schools and, until recently, public editor of the Education Writers Association. "Access is so constricted." As a result, she says, "There's great underreporting of what happens in classroom, and it's just getting worse."

Perlstein spent three school years in classrooms to report a series about middle school for the Washington Post in 2000, and for her books, "Not Much Just Chillin'" (about middle schoolers in Columbia, Maryland) and "Tested" (about high-stakes tests). But Perlstein says other reporters were never able to gain similar access to other schools, including those in Washington, D.C., where the reform efforts of former Schools Chancellor Rhee attracted national attention.

Even with a cooperative principal or school superintendent, few reporters could make the lengthy commitment that Perlstein did in her reporting. That means journalists don't get to see the very thing they're reporting about. Imagine if sportswriters never got to see athletes play or political reporters never attended a campaign rally. Some districts even forbid teachers from speaking to the media on the record outside the classroom.

What to do? "You rely more and more on talking heads and less on what a school looks like," Perlstein says. She adds, "That matters." Ironically, superintendents and administrators "always tell me that the media gets it wrong. Well, how can we get it right when they won't talk to us?"

This compels education journalists to talk to secondary sources: administrators and bureaucrats, labor leaders, politicians and the occasional billionaire. Not necessarily a bad thing, since at the moment, there are perhaps a dozen ideas (tenure reform, vouchers, charter schools, teacher accountability, etc.) floating around and plenty of disagreement about how or whether to implement them.

But pronouncements and policy nostrums often don't get the checking they deserve. "Some reporters don't do enough to synthesize and explain the wealth of peer-reviewed research available on the proposals being batted around," says Jessica Calefati, an up-and-coming education reporter at the Star-Ledger in Newark. For example, if a school district or a state is pushing for teacher merit pay, it behooves a reporter to point out that few studies link merit pay with increased student achievement, she says. Some reporters, says Calefati, "gloss over the nuance."

Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss goes much further, giving her media colleagues an F for legwork. "The mainstream media has failed to do due diligence [on the school reform agenda] for over a decade," she says. "They bought into the rhetoric of school reform and testing" mandated by No Child Left Behind. As for President Barack Obama's proposed Race to the Top initiatives, Strauss faults the news media for failing to ask whether "the rhetoric matches the practice. There's nothing new under the sun. Some of the things that didn't work 30, 40 or 50 years ago still don't work....We've taken as truth whatever Bill Gates says."

Strauss points out that leading Democrats, such as Obama, and Republicans have both embraced school choice and charter schools to some degree. This unusual political comity has led some mainstream outlets to position "reform" as a centrist, bipartisan idea, she says. There are a few consistently skeptical voices – she mentions New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip, and I'd mention Strauss – but for the most part, she says, the media have romanticized reform figures like Gates and Rhee, and the KIPP Schools, the darlings of the private charter movement.

"The mainstream media hasn't been digging," Strauss asserts. "Generally, reporters have gone along with the reform of the day. Well, I've got news for you: It's much more complicated than that."