The charter cap and the sad state of journalism: A tale of tabloid excess

How the tabloids “reported” the stories. Back in 2006, ABC’s John Stossel set the low bar for reporting on public schools. In his 20/20 segment “Stupid in America,” he depicted all the teachers as lazy, the students as stupid and charter schools as superior.

The media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) used Stossel’s work as a prime example of deception in its report, a “Beginner’s Course in Deceptive Reporting.”

FAIR began, “If there were a John Stossel School of Journalism, reporters-in-training would be taught a simple template for any story: Free markets are good. Unions are bad. When consumers get to ‘choose,’ everyone wins; if governments try to regulate, everyone loses.”

The Stossel School of Journalism

The sorry state of such journalism is not the province of “Insight,” but we try to do our part to keep truth and fiction separate in the education world. So let’s track the Stossel formula through the recent pages of the New York Post.

Over the last few months, the Post has managed to make charter schools the “free market” and the UFT and the Legislature the monopolist enemies, while setting up a showdown around the state cap on charter schools (government regulation) that wildly misrepresented the issues.

Anatomy of a media campaign

The Post began on Sept. 28 by hyperventilating over something it rarely covers: education research. “A new study has just blown away any remaining doubts about the remarkable success of charter schools,” it wrote. The fact that the research, by Stanford University’s Caroline Hoxby, was soon disputed, or that most charter research finds the opposite, never made the paper.

That piece turned out to be the first shot in a campaign to raise the state charter cap, guided by a principle of Stossel-trained journalists everywhere: “Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.”

The focus was the competition for federal Race to the Top education grants. The charter link was that the feds were awarding points on the grant application to states that permit an unlimited number of charter schools. New York State has a longstanding cap.

That little hook plus a thesaurus, and the Post was good to go.

Balanced coverage?

Between September and January, the Post, occasionally joined by the Daily News, reported that the city’s regular public schools were “substandard.” The state charter law was “idiotic.” Charter schools were “underfunded.” The state Legislature had “no class” for wanting some checks and balances on charters, and was “stabbing kids in the back.” Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was flipping “a stiff middle finger” to President Obama. And the UFT opposed charter schools “because — unlike the majority of unionized schools — they actually educate kids.”

Between them, the two tabloids produced no fewer than 25 editorials, or editorials masquerading as stories, about the supposedly egregious state cap on charter schools and how it would cost the state $700 million.

They gave Thomas Carroll, founder of a charter school chain and a longtime conservative political operative, a total of 12 op-eds just since September (nine in the Post, three in the News). No matter that all the stories, editorials and op-eds said the same thing. Or that they were mostly inaccurate or overblown.

Because cap or no cap, New York State has only a slim chance of winning Race to the Top funding in this first round, since just six states are slated for grants. The charter cap was worth only eight points on the application, out of 500 total. And that $700 million is a maximum, spread over four years.

While some charters are mom-and-pop operations, charters as a group are far from underfunded. The New York Times and the Albany Times Union reported that charters are the latest hot investment for billionaires and hedge fund managers, stories the tabloids chose not to cover.

And the politics? The UFT doesn’t have a policy to oppose charter schools and actually supported the Legislature’s bill to double the number of charters granted. The bill didn’t pass because charter advocates would rather it die than accept its provisions: to provide equal access to children with special needs; not to obstruct collective bargaining; to let parents vote on placing charters in their schools; and to prohibit for-profit charter operators.

The endgame — failure

On day seven of the Haiti earthquake, with thousands of New Yorkers desperate for news, the Post devoted pages 4 and 5 to a spread headlined “Pols trying to cheat our kids!” Two stories about how great charters are; an op-ed by a charter school principal; a story about the teachers unions’ donations to legislators; a story about “angry parents” (all four of them) under a picture of Martin Luther King Jr.; and a link to an editorial attacking the Regents chancellor for not stopping the unions from destroying charter schools. Haiti finally showed up on page 19.

Quite a piece of work. But in the end, the campaign failed. The Legislature bucked tremendous pressure and did not lift the cap.

Soon after, the Daily News carried a Carroll op-ed that attacked UFT President Michael Mulgrew personally, as “a throwback to the muscle-flexing union leaders of the distant past” (as if the modern union leader should be a wimp).

So you see where this is going.

Stay tuned, and will someone please hold a brief requiem for journalism?