FAIR Grades Education Coverage

Ever wonder why the mainstream media often seems to be little more than cheerleaders for top-down education "reform" and teacher-bashing? Check out this new alert from the folks at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting for a critical analysis of the media's coverage of public education today.

Another school year is beginning, and corporate media are ramping up their attacks on teachers and their praise for corporate-friendly education "reform." FAIR's on the case with special coverage on CounterSpin and in Extra!.

Time magazine's current cover story (9/20/10) sounds all the usual notes: the corporate-style "reform" movement is a bold attempt to run schools "according to what actually works;" the White House's Race for the Top grants are an attempt to get states to "rationalize their systems," the KIPP charter schools are "an alternate universe where things worked the way they should" and Barack Obama "is standing up to his party's most dysfunctional long-term romantic interest, the teachers' unions."

The September issue of Extra! documents how these and many other favorite media truisms about education reform deserve far greater scrutiny. The special education issue features articles on teacher-bashing, the Obama administration's "Race to the Top," media darling and D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, and interviews with author Jonathan Kozol and journalist Barbara Miner. Follow this link to read more--or to subscribe to Extra! today, with the education special as your first issue: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4

Grading teachers based on their students' scores on standardized tests is a popular obsession with so-called education reformers, White House policy makers and journalists. The Los Angeles Times even published test-based rankings of 6,000 primary school teachers recently, sparking demonstrations. What you wouldn't know from most media accounts of this controversial policy is that many critics think the focus on testing actually undermines student learning.

CounterSpin talked about the fetishization of testing with education researcher Diane Ravitch, a contributor to a new report on teacher ratings from the Economic Policy Institute, and the author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Follow this link to listen: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4152