KIPP and other teacher bashing media hoaxes

[Csubstance@aol.com]

In a message dated 1/1/07 2:39:54 AM, klreeves@swbell.net writes:

<< So... my fair assessment... I don't know what makes me madder...  
Feinberg so self-satisfied with his great KIPP experiment or the  
media that is so willing to make KIPP a great school simply because  
it's a great story to tell.
 >>

1/1/06

These "great stories to tell" have been around since the beginning of time. 
Every major con is based on a "good story" that people want to believe. A 
couple of trillion dollars in stock "value" was lost to people who bought the 
"stories" of the late 1990s from Wall Street, but here we deal with educational 
tall tales. 

Thank you, Kimberly, for your observations, reporting, and insights. Each is 
important to getting this picture straight.

My observation, going back more than 20 years to the first media-made 
"miracle" inner city school in Chicago (the Marva Collins hoax) is similar to what 
you narrate about KIPP.

Finally, it requires a media (usually dominated by white people with too much 
education and not enough experience in the inner city) that is inherently 
biased against public schools and public school teachers. At that point, someone 
(Marva; the KIPPsters) sets up a dog-and-pony show that wows the media. After 
that, someone glib, well connected, and reinforced by all of the other biased 
media leaders gets an interation of the story into print (print is almost 
always the first telling). The print iterations are collected and passed along, 
forming the basis for future tellings. 

At some point, that story becomes the "dominant narrative" for a certain 
group of people. It is refined over and over, reinforced by the support of 
powerful people (Spellings, most lately) and becomes an article of faith. 

One of the things I found most interesting in analyzing these store tellings 
is that nobody "covering" the story as a reporter ever asked some of the most 
basic questions once the original narrative was firmly in place. What is the 
family income of this child? (Most of the children in these schools are not 
ghetto poor...). Does this child know anything outside of the narrow band of 
materials he (or she) repeats on cue for the cameras (when the miracle show is on 
stage for the media). What "Ivy League" school is this child going to (or 
"Prep School") and how well does the child do when she gets there?

In its crude beginnings back in the days of Ronald Reagan and "A Nation at 
Risk", these stories had more holes in them than now. Marva Collins's hoaxes 
were filled with holes for anyone who actually went behind the carefully scripted 
moments. But few "reporters" did, and the rest is history, right down to last 
month's New York Times Magazine re-telling by Mr. Tough.

(By the way, Tough just had a tough time with some of his editing mistakes. 
See yesterday's Public Editor's comments in the News of the Week in Review. It 
turns out that that woman doing 30 years for an "abortion" actually aborted 
the child much later than the story last month reported. This is typical of the 
kind of fact checking these guys and gals are doing at this point in history. 
But because the narratives they are telling have such 'traction' in common 
mythologies, they get away with it. A recent example of the same kind of things 
was when English majors like Henry Blodgett were traipsing around giving moving 
stories about the "Dot Com" miracle and pumping up stock prices. Same M.O. 
The archtype story in this regard is "The Music Man" although Mark Twain also 
confronted this stuff regularly and did a hilarious job with the material...).

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance
www.substancenews.com