Fwd: More on Quality Counts

[Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>]

Begin forwarded message:

  From: James Crawford <jwcrawford@COMPUSERVE.COM>

  Date: Mon Mar 3, 2008 1:25:38 PM US/Pacific

  To: ELLADVOC@ASU.EDU

  Subject: Fwd: More on Quality Counts

  Reply-To: James Crawford <jwcrawford@COMPUSERVE.COM>

  [FYI. For those who would like to communicate their views on this matter to
  Education Week, there's still time. ... Jim]

  I want to thank you for your participation in our campaign to encourage the
  Education Weekeditors to amend their unethical behavior in the biased
  publication of Quality Counts.

  More than 100 people—parents, teachers, professors, school administrators,
  policy analysts, and other citizens—have sent letters to Ed Week decrying
  this behavior and urging Virginia Edwards and her colleagues to choose a more
  ethical course.

  Sandy Reeves, the commentary and letters senior editor, has published the
  letter from my colleagues and I in the issue that went to the press last
  Friday. The letter is also now on the Ed Week website with a rebuttal from Ed
  Week’s editors.

  Virginia Edwards, Ed Week’s editor and publisher, wrote to me in response to
  our letter. She calls Quality Counts“enterprise reporting that relies heavily
  on extensive data-gathering and analysis in the name of informing policy
  debate.”

  Edwards seems blind to the fact that Quality Countsdoes not “inform the
  policy debate;” rather by selecting categories that privilege the
  standards-and testing school paradigm, Quality Counts participates in the
  debate very much as a partisan.

  Of course, this was apparent to you.

  On its website Ed Week still claims the following:Education Weektakes no
  editorial positions but welcomes the opinions, comments, and ideas of its
  readers.

  I believe we have Ed Week’s editors’ attention. Now we need to keep the
  spotlight on their bias. Please take 2 action steps that will help this
  campaign to move ahead.

  1. Ed Week is a nonprofit; this means it has a board of trustees. The members
  are listed below. Please email them, conveying your concerns about Quality
  Countsand asking them to take responsibility for correcting Ed Week’s
  unethical behavior.

  2. I’ve copied the original email and Ed Week editors’ contact info below.
  Would you enlist 2 of your colleagues in this effort and ask them if they are
  willing to email the Ed Week editors and/or board members during the next
  week?

  I can’t promise you that our effort will be successful, but I believe that if
  we stop now, the issue is likely to go away. The longer we can keep it on the
  agenda—and the more people who write in to Ed Week—the more likely we are to
  get their attention and impact their actions.

  Best wishes,

  David Marshak

  ________________________________________________________________

  Editorial Projects on Education Board of Trustees

  David L. Crippens (no email address that I can find

  Paul Desruisseaux: associate vice-chancellor, U.C. Santa Barbara

  paul.d@ia.ucsb.edu0000,0000,0000

  Cris Gutierrez: teacher, scholar, peace educator

  cristeach@earthlink.net0000,0000,0000

  Willis D. Hawley: professor, University of Maryland

  wdh@umd.edu0000,0000,0000

  Pearl R. Kane: professor, Teachers College, Columbia

   prk4@columbia.edu0000,0000,0000

  Jay Mathews: Washington Post education reporter

  mathewsj@washpost.com0000,0000,0000

  Barbara Newton: publisher, Sunset Publishing

  corporate@sunset.com0000,0000,0000

  Robert S. Peterkin: director, Urban Superintendents Program, Harvard

  robert_peterkin@gse.harvard.edu0000,0000,0000

  Nancy Raley: director, communications; National Association of Independent
  Schools

  raley@nais.org0000,0000,0000

  Robert F. Sexton: director, Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence

  admin@prichardcommittee.org0000,0000,0000

  Marla Ucelli: Annenberg Institute, Brown

  Marla_Ucelli@brown.edu0000,0000,0000

  Ronald A Wolk: founding editor of Ed Week, current board chair

  rwolk@epe.org0000,0000,0000

  ________________________________________________________________

  On February 25, David Marshak, Philip Kovacs, Susan Ohanian, Jerry Bracey,
  William Spady, and Deborah Meier sent the letter below to the editors of
  Education Week, calling on them to adhere to basic ethical standards of
  journalism in future publications.

  The letter calls on Virginia Edwards, Ed Week’s editor and publisher, and her
  colleagues to cease publication of Quality Counts, which is advocacy, not
  reporting. It is unethical for reporters to engage in policy advocacy, which
  is a central element in Quality Counts. Or, at the least, if Ed Week insists
  on acting as an advocate, it must separate its reporting staff from its
  advocacy staff the way all American newspapers do.

  Please read the letter, and if you share this concern, please send your own
  email of complaint to Virginia Edwards and each of her colleagues (names and
  email addresses below). We know that many thousands of educators share our
  concern about Ed Week’s inappropriate advocacy, and we hope that an
  outpouring of email in this vein will have an impact on Ed Week’s editors.
  (Please copy your email to dmarshak@seattleu.edu0000,0000,0000 so we can keep
  track of what’s happening with this effort.) And if you intend to join us in
  this campaign, please send your email ASAP—and before March 5!

  ________________________________________________________________

  Virginia Edwards, Editor and Publisher                      gined@epe.org0000,0000,0000

  Gregory Chronister, Executive Editor                      gchron@epe.org0000,0000,0000

  Lynn Olson, Project Editor for Quality Counts           lolson@epe.org0000,0000,0000

  Karen Diegmueller, Managing Editor                      kdieg@epe.org0000,0000,0000

  Mark W. Bomster, Asst. Managing Editor           mbomster@epe.org0000,0000,0000

  ________________________________________________________________

  IT’S TIME FOR EDUCATION WEEK TO CEASE ITS VIOLATION OF BASIC JOURNALISTIC
  ETHICS

  The editors of Education Weekclaim to be objective journalists, but with
  their Quality Countspublication, they abandon objectivity and promote the
  standards-and-testing industrial school paradigm of No Child Left Behind
  (NCLB). In this context, they are no longer reporters; they have chosen to
  act as advocates.

  The editors of Editorial Projects in Education (EPE), the nonprofit that
  publishes Education Week, say that their mission is to “help raise the level
  of awareness and understanding among professionals and the public of
  important issues in American education. We cover local, state, and national
  news and issues from preschool through the 12th grade.” Education Weekdoes
  not publish its own editorials, and it claims not to advocate for particular
  ideological or policy positions.

  Yet for more than a decade EPE has published its Quality Counts (QC) annual
  volume, purporting to assess the condition of American public schooling from
  a neutral and fair-minded vantage. Education Weekhas presented Quality
  Counts (QC) as if it were any other piece of journalism, that is, a piece of
  reporting. But a quick inspection of the 2008 volume reveals the dishonesty
  in this presentation. Quality Countsis not reporting in any normal sense of
  the word. Rather it is advocacy.Its assertions and conclusions often support
  particular policy positions. A few examples reveal these characteristics.

  §      QC embraces the position that state academic standards are a positive
  force in schooling (p. 45). This is an ideological position.QC offers no
  evidence to support this position. While most corporate and political leaders
  and many school leaders embrace this position, many educators and parents
  believe that standards constrain learning more than they enable it, that
  standardization of learning is an antiquated artifact of the 20th century
  that hinders creativity and the personalization of learning.

  §      QC accepts the criteria of an unpublished review of state standards
  conducted by the American Federation of Teachers, dated October-November 2007
  (p. 45). This review judges state standards in terms of the following
  attributes: “clear, specific, and grounded in content.” Here QC is embracing
  an advocacyposition of the AFT.To employ an unpublished document that cannot
  be reviewed is also bizarre for a publication that calls itself journalistic.

  §      QC awards positive scores to states that “assign ratings to all
  schools…” and “sanction low-performing schools. (p. 47). These are additional
  advocacy stances. There is no evidence that, for example, Florida’s crude A-F
  rating system does anything for children other than intensify test
  preparation. Nor does QC offer evidence that sanctioning “low-performing
  schools” does anyone any good.

  §      QC advocates for the ideological position that “all high school
  students…(should) take a college-preparatory curriculum to earn a
  diploma…”(p. 48) This is yet another value-based position, not
  reportage.While some politicians and educators support this goal, others note
  that a more differentiated high school curriculum is likely to better serve
  the very diverse high school population, particularly since a large
  percentage of new jobs in the decades to come will not require a college
  degree.

  §      QC awards points to states where “teacher evaluation is tied to
  student achievement” (p. 51). Such a policy is extremely controversial, given
  that many educators and analysts agree that efforts at this sort of
  simplistic cause-and-effect delineation both distort the complexity of
  causation in the schooling process and increase pressure for schools to
  become test preparation factories.

  These examples and others in Quality Countsdisplay the profound ideological
  bias in this document. In this volume the EPE editors—Virginia Edwards, the
  editor and publisher; Gregory Chronister, the executive editor; Lynn Olson,
  the executive project editor; Karen Diegmueller, the managing editor; and
  Mark W. Bomster, the assistant managing editor—are not journalists engaged in
  good faith, objective reporting. They are powerful advocates for a particular
  school ideology: state standards, the simplistic labeling of schools based on
  narrow indicators and the “sanctioning of low-performing schools,” “teacher
  evaluation tied to student achievement,” and so on—seemingly the whole
  industrial paradigm of schooling, from Ellwood Cubberly to George W. Bush.

  If these EPE editors are not willing to publicly acknowledge their work as
  advocates in their yearly publication of Quality Counts, how can we trust the
  fairness of what they present each week in Education Week?

  We call on Ms. Edwards and her colleagues to rectify this situation in which
  Education Weekpretends to be a neutral reporter but actually engages in
  advocacy. Two obvious remedies come to mind.

  1. EPE could cease to act as an advocate and thus cease to publish advocacy
  pieces such as Quality Counts.

  2. EPE could play by the rules just as every other newspaper does and
  establish an identified editorial function. Then it would need to separate
  its reporters from its editorialists. Even the Wall Street Journal and the
  New Hampshire Union-Leader meet this standard.

  It’s certainly long past time for Ms. Edwards and her colleagues to give up
  this charade of objectivity and play by the same journalistic rules as
  everyone else.

  David Marshak

  Philip Kovacs

  Susan Ohanian

  Jerry Bracey

  William Spady

  Deborah Meier

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