We’ve got two real problems:

1. Very little knowledge, which I’ve mentioned several times above;

2. Very little available data/information. School districts and city/state ed depts. are notoriously rotten at keeping data themselves, let alone giving it out freely.

So, we’ve got a situation where media write about things on which they have only a tenuous grasp [I'm speaking generally here], and about which they have little hard information. That’s a recipe for the type of muddy, meaningless journalism you described in the Washington Post’s article about Maryland schools.

The stories are largely useless to anyone involved in education, and tend to mislead those with a casual interest. These papers do a pretty good job covering the ins and outs of their local district, though.

I think that the media’s lack of knowledge about the subjects they’re trying to cover is a high hurdle for them. I’m still waiting on a candid article about how an education reporter fared on the Third World Challenge.

For instance, headlines in the Washington Post recently trumpted the success of Maryland in decreases the number of schools on the NCLB failing schools list. However, after reading the article, it turns out that while about 35 schools came off the failing list, about 28 new schools were added to it. The overall drop is “failing schools” was only on the magnitude of about 3% across the state. Is such a drop even statistically significant? Yet the Post headlines made it sound like huge strides were being made in student achievement across Maryland.

And this doesn’t even get into the problems with comparing student performance of this year’s students to last year’s students. Apparently, Maryland adopted a new version of its test this year, so that it is possible that some of students who passed this year may not have passed the same test last year.

Just goes to show: Main stream education reporters are not necessarily providing an objective and well-rounded picture of the state of education in America today.

I actually agree with this. Education is just one of the topic areas the traditional media covers very poorly, focusing on the trivial and superficial while at the same time fostering an unrealistic ‘magic pill’ approach to policy and methodology.