A new research paper by a team of economists got a lot of pretty favorable press because it appears to deliver results that would seem to confirm what many in the media believe about American schools: If you could just use standardized test scores to weed out underperforming teachers, you would see serious improvement in school achievement.

Media coverage often glosses over the core problem here, which is how you measure teacher performance in the first place. The "value-added" research that is touted by many pundits--using test scores to determine a teacher's effectiveness--is controversial in large part because critics don't think it does what its supporters say it does (not to mention that dramatic swings in such scores from year to year, which can make a teacher "great" one year and below average the next). These are rather important criticisms that value-added boosters should engage.

Or they can be New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. In Kristof's first column on the research (1/12/12), he cheered the study's suggestion that good teachers boost student incomes:

Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime--or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class--all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade. That's right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year's students, just in the extra income they will earn.

There have been several interesting critiques written of this, which was written by Harvard's Raj Chetty and John Friedman and Columbia's Jonah Rockoff, but has not yet been peer-reviewed or published. At the United Federation of Teachers blog (1/8/12), Leo Casey argues that value-added research

assumes that standardized exams are accurate, reliable and robust measures of actual student learning, a necessary assumption if one is to use them as a measure of teacher performance.  It is tautological to claim that an analysis proves what it assumes, especially when that assumption is precisely what is contested in the public debate over standardized tests and value added measures.

Casey goes on to note that the singling out of future earnings--which featured so prominently in the coverage of the study--is also problematic. He cites another critic, education writer and scholar Sherman Dorn, who wrote:

If you want to generalize this claim beyond the data used for the study--associating the group effect scores with teacher quality more generally, making claims about lifetime income, or extrapolating to policy questions--you are making assumptions beyond what the data support.

These are some of the many criticisms of the study. But Kristof's follow-up column (1/22/12) skipped any serious discussion in favor of this caricature:

After I wrote about the study, skeptics of school reform wrote me to say: Sure, a great teacher can make a difference in the right setting, but not with troubled, surly kids in a high-poverty environment.

Who is arguing that poor, "surly" kids can't be reached by good teachers?

Kristof then goes on to find a living, breathing rebuttal to an argument no one is making. "Olly Neal was a poor black kid with an attitude," Kristof tells readers. His life turned around when his teacher, Mildred Grady, started buying books she thought he might enjoy and placing them in the library. That changed Neal's life--he "caught the book bug," went to college and eventually became a judge. And thus, Kristof argues:

To me, the lesson is that while there are no silver bullets to chip away at poverty or improve national competitiveness, improving the ranks of teachers is part of the answer. That’s especially true for needy kids, who often get the weakest teachers. That should be the civil rights scandal of our time.

Sure. But wait:

The implication is that we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers.

It's hard to see how anyone could jump to that conclusion. In the world of value-added research, Grady's work would be judged not by whether she created a new reader who grew up to be a judge, but on the incremental progress of a large group of students that could be seen on a standardized test. If anything, the story suggests--contrary to what Kristof and supporters of value-added research like to claim--that figuring out what makes a great teacher isn't necessarily going to be tied to test scores.

As Times education columnist Michael Winerip put it in his January 16 column:

The danger is that education policy gets driven by teaching methods that can be given a number.

I suspect that Mr. Noyes, my 11th grade Advance Placement American history teacher from 40 years ago, had a low value-added rating. As I recall, no one in our class got a top score of 5; I got a 3. There was no prepared curriculum aligned with the test: Mr. Noyes built the lessons. On any given topic, he would assign us several books that viewed history through different lenses--economics, politics, personality.

I have long ago forgotten the content of those lessons, but Mr. Noyes instilled in us something far more important: the understanding that history does not come from one book. While that idea has served me for a lifetime, I do not believe it is quantifiable.

There's an interesting piece at the Huffington Post (9/27/11) by Joy Resmovits about what some critics of the corporate-backed NBC Education Nation conference are saying. Even though some are crediting NBC for a more balanced program than last year, not everyone's ready to give the network a passing grade:

While some lauded the increased balance and depth at this year's Education Nation, retired New York City teacher and Grassroots Education Movement member Norm Scott gave [NBC News president Steve] Capus an earful on Tuesday. "People see an absence of the word 'class size' in these debates," he told Capus.

"This notion that somehow we're skewed too close to the reformers, I just don't buy it and completely disagree," Capus responded.

"How did a guy like Jonathan Alter end up as an expert on Sunday night's panel?" Scott asked. He was referring to the Bloomberg columnist and MSNBC contributor who has taken hard-line stances on charter schools and teacher evaluations.

"We had Jonathan Alter and 300 teachers," Capus countered.

Alter has long been one of the most vitriolic critics of teachers unions in the media--which would seem to be the only reason he'd be invited on a panel in the first place. (Teacher-bashing is one of the fastest paths to becoming an education pundit.)

But his presence on the stage wasn't the only area of criticism. Among the sponsors of the event, the controversial for-profit University of Phoenix:

The event took place in a tent whose central outside decoration was the logo of the for-profit University of Phoenix.

The University of Phoenix has 200 campuses and online degree programs. An ABC News investigation found that the school routinely makes promises about work eligibility that it can't deliver on, resulting in students mired in debt without the benefits of a degree.

A U.S. Senate committee investigation found that 66 percent of associates degree students and half of bachelor's degree students at the school withdrew after beginning their programs. About 22 percent of University of Phoenix students defaulted on their loans during 2008, while the school's owner, the Apollo Group, devoted 22 percent of its spending to marketing.

Capus defended University of Phoenix's sponsorship of Education Nation. "We have about seven decades worth of experience of building a dividing line between the...commercial sponsorship side and the reporting side of NBC News," Capus said. The Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and State Farm also sponsored the summit. "They don't shape the editorial content," Capus said.

Given the media's general tilt in favor of corporate "reformers," it's hard to imagine that Gates, Broad and the rest would need to intervene. Clearly they're happy to put their names on something that aligns with their views on education. (NBC's Brian Williams has acknowledged how deference to Gates was shaping his network's coverage of the summit, saying that "it's their facts that we're going to be referring to often to help along our conversation"--Answer Sheet Blog, 9/26/11.)

University of Phoenix, on the other hand, probably could use some good publicity. (Greenwashing isn't just for oil companies.)

As proof of their independence, Capus said: "The University of Phoenix has been subject to some tough news stories on NBC News."

Not many. Take this one from last year (Today, 9/29/10)--where the NBC anchor tells a company executive, "Good for you, helping young people":

ANN CURRY, anchor:

Welcome back to Learning Plaza, part of NBC's weeklong Education Nation. And most educators agree that personalized learning improves student performance. Well, joining us now is Rob Wrubel. He is the executive vice president for University of Phoenix and creators of the learning assessment test, which can be found on the Education Nation website.

And basically, the key is to find out what kind of learner we are, right, Rob? Good morning.

ROB WRUBEL (executive vice president, University of Phoenix): Yes, because each of us have different learning styles. Some of us are more visual, some of us are more auditory and we listen to things and learn. So by finding your learning style you can really optimize and personalize your learning outcomes.

CURRY: In fact, you've got a list of seven different kinds, and physical, as you say, aural, solitary, logical, social, verbal, visual. And by going to this Web site that you've created, people can take a test, and in just a few minutes they can find out what kind of learner they are.

Mr. WRUBEL: Right. You can go through this, it's 21 questions. And the kinds of questions they are ask you--just a range of questions about your activities, how you do things. Are you a good listener, do you do--do you talk with your hands. And then when we use our program we can give you a quick profile of what are your different types of learning styles.

CURRY: Mm-hmm.

WRUBEL: Sometimes you have a dominant learning style; sometimes you have a whole mix of different styles.

CURRY: But it would seem that it would be so important for, especially, parents of young people who may be, in fact, those young people may be having trouble in school, and may be showing some signs of having difficulty sitting still in class, that they go and maybe help their kids take this test, it would seem. The place you go is HowDoYouLearn.EducationNation.com?

WRUBEL: Yes, that's it.

CURRY: All right.

WRUBEL: And it is a very simple test. And for kids who are really trying to find a new way to learn, maybe they need more physical activity, it's a very successful tool to help parents find out what their learning style is.

CURRY: Good for you, helping young people...

WRUBEL: Right.

CURRY: ...this way. Congratulations, Rob Wrubel.

If you're in the New York area and you'd like to hear a conversation about education with a different point of view, come to FAIR's Miseducation Nation forum tonight at 7, at Manhattan's School of the Future.

A headline today at the Washington Post (6/3/11) reads, "A Reprieve for Higher-Ed Companies?" A more honest headline might have been, "A Reprieve for Us?"

The story discusses congressional action on a bill that would increase oversight of private, for-profit colleges, since many students take out government-subsidized student loans in order to attend such schools. Critics argue that the schools do a poor job of preparing students for the workforce.

The Post discloses its interests, though a bit late--in the 14th paragraph of a 22-paragraph story: "Half a dozen leading firms in for-profit education--including the Washington Post Co. on behalf of its Kaplan education division--and the trade group Coalition for Educational Success spent a total of $4.3 million lobbying in 2010 and at least $2 million this year."

My favorite part of the story is this:

After an intense lobbying campaign by the for-profit education industry, the regulation--which is supposed to push for-profit companies into designing programs that will lead students to good-paying jobs--was pared back from a draft proposal that was released last summer.

"I wouldn’t say people are dancing in the streets," said one lobbyist who asked for anonymity to protect relationships with clients and officials. "But it is certainly an improvement over the proposed regulation."

The Post grants anonymity to a lobbyist who could very well be working on the Post's side in this debate? That's a new one.

Is the Washington Post hoping readers only read headlines? At a glance, "Study: KIPP Charter Schools Have Extra Edge" (3/31/11) would seem to be just another in the Washington Post Co.'s toutings of charter schools in general and KIPP schools in particular (Extra!, 9/10)

Readers who actually click through though, might be surprised to learn what the "edge" consists of: A study by researchers at Western Michigan University found that the KIPP network "benefits from significant private funding and student attrition." Students receive more than $5,000 a year per pupil through private donations on top of regular sources of public funding; and the roughly 15 percent of KIPP students that leave each year are often not replaced. To the extent that these schools 'outperform' regular public schools, says the study’s author, "they're not doing it with the same students, and they're not doing it with the same dollars."

This is of course extremely relevant given that KIPP schools are often held up as a model, at least for some people's kids: "Every low-income school should be measured by how close it gets to that model, where kids go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and part of the summer," Newsweek's Jonathan Alter once explained (7/21/08), though he couldn't explain why rich kids wouldn't also benefit from a longer day than most adults spend at work.

It's interesting how, even while reporting research that should complicate the issue,  the Post still leaves undisturbed the thumbnail of the charter network as "known for lifting the achievements of poor children."  (KIPP, for its part, renounced the study, citing "flaws in the data" the paper left unspecified.)

Of course, the Post is, you might say, institutionally invested in such a portrayal. Washington Post Co. chair Donald Graham is on the board of trustees of KIPP's D.C. branch. Owners of test prep company Kaplan Inc. since 1984, the Post Co. is mostly an education company itself these days; Graham announced the rebranding in 2007, which he said reflected "the rise of Kaplan Inc. within the company and the decline of its flagship newspaper." Stories like this one encourage readers to question how interrelated those two phenomena may be.

"Teachers Wonder, Why the Heapings of Scorn?" is the headline of a front-page New York Times piece today (3/3/11). The article by Trip Gabriel reports, "Education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters."

Politicians, sure, but what's the evidence that voters--i.e., the public--have been heaping scorn on teachers? Gabriel offers nothing to substantiate this claim other than references to "online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators"--quoting blog commenters as evidence of the national mood has got to stop, guys--and the assertion that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's teacher-bashing has made him a "national star." (I can't find any national polling on Christie, which in itself calls into question how much of a national star he is, but his poll numbers in his own state are unremarkably average.)

Apparently it's hard to find evidence of this anti-teacher wave because it's already receding. In the 14th paragraph, Gabriel writes:

There are signs of a backlash in favor of teachers. A New York Times poll taken last week found that by nearly two to one--60 to 33 percent--Americans opposed restricting collective bargaining for public employees. A similar majority--including more than half of Republicans--said the salaries and benefits of most public employees were "about right" or "too low."

Is that a "backlash in favor of teachers," though, or is that the way people have felt about teachers all along?

And those polls probably understate the support for teachers, since they're more popular than "public employees" in general. When CBS asked last year (1/6-10/10) about public school teachers' salaries, fully 66 percent said they were paid "too little"--while only 4 percent said they were paid "too much." And this is a long-held public attitude; when Gallup (8/24-26/99) asked in 1999 about public teacher salaries, 56 percent thought they were too low and 7 percent too high.

The New York Times piece is not unsympathetic to teachers, but by buying into the notion that there is a wave of anti-teacher sentiment sweeping the public, it only emboldens teacher-scapegoating politicians. The next time a journalist wants to write a piece about the scorn heaped on teachers, they might take a look at a Gallup poll (11/19-21/10) that asked how people viewed the "honesty and ethical standards" of various professions. Elementary school teachers' ethics were rated "very high" or "high" by 67 percent; for newspaper reporters, it's 22 percent.

Richard Cohen recently (FAIR Blog, 2/15/11) took to the Washington Post to argue that Teach for America is wonderful because.... Well, it just is. He predicted that the "best teacher in America" is likely to be drawn from the ranks of the program, which draws recent graduates from elite universities into the teaching profession. His only evidence of the greatness of this scheme was that the program is very competitive.

On Sunday, George Will joined Cohen in praising Teach for America--more evidence, if any was needed, that TFA enjoys a great ride in the corporate media. In Will's column, was "Teach for America: Letting the Cream Rise," he explains:

Until recently--until, among other things, TFA--it seemed that we simply did not know how to teach children handicapped by poverty and its accompaniments--family disintegration and destructive community cultures. Now we know exactly what to do.

Will says TFA is "a template for transformation." And the cream is, obviously, rising:

TFA has become a flourishing reproach to departments and schools of education. It pours talent into the educational system--80 percent of its teachers are in traditional public schools--talent that flows around the barriers of the credentialing process. Hence TFA works against the homogenization that discourages innovation and prevents the cream from rising.

As Bob Somerby noted at the Daily Howler, Will offers no evidence to back up his argument. And even Teach for America doesn't make such claims; Somerby points out that the TFA website offers this lukewarm assessment:

TEACH FOR AMERICA: Research over time has conclusively shown that Teach For America corps members' impact on their students' achievement is equal to or greater than that of other new teachers.

So this program takes the best and brightest, the talented cream, and turns them into...average new teachers?

Somerby adds:

Indeed, in a new C-Span tape (click here), Malcolm Gladwell asks Kopp how well TFA teachers perform. To her credit, Kopp abandons her practice of making anecdotal miracle claims and seems to suggest that TFA teachers aren’t a whole lot better than everyone else. (This happens at 0:51. Rather typically, Gladwell shows no sign of having prepared for his session with Kopp, whom he describes as one of his heroes.) By the 1:05 mark, Kopp is back to making a miracle claim about a beginning teacher in Phoenix. But again: Will doesn’t cite any research about such miracles because it doesn't exist.

Luckily for Will and Cohen, tributes to TFA don't require any evidence. Call it faith-based punditry.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's Teach for America column today (2/15/11) demonstrates a real problem with logic. "Cut Teach for America Funding and We'll Be Closer to Flunking the Future," declares the headline, with Cohen kicking things off this way:

The best teacher in America was in Washington over the weekend. So was the best principal. I cannot name these individuals because they are early in their careers, and the truth of the matter is that I am just playing the odds. They are members of Teach for America, a kind of Peace Corps for the school room--a program so select that most applicants had an easier time being admitted to their college than they did getting into Teach for America. No matter. Its funding is being cut.

Cohen goes on to explain that the program's funding likely won't be cut. But the bigger problem is the assumption that Teach for America teachers are the best--he's just "playing the odds" here, predicting that the best educators of the future will be drawn from the ranks of this "Peace Corps for the school room." His evidence for this could charitably be called "thin." Teach for America, he writes,

is supposed to produce smart students. It also produces incredible statistics. This year it got 48,000 applicants and accepted 5,300 of them. About 18 percent of the Harvard senior class applied; so did 27 percent of Spelman's, a traditionally black women's school.

Note that these statistics don't say anything at all about whether Teach for America actually produces "smart students."  But that's all that Cohen comes up with.

What are the real odds that Teach for America teachers will be the best, or even good? I have no idea. Barbara Miner's profile of Teach for America in the Spring 2010 issue of Rethinking Schools points out that one of the chief criticisms of the program is that many who go through the two-year program don't stick around the classroom. But are they better teachers? One study found "no instance where uncerti­fied Teach for America teachers per­formed as well as standard certified teachers of comparable experience levels teaching in similar settings." Yes, the program attracts a lot of applicants. But it also seems designed to promote career paths outside the classroom:

TFA, meanwhile, actively promotes the value of joining its teaching corps, especially for those thinking of gradu­ate school or immediately transition­ing to a corporate job. Its website boasts of TFA's partnership with over 150 graduate schools offering TFA alumni benefits such as two-year de­ferrals, fellowships, course credits and waived application fees. The most popular schools for TFA alumni are Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Northwest­ern and the University of California-Berkeley--with Harvard the overall top choice. Its employer partners, which ac­tively recruit TFA alumni, are equal­ly prestigious and include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, KPMG, Credit Suisse, McKinsey & Company and Google.

Cohen's column is yet more example of corporate media's fondndess for Teach for America. "If the maniacal budget cutters have their way, the best teacher in America will become another investment banker," he writes.  But Cohen provides no evidence that Teach for America produces such teachers--and apparently doesn't think he needs to.

On Sunday (2/13/11), the Washington Post had an odd piece about Obama's budget proposal--starting with the odd headline, "Obama to Propose Spending Cuts in Budget Plan Aimed at Countering Conservatives." Republicans have been stressing spending cuts, so Obama is "countering" that with... spending cuts? Huh.

The piece tries to argue that these calls for austerity are merely the political system reacting to the will of the voters, particularly self-described independents:

Obama is sending a similar message, but to a different constituency: the independent voters who abandoned Democrats in droves last year and who are crucial to the president's 2012 reelection prospects. This bloc shares the tea party's alarm over the $14 trillion national debt but takes a more nuanced view of how to achieve fiscal balance.

As Dean Baker points out, the idea that voters in 2010--independents or otherwise--were sounding an alarm about the debt isn't supported by the evidence (though it's long been touted in the corporate media as the leading message of the midterms). But the point of some of the articles about the Obama budget is that it doesn't go far enough. Today's Post (2/14/11), for instance, has an article headlined "Obama Spending Plan Criticized for Avoiding Deficit Commission's Major Proposals"--a pretty clear sign that the budget critics worth listening to are the ones who want deeper spending cuts.

Unrelated to budgeting, the Sunday Post piece describes Republican ideas on education spending cuts that would

wipe out two decades of education initiatives by pulling nearly $5 billion from the Education Department, including funds for math and science and the popular Teach for America program, which puts well-trained teachers in needy schools.

The point of Teach for America is actually more like the opposite--sending novice teachers to go into "needy" districts for two-year stints in the classroom, it operates under the premise that children are well-served by educators who are not "well-trained."

The L.A. Times'  controversial investigation last year that rated Los Angeles schoolteachers' effectiveness based on a value-added research method has faced a storm of criticism. (See Wayne Au's recent Rethinking Schools piece.)

Now the National Education Policy Center has weighed in, finding that the research "was demonstrably inadequate to support the published rankings."

The NEPC was covered in the Washington Post and, wouldn't you know it, the Los Angeles Times.

Below are the headlines. Go ahead and guess which one is which.

Researchers Fault L.A. Times Methods in Analysis of California Teachers

Separate Study Confirms Many Los Angeles Times Findings on Teacher Effectiveness

New York City school chancellor Joel Klein is stepping down to take a job with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, and will be replaced with Cathleen Black, chair of Hearst Magazines. Though Black has no experience with education and Klein had none going in, I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense that the current pro-testing, anti-teacher educational fads be administered by executives connected to corporate media, where such nostrums are wildly popular. The irony, though, is that if you had to pick one institution that is a bigger failure at educating the public than the school system, you'd have to pick the industry that Black comes from and Klein is going home to.

Alan Suderman at Washington City Paper (10/28/10) caught NBC host David Gregory moderating an education event at a Washington hotel, where the Meet the Press host lavished praise on controversial former D.C. schools chancellor (and media darling) Michelle Rhee:

Before we begin, we have Chancellor Michelle Rhee here, and I just want to say publicly what I say privately, which is, thank you for what you've done, thank you for your commitment, for your leadership, for your stick-to-it-ness and for the result that you have achieved. Washington, D.C., will miss you greatly.... But your commitment to kids and to education endures, and there will be a great many people lining up to support you and your efforts.

As Suderman notes, "It's hard to imagine he would dare say something like that publicly about any other polarizing national figure."

An audience member posed some critical questions to Gregory about his show, chastising the host for asking too many softball questions and ignoring important issues like military spending. Gregory was having none of it:

"Sir, sir, you know what, with all due respect, I don't know which program you're watching because every week--I'm not going to get in a debate with you--I ask about taxes, I ask about how you pay for taxes," Gregory said, later adding: "And by the way sir, I've also dedicated the program to talking about education and about reform as well."

At this point, the man tried to interject, but Gregory wouldn't have it: "No, sir, I get the last word here, you asked the question.... Just because people don't listen or don’t take action behind it is not something I can directly control."

As for Gregory's commitment to doing shows about education "reform," here's a taste of how that actually works (Extra!, 9/10):

On November 15, 2009, NBC's Meet the Press assembled a panel featuring Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Republican leader Newt Gingrich and community activist Al Sharpton--all of whom are more or less on the same side of corporate-friendly school "reform." An opposing view could be found in a taped soundbite from the American Federation of Teachers' Weingarten--which was then countered with a soundbite from Rhee. All of which served as a setup for NBC host David Gregory to pose this question to Duncan: "Why should anybody believe that a Democratic president, who relies on interests like the unions who are out there organizing and who vote, why should somebody believe that he's really going to take them on, that you are really going to take them on to force accountability?"

Readers of  Saturday's New York Times may have noticed this this piece (10/16/10):

Despite Image, Union Leader Backs School Change
By TRIP GABRIEL

In "Waiting for Superman," the new education documentary, the union leader Randi Weingarten is portrayed, in the words of Variety, as "a foaming satanic beast."

At a two-day education summit hosted by NBC News recently, the lopsided panels often featured Ms. Weingarten on one side, facing a murderer's row of charter school founders and urban superintendents. Even Tom Brokaw piled on.

The article actually does a pretty good of explaining how Weingarten and others in the union movement have, contrary to the message of Davis Guggenheim's hit documentary, pushed for real reform efforts across the country. The article even points out that one union-backed charter school in New York was left out of the film:

Yet one scene that the director filmed, but left on the cutting-room floor, showed Ms. Weingarten signing a contract on behalf of teachers at Green Dot, which has had impressive results since it opened in 2008.

Steve Barr, who founded the Green Dot charter school network, lamented that the film ignored examples of charters and unions working together. "It doesn’t help to take the one true open-minded union leader and bash her," he said.

All in all, it's a pretty helpful article for understanding some of the nuances of the "reform" debate. But a better headline (though a totally unlikely one) would have been "Despite Message of Biased Media Coverage, Union Leader Backs School Change." The truth is that it's fairly routine for the press to bash teachers unions, as FAIR documented in this article.

"Even Tom Brokaw piled on" makes you think there's something surprising about a major media figure bashing a teachers' union. In reality, it's pretty common.

The media accolades that have greeted the new documentary Waiting for Superman confirm what FAIR documented in the September issue of Extra!--that the corporate media debate over education "reform" is heavily tilted in the direction of those who bash teachers' unions, cheer the White House's Race to the Top grants and charter schools, and lionize "reformers" like D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee.

Dana Goldstein's review of the film in the Nation (9/23/10) is worth reading. As she puts it right at the beginning:

Here's what you see in Waiting for Superman, the new documentary that celebrates the charter school movement while blaming teachers unions for much of what ails American education: working- and middle-class parents desperate to get their charming, healthy, well-behaved children into successful public charter schools.

Here's what you don't see: the four out of five charters that are no better, on average, than traditional neighborhood public schools (and are sometimes much worse); charter school teachers, like those at the Green Dot schools in Los Angeles, who are unionized and like it that way; and noncharter neighborhood public schools, like PS 83 in East Harlem and the George Hall Elementary School in Mobile, Alabama, that are nationally recognized for successfully educating poor children.

More organizing around the film is taking place at NotWaitingforSuperman.org, a project of Rethinking Schools.

Brian Williams introduced a report on NBC Nightly News (4/21/10) with this declaration: "Public schools from coast to coast in this country are looking at tens of thousands of layoffs, a lot of them teachers, because the money is not there." Correspondent Ron Allen went on to report:

In Springfield, Illinois, thousands of teachers turned out to try to save their jobs and programs; music, art and sports activities all being threatened with elimination. Many school districts are hoping for federal stimulus help, but in the meantime are locked into longer teacher contracts and higher salaries for tenured teachers. Some experts predict that American education must adjust to a new reality.

This was followed by a quote from Michael Petrilli (who is identified as representing the Thomas Fordham Institute, which is not identified as a conservative education group): "Not only do our schools have to go on a diet, they need to adapt to a whole new way of life because I--this money is gone, and it's not coming back anytime soon."

Concludes Allen: "A crucial test now facing the nation, how to educate more than 50 million public school students with less."

"Less"--that's the key message here, that teachers, parents and children need to accept that "the money is not there" and "adapt to a whole new way of life"--one in which teachers get paid less and children get less education. Only, if the "money is gone," where did it go?

Here are some facts from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis: Between 1971, when I was entering my school-age years, and 2009, the U.S. per capita GDP doubled, from roughly $21,000 to $42,000 a year (in constant dollars).  Since 1984, a couple of years after I graduated from high school, it's risen by 50 percent--from about $28,000.  Just since 1996, the nation's income per person has increased by something like 20 percent.

Assuming that educating our children is at least as important as our other national priorities, we ought to be able to fund education twice as well as we did 40 years ago, and half again as well as we did 25 years ago.  Why is it, instead, that NBC is telling us that schools are going to have to get by with less? Because while the country as a whole has a lot more money, most of it has gone to making the rich richer--and they have no intention of getting by with less.

Newsweek devotes several pieces this week to public schools. But the lead piece, "Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers," by Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert, lays out the magazine's skewed vision: Teacher unions protect the worst performers, while charter schools offer an easy solution. ("In the past two decades, some schools have sprung up that defy and refute what former president George W. Bush memorably called 'the soft bigotry of low expectations.'") Newsweek even finds the silver lining in Hurricane Katrina:

It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: Since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out. Using nonunion charter schools, New Orleans has been able to measure teacher performance in ways that the teachers' unions have long and bitterly resisted.

The decision of a Rhode Island superintendent to fire every teacher at one low-performing high school is called a "notable breakthrough."

Many of these ideas are the subject of intense debate--research on charter schools has generally not shown substantial improvement over conventional public schooling, for example. Experts and advocates disagree with the notion that New Orleans is a success story. But Newsweek presents little debate--sticking with the right-leaning narrative version of "school reform" that is primarily about bashing teachers.

An accompanying article pitting teachers union president Randi Weingarten and anti-union D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is presented on Newsweek's home page under the headline "The Union Boss vs. the School Reformer." It's not hard to imagine which option is supposed to be more attractive (unless you're the pro-boss, anti-reform type).

Back to the Thomas article, though, with its subhead: "In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability." This is particularly ironic to see under Evan Thomas' byline. One only needs to recall his contribution to the pre-Iraq War propaganda effort summarized below, and wonder what sort of accountability exists at Newsweek.

March 17, 2003
—Newsweek's cover story is entitled "Saddam's War," and the cover features a close-up of Hussein's face on fire. At the top of the story, Newsweek reports from the scene of a Baghdad military parade, describing as jarring the sight of Iraqi fedayeen fighters "garbed in the familiar tan camouflage of the United States Army. Saddam has ordered thousands of uniforms identical, down to the last detail, to those worn by U.S. and British troopers. The plan: to have Saddam's men, posing as Western invaders, slaughter Iraqi citizens while the cameras roll for Al-Jazeera and the credulous Arab press." The article closes with this call for war:

"One Arab intelligence officer interviewed by Newsweek spoke of 'the green mushroom' over Baghdad—the modern-day caliph bidding a grotesque bio-chem farewell to the land of the living alongside thousands of his subjects as well as his enemies. Saddam wants to be remembered. He has the means and the demonic imagination. It is up to U.S. armed forces to stop him before he can achieve notoriety for all time."