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Media has a duty to scrutinize education
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Out in the Katy Independent School District, west of Houston, one education watchdog has raised a question which might at first seem fairly trivial, but when examined in depth goes a long way toward explaining why public schools so rarely face close public scrutiny.
George Scott, who at one time ran the Katy Sun newspaper and is now an independent writer and activist, questioned a statement by a member of the Katy school board that only the board president can speak to the news media on issues concerning the school district.
Scott, writing at GeorgeScottReports.com, cites a report by John Pape of InstantNewsKaty that when he wrote individual e-mails to board members seeking comment on a news story concerning a vendor’s dealings with the district, he received only one response, from board member Chris Crockett, that “According to our board procedures, only the board president, Mr. (Eric) Duhon, can speak about matters of board business.”
The idea, of course, is that the school board will present a united front. The problem is, school board members are elected representatives of the public – and there is no adopted Katy ISD board policy, which is posted at the district’s web site, which limits board members’ ability to speak to the news media. No one can force them to talk to the news media, for sure – but very definitely no one can prevent them from doing so, either.
To view the issue from a slightly different perspective, it would be like Nancy Pelosi telling the Washington media that she is the only member of the House of Representatives authorized to deal with the press.
Scott attacks the area’s print media – the Houston Chronicle, the Katy Times and his own former paper – for not having the gumption to follow up on the issue, and the general “softball” coverage given to public education: “Don’t ask wishy-washy questions,” Scott writes. “Don’t leave loopholes for trucks to drive through. This is Journalism 101.”
Therein lies the real crux of the issue. Coverage of public education in general, and especially coverage of the governing of public education, lacks the teeth the news media often applies to any other government entity. Where city, county or state government meetings and records might be scrutinized with a fine tooth-comb, news organizations rarely, if ever, question those involved in the governing of public schools.
Yet, especially in Texas, what happens at your school board meeting often has more direct impact on you and your family than any other element of government. School property taxes are nearly three times higher than city or county taxes in Texas, especially in high-growth districts such as Katy or neighboring Cypress-Fairbanks. What is taught to children – or not taught, as the case may be – in grades K-12 very often determines whether those children ever become productive citizens as adults.
Outside of incidents such as violent episodes in schools, the news media is reluctant to dig into public education for two primary reasons: one, it can be dreadfully dry and difficult-to-explain subject matter; and two, public education officials want to make sure it remains impossible for the public to understand, in order to protect their own bureaucracy.
Modern public education has a language all its own, honed by more than two decades of refinement on college campuses and manipulation of curriculum by product marketers rather than subject experts. The result is that policies, procedures and even curriculum guides are designed to make anyone outside education examining them feel inadequate to the task – even though most of those policies, procedures and curriculum guides were written by professional educators who were themselves “C” students in high school and college.
As well, today’s modern approach to news reporting has been hampered by the eight-second rule: if you can’t get someone’s attention in eight seconds, you’ll lose them. All too many Americans are unwilling or unable to attempt to weed through the lengthy prose often required to properly examine education issues.
The educational bureaucracy has also learned to duck accountability by minimizing critique. School administrators are specially trained on “consensus-building” techniques designed to isolate objections to policies school districts wish to pursue – this writer, in fact, identified and reported in 1998 that the Texas Education Agency had used a consensus-building technique to limit objections during “public meetings” it held prior to the adoption of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), for example.
Getting information out of a school system, even for the news media, can often be next to impossible. Schools and school districts often use privacy laws as a cloak to limit access, while obtaining copies of things like financial records or curriculum materials is often slowed to a crawl because “we don’t have enough people to get that for you right away.”
There are a lot of good things going on in modern public education, and we in the news media have the duty to report about them. But we also have the duty to question our public education officials to ensure that the taxpayers they are supposed to serve are not being fleeced.
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