By Michael Miner
Lenz, whose magazine provides, by virtually everyone’s account, the most savvy coverage of the public schools, was more subdued. “In its test score press release,” she wrote, “the Reform Board credited programs and people. However, there was a glaring omission: Student retention, which inflates scores.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Surely there’s enough perspicacity at the daily papers for them to have produced this caveat on their own. The Sun-Times’s Rosalind Rossi, for one, gets the math. She’s written warily of test scores in the past, and last August, in a long two-part report on the retention debate, she quoted a Georgia educator who called retention “a test score shell game.” But Rossi wasn’t available to write up the school board’s jubilant announcement, and the reporters who got the assignment kept their story short and simple.
Standardized testing is a crude tool–along the lines of the hammer that makes every problem look like a nail. The board puts grade schools on probation on the basis of a single number: the percentage of each school’s students falling short of the national average in the reading comprehension portion of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Probation means embarrassment, intervention, even the possible ouster of the principal and local school council. And a school is put on it if 85 percent of its students get a below-average Iowa grade in reading.
“The worst coverage that we got on that particular story was from the Trib,” Anthony Bryk, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for School Improvement and of the consortium, told me by E-mail. “As for the Sun-Times, unfortunately Roz Rossi was out of Chicago….She has, however, paid attention to the reporting recommendations and subsequently did a FOI request from the Board so that she could approximate a value-added analysis on the progress of the Charter Schools.” Her two-part study of charter schools ran last month.
What about Catalyst? I asked him. “They’re the closest to something I can like,” Schmidt answered. “And they’re evolving to be something critical. When they did an analysis of the reading scores, that’s the essence of one of the two biggest scams going on in terms of numbers.”
Last week I reported that the Sun-Times refused to put up a penny to help underwrite the national convention of the Asian American Journalists Association in Chicago. And there was no Sun-Times booth. Asked to explain by Voices, the convention newspaper, Nigel Wade reportedly replied, “Personally, I don’t believe in job booths. I think journalists should have the initiative to come and see us. My name is in the phone book. If they want a job they can call me up.” He went on to say, “Besides, we rarely have vacancies.”
