Education Matters US

And they really gave Easton and Tuttle heartburn by saying that public school officials were their primary source of information on vouchers and tuition tax credits, “despite that industry’s open hostility to these innovations,” the report said.

The study’s audit of 403 newspaper articles was even more interesting. The report said “65 percent of published articles related to topics of foremost interest to the public school industry, namely, public school funding, public school staffing, and public school wage and benefit proposals.” They divided the rest of the articles this way: 22 percent on student achievement and state learning standards, 7 percent on the federal No Child Left Behind Act, 3 percent on assorted matters such as school boundary issues, and just 3 percent on what Easton and Tuttle would like to see, articles on “public education reforms and innovations such as charter schools, home schooling, vouchers, and tuition tax credits.”

They counted the sources in all those stories and found 95 percent — 1,364 citations — were from “government/public school-affiliated sources” and only 5 percent, or 74 citations, were not tied to government or public schools. In 261 stories on school funding, the report said, individual taxpayers were quoted only six times and taxpayer advocacy groups were never quoted.

What galled me most about the report’s results was the almost total lack of stories from inside classrooms, which is where I think education reporters should try to be as often as possible. That is where readers are most likely to learn what is working, what is not, and what is happening to their children. And that is where The Post, with 14 education reporters and a lot of space, does a better job.

But the institute’s report chose to emphasize instead the overreliance on official school sources, the failure to say much about innovations that favor parental choice and the almost complete absence of taxpayers’ opinions.

These complaints tend to overlook some of the report’s own data, and lose sight of reporters’ obligation to cover the world as it is, not as would-be reformers would like it to be. For instance, after suggesting that the reporters did not care about taxpayers, the report noted that they covered school funding issues three times as often as they covered academic innovations, which seems to me a sign of deep interest in keeping taxpayers up to date on what is happening to their money.

It may be true that reporters should be writing more about parental choice innovations, but it would also be irresponsible for us to pursue Easton’s and Tuttle’s agenda for them.

“To tax payers,” she said, “the local budget process seems deliberately designed to put them at a disadvantage:

“The tax spending group generally develops, debates, and reaches agreement among its various constituencies on a proposed budget (including additional staff and staff pay raises), then submits it to the tax collecting group. (They may have no idea what resources are actually available, but that isn’t the school board’s problem.) By this time, several news articles have been written reflecting the tax spending group’s perspective justifying their needs and expectations.

“If there are insufficient resources to fund all city/county service requests, the tax collecting group must either say ‘no’ to a now-united tax spending group or demand more funds from the tax payer group. More articles are written to chronicle the tax collecting group’s deliberations, usually with quotes from the tax spending constituents sprinkled in.

“If the tax collectors choose to raise taxes, tax payers finally learn what the school budget, developed months earlier, means to them. By this time, tax payers also face a united lobby of both tax collectors and tax spenders ready to portray tax payers as the grinches who stole Christmas if they object.”

She has something there. More outside voices, reported sooner in the process, would help.