I can't resist joining Kevin Carey at The Quick and the Ed and Alexander Russo at This Week in Education in their critique of how education news stories are written.  My pet peeve is different than theirs, however.  What bugs me is the education journalist who frames her story in this fashion: "I visited a classroom for one period of one day and saw this thing happening, therefore my observations are emblematic of what is wrong with public education today."

Witness this story in today's Washington Post, in which Amit R. Paley compares two ninth grade classrooms in Prince George's county, a suburb of Washington, D.C.  In a classroom in the more affluent part of the county,  the teacher is doing a compare and contrast assignment using Animal Farm and the poetry of Langston Hughes.  At a different high school, in a classroom with "more poor and black students," the teacher is doing a writing assignment on the student's immediate goals.  Paley uses the comparison between the two classrooms to illustrate that instruction for some students is "dumbed down."

Is it possible that the level of instruction at one high school is higher than at another in the same county?  Of course.  In fact, if Paley didn't even need to drive to another school--he could have just walked down the hall and found different levels of instruction within the same high school.  But is it fair to make a judgment about a teacher and her teaching practice based on what is observed during one class on a random day selected by the journalist?  I would argue it is not.

Who is to say that the teacher Paley observed focusing on the students' goals hadn't also taught a lesson on Animal Farm or Langston Hughes' poems earlier that month? County Superintendent John Deasey is quoted later in the article as saying that the county has adopted a standardized curriculum, but that doesn't mean that ninth grade teachers in different classrooms (in different high schools) have to be doing the same lesson on the same day--or at least I hope it doesn't.  And, getting the teacher to admit, as Paley does, that she sometimes modifies instruction for her students based on their academic background does not convince me that she has lowered her expectations for her students, which seems to be what he is implying.

While I think that journalists should get out to actual schools and try to translate what they see for their readers, I also think they should be more cautious in drawing conclusions based on their limited experiences in the classroom. The whole, "I went to school myself so I know what should happen in a classroom" attitude really gets on my nerves.  So, that's my contribution to the edublogosphere discussion of "what's wrong with education journalism."