Gregory Michie doesn't think much of the way the media cover education.  Over at Rethinking Schools, Michie, who teaches at Illinois State University, rips into education reporting in Chicago.  (H/T Pen Weekly Newsblast.)

He takes on the Chicago Tribune for missing the big picture and blaming a parent for her child's problems: 

"When the ground-level reality in Chicago was that schools had a thousand available spots for 270,000 eligible transferees, wasn't that the big story?"

He calls out Oprah for not asking the right questions about the differences between two Chicago area schools: 

"Several of the most significant causes of such disparities — state funding formulas that perpetuate abominable monetary gaps between rich and poor districts, persistent residential segregation, and the near-total abandonment of public schools by white and middle-class city dwellers — went unmentioned."

He chides Chicago magazine for its best schools list:

"...in only five of the 30 "best" schools do even a majority of the students qualify as low-income. And in only one does the percentage (79 percent) come close to the system average of 86 percent. What's more, in nine of the 30 schools, the percentage of students from low-income families is less than 20 percent. Talk about apartheid education."

I can't agree with everything Michie writes -- Did the Tribune reporter really miss the mark by pointing out that a parent let her kids stay up past midnight on school nights? But this is a thought-provoking piece.