Iam amazed that educational leaders don't all look like an anorexic Ally McBeal on a really thin day. That is because they are dined on regularly by the public as they are served up in the press. In this one corner of our society, cannibalism not only is accepted, it is encouraged through public feasting.
Now don't misunderstand. I believe in a free press and I believe in the public's right to know how its tax-supported institutions are run. School leaders must cooperate with the press. The public does have a right to know. However, that has its limits and those are when the knowing becomes gnawing.
Most of us are familiar with "board watchers." These folks turn up at every school board meeting hoping a good fight breaks out. I always wondered if they were good citizens, incipient sadists or just folks who couldn't afford cable television and needed to find their entertainment elsewhere. I just knew I was there because I had to be—not because I thought it was the best show in town.
Of course, the other group required to be in attendance besides the school board and staff was the news media. Sometimes I wonder if the bad press received by public schools comes about because the reporter seeks revenge for having to sit through meetings that rarely rise above the level of intense tedium.
I do believe school systems would be better served if the press were to handle their awesome responsibility a bit more responsibly. I am not talking here about the occasional misquote or twisted story. Generally reporters are well intentioned and are not out to zing us. The problem stems from the decisions of what editors and news directors define as news and whether the public's best interest is served by those decisions.
Overblown Coverage
There are several areas of coverage that I think have hurt schools and haven't really served the public's needs. The first is the coverage of violence. Clearly, when an act of violence occurs in a school, it is news. Yet often these incidents are covered well out of proportion to the actual number of incidents or the school gets tied to something that is bigger than the school. I remember stories about murder victims who were found near school X. The murder had no connection to the school beyond the geography of the victim's demise. Or the murderer who, when caught as a 40-year-old, is shown to have attended school Y. Why isn't the church or synagogue they attended or the clubs they belonged to seen as equally relevant to the present circumstances?
Of course, the school shootings of the past several years have become a cottage industry. Too rarely are these events tied to the bigger picture. There have been shootings in the workplace, restaurants, day care centers and churches. They all deserve examination so they won't happen again. Looking at only a part of the picture will not yield a clear solution.
While the initial story is newsworthy, many follow-up stories are not. When is enough enough? Also, a little context would be good. It is awful that children are shot in school. Each year 20 or 30 students are killed in school. Each year we lose several thousand young people to shootings at home or in public places. Where are they safest? Focusing on the exception yields exceptionally poor analysis of the real problems.
For similar reasons, the media's incomplete reporting of test scores through the ranking of schools without the information on the differences in social capital available to kids distorts the picture. This has driven a lot of state and national policy and has led to poor decisions being made about how best to solve school problems. That is like rank ordering hospitals based on a report of the number of cancer cases in each as a way of creating a cure. More needs to be told and understood.
Lately we have seen a proliferation of stories on home-schooling that were driven by the home-schooled kids winning the national spelling bee. Trying to draw systemic comparisons based on individual accomplishments is even more naive than thinking that a kid who can spell naivete is well educated. It is important to remember two things: The sum is always greater than a single part, and they invented the spell-checking function for personal computers so we wouldn't have to memorize lists of rarely used words.
Message Management
Finally, let's think about what the open public meeting law has done to board/superintendent relations. How can you have an open, honest discussion of differences in public? It is the rare board that can pull that off. More likely what one sees in public is preening and posturing. An honest discussion of differences that can be made in private becomes a platform for bad behavior in public. I am not suggesting everything belongs in private. But school board self-examinations and retreats on working together deserve the respect that privacy offers.
Not to let you think I am letting school leaders off the hook here, let me end by pointing out that most of what I have been ranting about thus far is not likely to change in our lifetime. So the answer falls squarely on the backs of school leaders to become more adept at dealing with the public and its right to know. We must develop better skills at shaping our stories and getting them out. We must find alternate ways of getting information to the public. And we must take responsibility for being the message managers of our districts. That will require a new set of skills and attitudes. But anything short of that will mean that you are going to be someone's super-sized meal as they chew on your foibles and failures.
Paul Houston is AASA executive director. E-mail: phouston@aasa.org