Sorry to?interrupt?Mike's slow Friday contest, but ?I need to tell?a couple of quick?stories about the power of the press (The PoP!) ? as sequel, if you will, to my earlier communications gap post.? High-minded?reflections?on a slow Friday ? captions welcomed on this too.
First story:??A couple of years ago I wrote a long essay for a local magazine about our local school district ? the good, the bad, the ugly, and the dropout rates?? and in church the following Sunday was tapped on the shoulder by a woman who worked in one of the schools. ?Thank you, so much,? she said, ?for writing that story.?? My mind was racing. Did she like the part where I took out after the district for?not having a curriculum or the section about? the antagonism?of administrators to?reform and improvement?
?The windows,? she said.? ?They were cleaned the day after that story came out.?? Uh?? I had forgotten about my noting that?windows on a school building had not been cleaned for years, if not decades.?The?PoP!?Windows cleaned!?? Take that, accountability movement.
Story two is more serious:? On another occasion, at a school board meeting, a perceptive taxpayer who had done his research, stood up and asked why our school district, which spent just as much per student as the neighboring districts, did so poorly on the state tests.? There was the classic group deer-caught-in-the-headlights look by the board until finally someone said, ?Joe can answer that.?
Joe was the Curriculum Director and, indeed, was just the guy to answer that. And so Joe stood and said, ?It's because of the minorities.?? Or something to that effect.
Well, if a tree falls in the forest?.? It was actually ?common knowledge? in our little district, 26 percent of which was African-American and 40 percent of which scored below proficient on most tests, that blacks brought us down. Right. ?But it was never a belief tested in public.? No one said it except at cocktail parties, the deli, or?in faculty lounges.??But the night that?Joe said it?in public?just so happened to be the night that the local newspaper had a reporter?present who was a former teacher and knew her stuff ? and knew that what Joe had said was NUTS!? And she convinced her editor to put,?next day, on the front page ??above the fold!
All hell broke loose.? Phone lines lit up.? Public protests were organized.?The Black Leaders Coalition, which most?people didn't know even existed, issued a statement. ?It didn't help calm things when the president of the board of ed issued an apology, which also ran on the front page, ?saying that Joe didn't really mean ?minorities,? he meant ?ethnics.?? Certain ethnic groups, said the Board President, just don't believe in education.? Words to that effect.
More hell broke loose. ?Public meetings ensued. And at one, a white principal actually stood up and admitted, ?We have lots of racism in our district.?
These were two galvanizing PoP! moments, very different in the significance of their outcomes, of course, but both? telling in their demonstration of the wisdom of the Founders, who made a free press part of the national DNA. ?Clean windows was a PoP! victory.? Unfortunately, racism is not so easily purged. The intrepid reporter who put Joe on the front page was soon replaced and the daring principal was forced ? by his union ? to deliver a defense-of-the-district speech at an official Board of Ed public meeting.? Bring out the stocks!
Okay, it ain't the Pentagon Papers, but it is a reminder of why education needs an informed public*?as well as?a free and unfettered press to do the informing.? (As if the Gadfly didn't know this.)
?Peter Meyer
*?I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.? ?Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820.? ?This is a fascinating statement, in part because it is not really an argument for a free press, but, as E.D. Hirsch will tell you over and over, an argument for education.
