In a nutshell: cheating is rampant, national test scores are abysmal, school policy is set in Washington, and teacher tenure is on its last legs. That’s the image implied by the 250-odd education stories published by leading news organizations last year, according to an analysis my team and I did for Education Next. Let us take a closer look.

As declared by the press, 2011 was “the year of the cheating scandal.” (See Greg Toppo’s year-end story in USA Today, “Schools flunked inquiries into suspicious scores in 2011,” or Dorie Turner’s AP roundup, “2011 marred by test cheating scandals across U.S.”) And sure enough, the media covered the story extensively, with 18 articles published by the national outlets (see Figure 1).

And how could they resist? Cheating on standardized tests is one of those perfect issues for the press. Not only does it involve immoral behavior and attempted cover-ups on behalf of the perpetrators, it also raises questions about public policies supported by the high and mighty—test-based accountability and teacher evaluation systems in particular. Are the cheating teachers the villains, or the victims? What a great meme!

What’s not clear, however, is whether cheating on standardized tests increased this year, or was it simply discovered by a few enterprising reporters? (Toppo and his colleagues were the first on the case, with a long article about testing irregularities in Ohio and elsewhere in March. Reporters nationwide soon followed suit.) Did the press break the story, or create the story?

If cheating represented fresh meat for the press in 2011, lousy NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores played the role of “oldie but goodie.” The major papers published 16 stories on NAEP exams last year, covering subjects that included reading, math, science, history, and geography, plus special results for two dozen urban districts.

And the headlines were almost uniformly negative. “National science test scores disappoint.” “Students stumble again on the basics of history.” “Geography report card finds students lagging.” Only deep in the stories would readers learn that the country has made a great deal of progress in several of these subjects, at least for some students and in some grades. (For instance, in 2010, African American 4th graders scored two grade levels better in U.S. history than they did in 1994.)

Another proclivity of the national press is to obsess about federal policy. Once could argue that, thanks to George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top, Uncle Sam is driving education reform; the media are simply following along for the ride. Still, education remains a state responsibility and a local activity, but you wouldn’t know that from following the major outlets, perhaps because they are located in Washington and New York City. Consider the treatment of the Obama administration’s plan to waive portions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, aka NCLB). The administration got three bites at the media apple, with widespread coverage in June (when Secretary Arne Duncan first floated the idea), August (when more details came out), and September (when the president made the formal announcement). The national reporters turned in 19 waiver stories altogether.

The press also covered every twist and turn of the (stalled) reauthorization of ESEA. This is reasonable enough; following deliberations on Capitol Hill is a core component of the job of national reporters. But the 14 stories on the topic created the false impression that Washington is the center of legislative activity on education.

When the national press corps did turn its attention to state-level policy, it was mostly around teacher issues. The clashes in Madison, Wisconsin, and Columbus, Ohio, between Republican governors and teachers unions received a good deal of coverage, as did the broader issues of collective bargaining and tenure reform (for 19 articles in all). As former secretary of education Rod Paige once explained to me, the news media are in the “conflict business.” And there was conflict aplenty on the teacher-effectiveness front.

But what about another highly contentious subject: school vouchers? The Wall Street Journal editorial page decreed 2011 “the year of school choice” (sorry “cheating” fans), yet the issue remained almost invisible in the national press (including on the news side of the Journal itself). The only account we could spot was an August AP story, “School voucher bills flood GOP-led statehouses.” These developments weren’t worth noting in the Times or the Washington Post?

The press has long been accused of traveling in a pack. Maybe this year the hordes will discover private-school choice.

Now then. In our little world, it’s well known that Alyson Klein and Michele McNeil’s “Politics K-12″ blog is heavily read. But how about after that? How much interest is there in school districts relative to special education, school sports, or school law?

Anyway, with the assistance of my uber-competent and indefatigable R.A. Daniel Lautzenheiser, I thought it’d be interesting to take a look. So, for the first four months of 2011, we tallied the average monthly page visits to each of the Ed Week subject matter blogs.

Here are the results (note: We couldn’t do “Rural Education” due to a web glitch):

The most popular subjects, by far, are politics and curriculum, each average more than 30,000 page visitors a month so far this year.

Those were followed, at a discreet distance, by the blogs that tackle teachers, research, and special education. These all averaged 15,000 to a little over 20,000 visitors a month.

Averaging 8,000 to 15,000 monthly visitors were the blogs addressing the states, school law, digital education, college, and language learning.

And, finally, drawing less than 8,000 visitors a month, were the blogs tackling district affairs, sports, early childhood, and “Beyond Schools.”

It is noteworthy that four of the top five blogs address questions of direct relevance to classroom teachers, while less than half of the others do. Topics that I might think would be big draws for parents and non-educators, like “School Sports,” “Early Years,” or “College Bound,” don’t generate as many visitors as I might’ve expected. (Which is probably why it’s best for all concerned that I’m not in publishing.)

Not sure what else to make of the results, or whether there’s any seismic meaning, but what the hell. Would be curious to hear what you make of it all.

-Frederick Hess

First, previous explorations into this topic point to an issue that Yettick neglects: In a 2003 survey by the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, a large majority of journalists covering education declared most education research to be “so poorly written or jargon-laden” as to be incomprehensible. I think this is too broad a declaration (have you seen Andrew Ho explain growth models?), but you’d be hard-pressed to find folks to argue that the clarity of academic writing or presentation has dramatically improved over the past eight years.

Second, there are many times different conceptions of quality, goals, and intended audiences for work from these different institutions and authors. As an organization that attempts to draw on strengths from research, policy analysis, and journalism, Education Sector struggles with the tensions that each field brings to the work. For example, Yettick mentions the advantages of the peer review process. But, while in our internal standards, intellectual and methodological rigor top the list, we also include others that can conflict with the peer review process itself: timely, solution-oriented, and clearly communicated.

Third, the three media sources she surveys are all national media. Much academic work, particularly in education and public universities, focuses on local or regional issues.

More importantly, though, are the paper’s assumptions that think tank work is necessarily opposed to academic research. Many academics collaborate with think tanks to publish and promote research. And, much of the best think tank work draws on, synthesizes, and makes academic research accessible to lay audiences. For example, On the Clock: Rethinking the Way Schools Use Time, one of our more cited reports from my colleague Elena Silva, is not original research, but draws on a wide variety of more traditional research sources.

Clearly, any work offers opportunities for bias in the selection and characterization of the underlying research. But, mention of a think tank report in the media may further findings from — not compete with — academic research. Rather than thinking of academic research and think tank work as separate, opposing worlds, it’s better to understand the myriad of connecting pieces. An artificial divide masks the reality that there’s almost certainly more variability — with regards to both quality and bias — within these worlds than between the two. So, let’s use the work itself, rather than a particular label, to make judgments.

-Bill Tucker

PS – Yettick also acknowledges the difficulty of characterizing many organization’s political positions. I take it as a good sign that she specifically mentioned Education Sector as being hard to pin down. (Much to the surprise of our friends at CATO, she characterized us as “center-libertarian” and classified our citations as on the right to compare the overall political perspective of media mentions.)

If we were talking about the 1960s, I could easily offer Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age as the articulation of that era’s strategy of increasing resources devoted to education, particularly for minority students. The revival of progressive education, with open classrooms, student-centered learning, and whole language, which was all the rage in the 1970s, could be found in a few influential books of that time. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Charles Silberman’s Crisis in the Classroom come to mind. If we were talking about the 1980s and the growth of the standards and accountability movement, we could credit E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy. And the case for school choice was laid out in the 1990s by John Chubb and Terry Moe’s Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools.

The first decade of the 21st century has also had a dominant strategy: incentive-based reforms, such as increasing competition among charter and district schools, merit-pay plans to improve teacher quality, and school-level accountability based on testing. But no single book or set of books stands out as the voice of these reforms.

Rather than articulating a broad, theoretical case for reforms that have been embraced by policymakers, the books of the “aughts” were more likely to engage in debates over evidence, articulate a strategy that had not been adopted, or do battle against the strategies that policymakers did adopt. (See the results of a web poll that invited readers to vote for their favorite education books.)

My own book, Education Myths, may have bolstered efforts to enact the incentive-based reforms that dominated the decade, but it did not provide the conceptual rationale for the movement. William Howell and Paul Peterson’s Education Gap was more a review of the evidence from voucher experiments than it was a call to arms for incentive-based reforms. Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth’s Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses and Frederick Hess’s Common Sense School Reform both make a case for incentive-based reforms, but they are also primarily reviews of the current research rather than the articulation of a new reform strategy.

Some books from the aughts did make theoretical arguments for new reforms, but those reforms have not been embraced by policymakers, at least not yet. Terry Moe and John Chubb’s Liberating Learning, Paul Peterson’s Saving Schools, and Clayton Christensen et al.’s Disrupting Class all make the case for technology-based schools that substitute computers for human instruction. Someday that may be the dominant education-reform strategy, but that day is not today.

The most common type of education reform book from the period argued against the dominant strategies. Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Linda Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education, Richard Rothstein’s Class and Schools, Daniel Koretz’s Measuring Up, Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap, and Deborah Meier’s In Schools We Trust, among many others, are notable for their opposition to incentive-based reforms. There have always been books opposing reforms embraced by the Establishment, but they were usually outliers. In the aughts, however, a large number of prominent books stood in opposition.

Why is it so difficult to identify a book that embodies the incentive-based reforms of the decade and relatively easy to list books that argue against them? One reason is that books have lost their place as primary vehicles for shaping education policy. Just like in other realms, books are being displaced by other media.

A film like Waiting for “Superman” can have considerably more influence over education policy than any book. Articles and reports can be released on the Internet as soon as they are written. Even blogs are swaying education policy discussions to a greater extent than books. The power of blogs is especially clear when it comes to debating the merits of the research on various policy questions. There is little point in writing a book that reviews and adjudicates research findings when online articles and blog posts can do the same thing and be available within days or even hours.

The lack of policy influence that is attributable to recent education-reform books is not for lack of sales. Some have even become national best sellers. The problem is that policymakers and other elites are less likely to be among their readers. Instead, the buyers increasingly seem to be those actively participating in education reform debates; the people actually shaping policy appear to be paying relatively little attention.

For example, teachers and others hostile to incentive-based reforms consume works by Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Tony Wagner to affirm their worldview. These books are not setting the agenda for policymakers. They are feeding the resentment of practitioners to an education reform agenda that draws its inspiration from nonbook sources and is advancing despite the hostility stirred by such books. These best-selling volumes are, in the words of their intellectual nemesis, “standing athwart history, yelling stop.”

But books are no longer up to the task of significantly altering, let alone stopping, education policy trends. Policy agendas are being shaped by online debates, articles, conferences, and documentary films—not by books. In policy terms, the education reform book is dead, even as education reform thrives.

There is hope. To paraphrase Miracle Max, the education reform book is only mostly dead. Its policy influence can be revived if authors steer clear of topics that are better addressed by other media. Blogs can evaluate research as it comes out and are quicker and cheaper to write as well as to read. Emotionally charged anecdotes can be shared to far greater effect in a documentary film. Books shouldn’t try to do what other media can do better, faster, and with greater ease.

Moreover, if book authors seek policy influence, they have to write with policy elites as their target audience. It may sell a lot of books to write for teachers or education school students, but those people no longer dominate policymaking discussions. There is a new set of elites interested in education policy who do not come from the traditional teaching or education school worlds. These people tend to be young and technology savvy, getting more of their information from the Internet than from books. They can still be reached by books, but the volume would have to be written with them in mind rather than the traditional educator audience.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with books that are not written with policy influence as their primary objective. The book geared for an academic audience or designed to encourage a partisan base will continue to have its place. But if there is a lesson from the last decade of education reform books for enhancing policy influence, it is that the education reform book is dead—or at least mostly dead.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, senior fellow at the George W. Bush Institute, and contributing editor at Education Next.

I’m talking about Michael Winerip who, to the best of my knowledge, is the single worst education reporter in America, infamous for biased hatchet jobs on NCLB, Bloomberg and Klein’s reforms, and anything else associated with genuine reform (if anyone is aware of someone worse at a major publication, please let me know – maybe I’ll start a Reporter Hall of Shame…)

(Note to self:  must do a day in the life of Tilson; specifically, what exactly is his definition of day?)

It is the Times

Tilson’s fury says more about the paper of record, of course, than it does about poor Mr. Winerip, who has been a dependable workhorse at the Times for nearly two decades.  Winerip has turned out over a thousand stories for the great gray lady (now gone to Peter Max color), on every conceivable subject, since 1983, when he was a cub reporter covering you-name-it on Long Island.

(By the way, the consensus theory from email colleagues is that the Times is picking up the pace on education reporting in order to stay ahead of the Wall Street Journal.  “Not about what [the Journal] says,” wrote one colleague, “just that it exists.” Will education stories sex up the Times?  We should ask Michael Winerip.)

As any young beat reporter would, Winerip on Long Island wrote stories on police patrols in shopping malls, burglar alarm battles, bar owners serving youth, and speed skating.  He did well enough that, by the 90s , he was getting national assignments, on things like schizophrenia, the West Point Class of 2001, and presidential campaigns.  (Let’s remember, love it or hate it, this is the New York Times, which may make ocassional mistakes – Jayson Blair! – but does not suffer fools gladly – or for very long.)  For a time Winerip  did a feature column called “On Sunday,” but in the Times online archive trajectory (a wonderful thing), you can begin to see his favoring of school stories – whether his choice or an assignment editor’s is not known — with reporting on teen-age dropouts, disabled students, school taxes, P.S.A.T. tests, etc.

Poor Mike’s Almanac

One thing is for sure, Winerip is no naïf – or shouldn’t be – about education. Nor is he new to the subject. As early as 1993, Winerip wrote a story about a new public middle school in Detroit that conducted a lottery to choose 330 students from over 6,000 applicants.  In November of that year, the Times published a Winerip story called “American Can Save Its City Schools,” a profile of Robert (Success for All) Slavin and others then trying to rescue urban education. Winerip even had a regular “In School” beat for a couple of years during that period.

By 1998 our budding scourge of education reform had become a staff writer for the Times magazine and had authored a book called ”9 Highland Road: Sane Living for the Mentally Ill,” praised as a “harrowing account” of a group home for schizophrenics by Publishers Weekly. (Mental illness has been one of Winerip’s favored reporting subjects.) And that same year he wrote a 7,500-word piece for the Times magazine called, “Schools For Sale.” It was, according to the paper’s summary, an “article on school-choice movement; competition from charter schools, publicly-financed free schools, is forcing other public schools to sell selves aggressively and forcing parents to evaluate claims; competition for Jersey City, NJ, students between public schools and new charter school planned by for-profit Advantage Schools Inc described.”

He surely covered the territory, writing knowledgeably if pointedly, about  the “diversion of resources” that “has so far kept charters out of New York,” and including Deborah Meier, Ted Sizer, and then Jersey City Mayor (now the Garden State’s Commissioner of Education) Bret Schundler, an outspoken proponent of charters and vouchers, in his lengthy roundup.

An Aversion to Competition

“Every reform has limitations,” wrote Winerip, perhaps tellingly, in that  1998 story for the Times magazine,  “and the problem with school choice is what happens to schools that have nothing to sell, schools left behind after the most-motivated families have made their choices and moved on.”

What seems central to Winerip’s reportorial DNA is a sympathy for the little guy, whether the disabled kid or the handicapped school.   Though I can’t claim to have studied his writings thoroughly (nor have I communicated with him), if Winerip does have political or ideological views about  the education system, it would appear that he  sees the thing through the prism of leaving no child or school behind – that is, before allowing any child or school to get ahead, we must pick up those behind. The market place, which allows success and failure, is a threat; the social safety net is wide and deep.

“The sales pitch that accompanies school choice dazzles, promising to deliver more, better, sooner,” he wrote in his Schools for Sale story, “when the reality is that education is an intricate process filled with subtle challenges like how to foster curiosity.”

Tours of Duty

Winerip’s first “On Education” tour began on January 8, 2003, with “How New York Exams Rewrite Literature (A Sequel), a followup to what has to be one of the more bizarre education testing stories of the last decade, “The Elderly Man and the Sea? Test Sanitizes Literary Texts,” the saga of  how the New York State Education Department had the chutzpah to change language in classic works of literature for statewide English exams.  (Note to self: revisit THAT one!)  Winerip wrote feverishly after that, producing six On Education columns before the end of February. His first anti-NCLB story, “A Pervasive Dismay on a Bush School Law,” arrived soon enough, in March of 2003 – and, interestingly enough, is a story based in Vermont, scene of the offending recent July 18 article that raised Whitney Tilson’s ire.

Back to the present

“A Popular Principal Wounded by Good Intentions” tells the story of a “highly regarded” Burlington school leader who was dismissed because of dreaded high stakes testing forced on the district  by the dreaded federal government. The story received 292 online comments between 11:38pm  (July 18) and 6:00pm the next day,  when the comment box was closed. Not surprisingly, the anti-testing folks came out of the gate fast and furious:

If this doesn’t show the absurdity of No Child Left behind, and single, high-stakes testing, I don’t know what will. (from Steve S. in Hershey, PA)

And

Insane (Expat Mexico)

And

Absolutely insane!… It’s all about making money for the investors in the charter schools that will replace public schools. (Cloudy Seattle)

I don’t know if anyone hit the “Report as Inappropriate” button, but those three reactions alone racked up 398 “Recommended by” credits — in less than seven hours!  (This being the Times, not all the comments were shrieking and the newspaper, loyal to its classy roots, took the time to highlight (in soft blue) the “most interesting and thoughtful” of the lot. There were a couple.)

But I digress

“When I first read this NYT article,” wrote Tilson on July 22, just a few weeks ago, “I was troubled – until I saw who wrote the article.  He’s baaaaaack.”  Tilson then reminded readers that Winerip “was so bad [during his first On Education tour, which ended in 2006] that Joe Williams and Andy Rotherham both gave him a well-deserved ripping in the Winter 2005 edition of Education Next.” (Full disclosure: I helped edit these stories.)

Rotherham hasn’t mellowed much. As he wrote, the day after Winerip’s recent Vermont tear-jerker, on his Eduwonk blog (“Let’s Do the Time Warp Again!):

I woke up today and thought it was 2004, when this blog first launched.  There in The New York Times was a Michael Winerip story that, well, left a few things out.

For starters, Winerip’s story confuses the federal accountability test scores with run of the mill scores, said Rotherham. And the Times columnist conveniently  omits  the fact that the federal laws at issue here were part of a grant that “the district did not have to even apply for.” Said Andy, “there are other school improvement funds and other funds overall that can be purposed for school improvement and do not require personnel changes.”

So, what’s the big deal here?

Says Rotherham:

“If the leaders of the district truly believe the requirements to be adverse then it’s essentially malpractice to take the funds.  They fired a great principal for money?  Really?”

Yes, Really

Rotherham also did some checking and found out that while Winerip blames immigrant students for the poor scores at the school, “scores are no great shakes for white regular education students” either.

If I sound suspicious about the article’s fact base, it’s from experience…. These stories that seem too neat and tidy usually are.  This is a messy business.

In Conclusion

Fascinating as the Winerip education rebirth is, let’s hope that our veteran liberal – in the nice sense — hasn’t been brought back to the paper of record just to nip at the heels of the new reformers, Obama and Duncan, or simply to seek out the silver lining in the progressive’s pro-union agenda, or just stir the pot so that the Journal cooks.  Winerip’s too good a reporter for that.

Much has changed in the last five years, including, it must be admitted, a small vindication of the  ink-stained liberal and incessant critic of NCLB, Michael Winerip, as many proponents of the great Bush reform law have jumped ship.

Welcome back, Mike. Oh yes, Mr. Winerip can be reached at oneducation@nytimes.com.

“I occasionally complain about the media’s education coverage, but I’ve applauded what I consider to be good work, too. Mainstream reporters have to be generalists, so it’s unfair to blame them for lack of depth into the many and varied arcane topics some of us deal with – including, of course, labor.”

I could not disagree more with the notion that it’s unfair to blame education reporters for lack of depth in covering labor issues.  These are the issues that drive K-12 school budgets and day-to-day operations.  If education reporters aren’t expected to have depth in their reporting of labor and collective bargaining, in what areas are they expected to have expertise?

Incidentally, Mike Antonucci’s observations on this topic were spurred by a Mike Petrilli piece, as he describes below:

“In a dwindling newspaper industry, there is a lot of soul-searching going on, but it’s nice to see someone take on the status of education reporting specifically. Michael Petrilli wrote a story headlined “Disappearing Ink” for Education Next that is really worth your time.”

While Antonucci is as informed as anyone on these matters, it discourages me to see him effectively raising the white flag in terms of what we can expect from education reporters.

This is a topic that excites editorialists, who are, of course, members of the journalism profession themselves. Many bemoan the demise of the daily newspaper, arguing that it signals the end to the educated citizen. Others worry that Americans will retreat to ideological safe havens—cable TV channels, Internet sites, and blogs that conform to their strongly held views—which will lead to even greater divisiveness in our politics and culture (see Figure 1).

Are these concerns valid when it comes to coverage of education? To find out, I interviewed some of the smartest minds in education journalism, including Richard Lee Colvin of the Hechinger Institute; Richard Whitmire, president of the National Education Writers Association (EWA); Jim Bencivenga, formerly the education editor of the Christian Science Monitor; Virginia Edwards, the publisher of Education Week; and Elizabeth Green, an editor of the online upstart GothamSchools.

They all agree that the demise of the daily newspaper is bad for the local “conversation” around education. And even if papers survive, already the education beat is being squeezed. Those reporters who remain on the job (see Figure 2) are asked to cover higher education as well as K—12 schools, meaning they have less time to develop expertise in specific areas. They are pushed to write shorter articles, leaving little space for in-depth reporting. And editors want stories that are hyperlocal, at the school level, not missives about the latest school board policies, or dry accounts of state regulatory actions.

As a result, says Whitmire, decisions go unchallenged. “What is lost is that the superintendent will bring in a new program, and nobody will be there to explain to the community whether similar programs have worked or failed in other places.” Colvin goes even further: “We hear from superintendents that the coverage is worse than ever.” All the reporters seem to want is a “couple of quotes” for a “sensationalist” story. So when it’s time for leaders to make the case for, say, budget increases, they have no credible vehicle through which to explain their rationale to the broader public, beyond their own communication outlets, and no independent third party to present opposing views in a fair manner.

“The people who will be excluded from the conversation will be people without kids in the schools,” explains Bencivenga. Those with a vested interest—the teachers unions, realtors—will continue to get their message out. But there will be no one to counter these self-serving opinions. As Edwards argues, “An ill-informed public will benefit people who can push an agenda without accountability and public scrutiny.”

The national scene is unlikely to look so bleak, argue the experts. In part that’s because everyone expects a few of the great national papers to survive. But it’s also because of the well-developed community of think tanks, blogs, and trade publications that follow the education issue, and aren’t disappearing anytime soon. “National will always be the easiest to do,” says Whitmire.

But even at that level, there are signs of trouble. Right now a CEO or university president might skim an education editorial or op-ed while flipping through the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. But imagine if such elites stop getting newspapers and only read articles online that are of immediate interest. The larger public that engages in the K—12 education debate could shrink dramatically, to just partisans engaged in the war of ideas around schooling.

Still, nobody expects high-quality education journalism to disappear without a fight. Already new models are starting to emerge. One of the most talked about is Green’s GothamSchools, an online site that follows New York City’s education scene, and also covers national education happenings. An initiative of the nonprofit Open Planning Project, GothamSchools aims to be a “one stop shop in New York City for education news,” according to Green. It covers education the way newspapers used to, with its two reporter/editors showing up at every meeting of the city council and the state assembly that touches on the public schools. But it also dives in to do more in-depth analyses and investigative pieces.

There are similar experiments up and running in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago. Plus a growing number of cities, such as Minneapolis and San Diego, are home to new online nonprofit newspapers that feature strong education reporting.

Meanwhile, the national players are tweaking their approach. Hechinger is going into the content-production business, with a growing staff that will write original, long-form articles about key education trends. The EWA has a new “public editor,” former Washington Post reporter Linda Perlstein, who helps cub education writers around the country hone their craft and offers high-level feedback to more-seasoned pros. And Education Week is contemplating how it might distribute its content to daily newspapers.

All of these “business models” have promise, but also big question marks. First, they depend on philanthropic support for start-up revenue; with the stock market, and thus endowments, down some 30 percent, it’s not known whether there will be enough grant dollars to go around. Even Education Week, which has attracted foundation support for years, only receives 25 percent of its revenues from such sources and must bring in the rest from subscriptions, advertising, and elsewhere. Second, it’s unclear whether any of these approaches are sustainable once the grant money inevitably runs out.

So should education reformers try hard to help solve these problems? Would the further diminishment of the newspaper be bad for the cause of change? That’s not quite clear, either. On the one hand, newspaper editorial pages have generally been friendly to supporters of greater accountability, transparency, and parental choice. They have been particularly bullish on charter schools (“Opinion Leaders or Laggards?” what next, Summer 2008). And to be sure, the organized interests of the status quo—particularly the powerful teachers unions—will always find a way to get their message out to core audiences. They would only profit from a world without the fourth estate playing referee.

On the other hand, reporters have never been particularly astute at covering “change,” particularly the variety that causes pain for adults. In this way, the media have not been very friendly to reformers. Colvin puts it best: “Journalists never get out front of reform. They are always the trailing entity. Anyone whose ox is gored by reform is going to be outspoken and resist it. Journalists must understand that there’s always pain and disruption in great change. But they rarely frame it that way.”

Now that it’s the journalists who face pain and disruption, the question is whether they will get out in front of the changes happening in their own industry. No doubt you can follow this developing story in a local newspaper—if you still subscribe to one.