BOB GARFIELD:
It’s back-to-school time, and in 50 states that means kids are back in class experiencing that autumn rite we all remember, being pulled aside by a teacher with a Palm Pilot measuring basic skills, while the rest of the students are busy doing worksheets.

This is the era of the federal program called No Child Left Behind, one of the Bush Administration’s legislative triumphs, at least in the President’s opinion.

But No Child has been buffeted by criticism almost from the beginning and now is unlikely to be reauthorized by Congress in its current form. According to blogger Alexander Russo, this is just fine with the press, which he says has used No Child Left Behind as a scapegoat for all that ails public education.
ALEXANDER RUSSO:
I think that the scorn comes from misunderstandings about the law, lack of contextual background in what education is all about and where it’s been in the past, and possibly a little bit of prejudice against a law that’s affiliated now with a much-maligned administration.
BOB GARFIELD:
Now, back in 2002, when the legislation was signed, it got pretty good reviews. And there were pictures of the President and Senator Ted Kennedy, of all people, at the signing ceremony, all smiles and bipartisanship. It was portrayed in the media, it seems to me, as the realization of the President’s “Unite, not Divide” campaign theme.

ALEXANDER RUSSO:
That's right, there was a lot of gee whiz surrounding the law – its size, its ambitiousness, its bipartisanship. It took about three or six months before the coverage started to turn.
BOB GARFIELD:
The coverage got critical, which we usually think of as a good thing, but you say it was not merely critical, that it was actually unfair.
ALEXANDER RUSSO:
Right. Let me start by saying that covering education issues is a difficult and thankless task. Learning is a very difficult thing to measure. Causality is very hard to figure out. But over the months and now years following the passage of the law, it seemed to me that things tended to skew against the law and the reporting seemed to focus on some things that actually turned out not to be true, that the law was a Bush law when it was a bipartisan law, that there were going to be massive revolts around the country against the law, that people were going to not take the money – this also never happened – that schools were going to be closed and teachers were going to be fired.

There were a whole set of these sky-is-falling things, when in reality the law turns out to be a big increase in funding, a rigorous rating system for schools, but not a ton of sanctions.

There’s no ban on social promotion in No Child Left Behind, and there’s no holding kids back or preventing people from graduation. And yet when I'm at a cocktail party or at a school or even talking to teachers, these are some of the things that they think, from reading news coverage, that seem unfair or unwarranted.
BOB GARFIELD:
You also mentioned to our producer, Megan Ryan, that the press tended to go for commentary to teachers and principals, the usual suspects, instead of going to education policy experts.
ALEXANDER RUSSO:
Education reporters out there have some of the same problems that an embedded reporter has in Iraq; that is, they end up seeing the law or its implementation from a very vivid but limited perspective. It would be as if health care reporters only talked about health care reform by talking to doctors in hospitals. There are a lot of other stakeholders involved.

I'm not sure that talking to policy experts is always the way to go. I think that talking to parents and community advocates and the education historians is the way to go to give people more than the complaint of a teacher or the complaint of a superintendent about a law that’s being sent to them from far away and is very easy to complain about.

BOB GARFIELD:
It has been well documented that the newspaper industry is in crisis. What is the future of education reportage in the newspaper environment that we face now?
ALEXANDER RUSSO:
My sense is that education reporters around the country are a little bit less vulnerable than those on other beats because there is a consistent demand for coverage, at least of what’s going on locally in individual schools or in school boards. It’s a very low-prestige beat. We tend to lose people just as they're getting good.

But I don't sense that things are going to go away entirely. There ends up being quite a lot of coverage, especially right now, the sort of back-to-school coverage, what’s new, what’s different, what’s in the backpack, but there’s not enough time and space for that kind of quality coverage that we all want.

It’s great to see people do some amazing time-lapse coverage where they take a kindergarten class and they see how they were affected by various reforms and how they're doing in high school. That type of in-depth quality coverage is sorely lacking.
BOB GARFIELD:
Alexander, thank you very much.
ALEXANDER RUSSO:
What an excellent experience.
BOB GARFIELD:
[LAUGHING] Alexander Russo writes the blog This Week in Education for Scholastic.