Media and Schooling
I keep thinking about that opinion piece Bruce Deitrick Price wrote and was passed on to ECC readers by William Brown, Mar 11.
BDP’s article was entitled: K-12: Media Should Help for a Change. He makes the point that if the media was more attentive to exposing the faults of the public education system many corrective practices would emerge. We would have better literacy and better test scores. He encourages people to write their newspapers to provide more coverage of education matters.
Now, that might help, but lately the trend has been that newspapers and media generally have been decreasing staffs that work on such stories.
And, we also must be mindful of the fact that media is not always reporting, but in fact, sometimes are biased promoters of what they see as “the common good” — the public schools. To be otherwise is to be unpatriotic, they think.
Two such articles that I’ve kept close to mind over the years are:
– If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/08/private-school-vs-public-school-only-bad-people-send-their-kids-to-private-school.html
– Liberals: Don’t Homeschool Your Kids https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/02/homeschooling-and-unschooling-among-liberals-and-progressives.html
Both these articles generated considerable debate for a time, 2012 – 2013, but did nothing to challenge the prevailing media positive mindset about public schools. In fact, as the first article infers, families could be seen as heroic by keeping their kids in public schools as they’re bound to improve, even if it takes “generations”!
I’ll jump to my purpose for writing today. I do think we, and public generally, should approach our media outlets to honestly report education stories. Right now, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic we see schools being closed and students kept at home. Parents are mounting home education efforts and school systems are scrambling to produce online programs. This will be a time when many innovations can emerge. We should urge our media to report on these efforts.
In particular, I would emphasize to the media that much home education, or homeschooling as the popular press likes to call it, is not new. Home education has been around since the 80’s and much groundbreaking work has been established. There are parent support groups in many communities. There is much literature and books and resources.
I will hunt up the contacts for some of these support groups in my area. They would have success stories to tell and probably tips to share. I’ll approach my news sources to report on these successful, and from what I gather, happy experiences.
[Sent to ECC