As I mentioned in Leading Off, there’s a story in the paper today about DISD. Two administrators at a school with 390 students were put on leave while the district investigates possible academic misconduct. Were the administrators cheating? Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know. The Morning News doesn’t know. The paper doesn’t even know what the possible “academic misconduct” might have entailed. All it could report was that two administrators were on leave. It’s a pretty thin story. Yet it ran above the fold today on the front page. It’s such a non-story at this point that the reporter, Tawnell Hobbs, had to write one graph about all the people who wouldn’t comment and another two graphs about how the school in question got its name and how it partners with a local college.
This is a screw job.
Meanwhile, as Louisa Meyer pointed out in the comments to my earlier post, some very good news is coming out of the district. This news has not yet appeared in the paper, but on the DMN’s education blog yesterday, Jeffrey Weiss put up a post with a headline that asked a question: “Is This New Evidence of a ‘Dallas Miracle’ at Dallas ISD?” The gist:
Using a multi-factor analysis that is designed to remove the very large effects of poverty on educational achievement, ERG aka Education Research Group, showed that Dallas ISD took a huge jump compared with its peers in the first year of Miles’ leadership. The “miracle.” And slipped a little in the second. So what were the results for Miles’ third and final year? To the moon, Alice.
Now, there are some qualifiers. It’s not entirely clear that the district is doing as well as some of the data suggest. We don’t know. The Morning News doesn’t know. But it might be a miracle! An effing miracle might be occurring in DISD. And the paper didn’t commit that story to print.
Screw. Job.
