by Jeff Bryant
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry when an “All-Purpose-Pundit” atThe New York Times takes it upon him/herself to write a commentary about education.
“Thomas Friedman is infamous for his uninformed pieces on education,” Larry Ferlazzo, a retired schoolteacher and ubiquitous education commentator on the Internet recently observed. And there’s “David Brooks, who is equally off-base.”
Diane Ravitch, lamenting a recent column by Times editorialist Bill Keller, who lazily blamed widespread problems with education performance on university teacher preparation programs (without mustering a shred of evidence to support his claim), concluded, “It would be wonderful if theNew York Times elevated someone to the op-ed page as a columnist who actually knew something about education.”
Staying true to form last week was Times opinionator Nicholas Kritsof. Prompted by the latest results of the National Assessment of Education Progress, aka “the Nation’s Report Card,” Kritsof observed on Twitter, “Latest NAEP school test scores suggest that school reform helps. Big improvements in DC & Tennessee, both centers of reform.”
Since 1990, the “Main NAEP,” given every other year in grades 4 and 8 to measure national and state achievement in reading and math, has led to all sorts of overblown claims. This year’s results have been subjected to the same tendencies – despite the fact that the results were described as“stubbornly mixed” by reliable news outlets, with stagnation in 4th grade reading and math and slight gains in 8th grade reading only.
