While not above criticism himself, Malcolm Gladwell (Time, 20 October 2009) has argued an important point about the importance of topic expertise for journalists:

The issue is not writing. It’s what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he’s one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He’s unique. Most accountants don’t write articles, and most journalists don’t know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master’s in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that’s the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.

The education debate, specifically the education reform debate, currently confirms Gladwell’s concern because politicians with little or no educational expertise or experience control education policy and journalists with little or no educational expertise or experience report on both the claims made by those politicians and the education reports coming from think tanks and advocacy groups posing as scholars.

The list could be almost endless, but recent education reports on charter schools, for example, have all been represented inaccurately by the media—essentially since journalists tend to report on the think tank press release instead of analyzing the claims or quality of the study itself. (See Baker on the misrepresented KIPP study, Baker on the misrepresented NYC CREDO study, and Di Carlo on the garbled charter school debate as just a few examples.)

Blogging about the combined failure of charter schools and the entrenched commitment to those charter schools, Michael Deschotels poses questions that must be answered:

My questions are: When will our news media start doing their job of exposing the fraud and abuse of charters, vouchers, and reform profiteers? When will our legislature call a halt to this misuse of our tax dollars? [See my take on poor stewardship of state funding.] When will our District Attorneys start prosecuting the crooks who are using our public school children to raid our school funding?

While these questions are complex, part of the answer lies in Gladwell’s endorsement of expertise as well as the cumulative effect of multiple layers of inexpert leadership filtered through the inexpert media.

My home state of South Carolina is a disturbingly vivid snapshot of this exact problem. Our state superintendent of education, Mick Zais, has no expertise or experience in K-12 education; his background includes a childhood and career in the military and then a decade as a university president. Zais is a state-level parellel to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (whose entire educational background is a series of political appointments)—both having the bully pulpit for education reform devoid any educational expertise or experience.

Zais’s bully pulpit affords him several advantages, including the ability to publish Op-Eds and make public talks that will be covered with almost no critical analysis by the media.

Once again, the pattern of inexpert media coverage of inexpert political leadership highlights why education reform continues to flounder at best and fail at worst. Jack Osteen offers yet another example of taking Zais’s claims and “logic” seriously without examining either the accuracy of Zais’s facts or the credibility of that logic; Osteen concludes, in fact: “Whether you agree or disagree with Superintendent Mick Zais and some of his policies, it’s hard to argue with some of the logic when it comes to improving education in South Carolina.”

It is not hard to argue with some of Zais’s logic because virtually all of Zais’s facts and logic are without merit. Let me consider some of them here:

CLAIM: Osteen endorses Zais’s claim that “Sumter School District showed a solid ‘B’ rating which fell ‘above average’ as a whole among South Carolina schools,” adding, “Sumter School District ranked 51 out of 83 districts when it comes to performance related to the poverty level.” This praise of Sumter schools builds to the key point Zais wanted to push: “Sumter School District’s funding in regard to poverty level was lower than average at $9,616 per pupil. The state average is about $11,000.”

BEHIND THE CLAIM: While Zais appears to be praising Sumter (and certainly our schools deserve some praise as well as good press), the real goal here is to suggest that some schools do more with less. This is a common tactic with claims about charter schools, although such claims are discredited (see Baker about higher per-pupil spending at KIPP). The string of assertions by Zais are left, however, to speak for themselves without further examination. What we need to know is what exactly “in regard to poverty level” means as well as some clarification about student population comparisons that are not identified, including English Language Learners (ELL) and special needs students. The “more with less” argument is not valid if Sumter’s ELL and special needs populations are not also compared against similar student populations. While high-poverty students are cost-intensive, ELL and especially special needs students skew per-pupil expenditures significantly. For example, many charter schools claiming success with high-poverty students have those claims unmasked when reviews show that the gains are strongly linked with lower concentrations of ELL and special needs students (further, the most cost-intensive groups of special needs students are almost always absent in the charter schools but included in public schools).

CLAIM: Osteen then notes Zais’s praise for Sumter consolidating districts:

He also noted that he was very happy to see Sumter School District 2 and 17 merge and looked unfavorably on those counties with multiple school districts. For example, Spartanburg has seven school districts, which he pointed out was one of the many reasons why some counties with multiple school districts have poor performance overall.

BEHIND THE CLAIM: Using Zais’s own focus on the A-F federal accountability ratings and his own choice of the seven Spartanburg districts [1], Spartanburg 7 has the exact same “B” rating as Sumter, although the two districts have comparable Poverty Index ratings (both above 75). Behind the flawed logic of Zais’s claims about consolidation and cost savings is research showing that consolidation doesn’t necessary create fiscal efficiency (especially in high-poverty areas) or improve academic achievement.

CLAIM: Eventually, Osteen repeats Zais’s concern about teacher quality:

Zais pointed out that 80-90 percent of teachers have worked in K-12 education only, so they have no other life or work experience to go with it when they enter and remain in the classroom. He sees that as one of the problems….

According to statistics, teachers who perform in the top 20 percent can impart 18 months of learning on a student during a traditional school year. In contrast, teachers that fall in the bottom 20 percent may only impart 6 months’ learning during the same school year. As Zais pointed out, a child that gets a teacher that falls into that bottom 20 percent for three or more years will never catch up in school.

BEHIND THE CLAIM: As noted above, Zais himself has no K-12 experience or expertise so I wonder about the credibility of his own logic applied to his field of expertise, the military. Would Zais (and Osteen) make the same claims about a general leading soldiers into battle or about the soldiers themselves? Should our armies be led and soldiered by people without military experience and expertise? But as troubling is the “according to statistics” paragraph. These claims about teacher quality are Zais repeating the flawed media coverage of discredited reports (more of the problem with layers and layers of inexpert leadership and journalism). For example, Di Carlo explains the flaw behind Zais’s misleading claim:

But these somewhat technical issues are less important than what the “X consecutive teachers” argument actually means for policy. Outside of a general suggestion that teacher quality is important (with which nobody disagrees), it doesn’t mean much at all.

All of the claims about teacher quality directly and indirectly included in Zais’s plan to evaluate teachers in SC lack credibility (see a review here); in fact teacher quality is dwarfed by out-of-school (OOS) factors’ impact on student outcomes (about 60% OOS to 10% teacher quality).

While SC children suffer under an escalating inequity gap in their homes and communities, a tremendous expertise gap plagues political leadership and media in terms of education and education reform.

The disturbing irony is that among all the political and media focus on teacher quality and accountability, politicians and the media themselves fail to provide the expertise or accept the accountability that they argue is needed for schools, teachers, and students.

And it is there that the entire logic falls completely apart.

[1] For the record, state report card data on the seven districts in Spartanburg county that Zais suggests are struggling due to not consolidating include the following: Spartanburg 1, Excellent/Excellent, A; Spartanburg 2, Excellent/Excellent, A; Spartanburg 3, Good/Good, A; Spartanburg 4, Excellent/Good, A; Spartanburg 5, Excellent/Excellent, A; Spartanburg 6, Excellent/Excellent, A; Spartanburg 7, Average/Average, B. Which begs the question about” poor performance overall.”