Journalists and advocates raise two general complaints & flag one controversial storyline

By Alexander Russo

Earlier this week, after a long and heated debate over charter school expansion, Massachusetts voters soundly defeated the state ballot measure known as Question 2 that would have allowed 12 more charters each year. With roughly $41 million spent, the Boston Globe described it as “the most expensive ballot-question air war in the country.”

Now that the debate has been settled, it seems like a good time to try and figure out if the media did a good job covering Question 2 — and what if any lessons there might be for journalists in other places who are tasked with covering fast-paced, highly controversial issues being decided in a political setting.

Like the outcome of the Presidential campaign, the lopsided vote against expanding Question 2 was unexpected. At 62 percent to 38 percent, the measure failed even in cities where popular charters exist and nonwhite charter support was thought to be high. Other similarities: Economic concerns seemed to eclipse ideology. Editorial page endorsements were generally ignored. The better-funded side lost. There was even a mysterious, late-breaking story that might have played a meaningful role in the outcome.

A review of the coverage, as well as interview with journalists and sources involved, reveals no major errors of fact or deeply problematic coverage (one minor controversy notwithstanding). A lot of solid work was done by a number of smart, hard-working reporters and editors.

And yet, frustrations with how the story was covered were widespread among both journalists and participants. National coverage was surprisingly sparse, and local coverage, while abundant, focused too much attention on the political battle between advocates and — perhaps most critically — was unable to settle what became the debate’s central question: whether charter schools drain funding from district schools.

“Trying to educate voters on the facts was really hard,” said WBUR education editor Louise Kennedy. “Right up until the end we heard people saying ‘I don’t really understand this question,’ which means we could have done more.”

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Chart from a WBUR story about outside fundraising from October 27, 2016

As with any hotly-debated contest, there was no shortage of concerns and complaints about coverage, generally split along predictable lines:

According to charter proponents who backed Question 2 and lost, there was too much coverage of the political battle and outside funding, and too little standalone coverage of the research and the racial dynamics.

“The biggest thing for us was wishing there had been more coverage about the policy versus the politics of it,” said Liam Kerr, state director for the state Democrats For Education Reform chapter, a pro-charter school reform organization. But the policy “gets overwhelmed by the conflict narrative and the political narrative.”

According to charter critics who opposed Question 2 and won, there was too little coverage of the “dark” money coming into the debate without identifying information as to its source, the financial drain created by charters, their inadequate services to ELL students, and the passage of anti-charter resolutions by local school committees across the state.

“Overall, the reporting improved over the course of the campaign,” said Barbara Madeloni, head of the state teachers union who helped lead the “no” on 2 effort. Credulous representations of the ‘yes’ side in the media evolved into “some semblance of balance” as the campaign wore on.

“I’ve been really impressed by the quality of the reporting, almost across the board,” says Jennifer Berkshire, better known as EduShyster, a union-affiliated writer. Local outlets in particular, she said, “went well beyond talking points and the sort of ‘this parent likes her school’ stories that often pass for news.”

One thing everyone agreed on was that there was a healthy amount of coverage. The Globe made a concerted effort to find and relay the views of real people who would be directly affected, most notably this four-part series featuring parents with various experiences of charter and district schools. WBUR’s education page covered the debate nearly as thoroughly, using both audio and digital storytelling and tons of interviews. Several of those interviewed praised the Bay State Banner for its efforts, as well as WGBH and MassLive.

The measure got surprisingly little national news coverage, ongoing or otherwise, and what little of it that was produced by national outlets was criticized by local observers as being too little, too late. The national reporting “has been pretty terrible,” according to writer Berkshire.

The New York Times weighed in the weekend before the vote. The Washington Post covered the story once, from afar, through a Valerie Strauss overview. Politico weighed in with its version of events just in advance of the vote. NPR produced a series on segregation in Boston and a September roundup of diverse views on Black Lives Matter and school reform that touched on the issues, but nothing else. The Wall Street Journal did not assign a reporter to cover the story. The PBS NewsHour did not air a segment on it.

Perhaps the only original news unearthed by national outlets was that Obama’s Education Secretary John King favored the measure. USA Today and Politico both reported his comments after a National Press Club speech. According to a Globe followup, King stopped short of endorsing the measure but “his comments offer the clearest indication yet that the Obama administration supports Question 2.”

The White House did not formally endorse Question 2, however, though it did weigh in on at least one other local education issue (endorsing a school board candidate in the San Francisco race).

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Charter schools have been a small, generally noncontroversial part of the education landscape in Massachusetts for over 20 years. In the state and nationally, the semi-autonomous public schools have grown in number over the past decade. According to Politico, 15 states removed caps on charter schools during the first term of the Obama administration, in hopes of winning a share of $4 billion in Race to the Top funding. However, charter schools have in recent years come to divide Democrats deeply divided over how best to improve public education, and that conflict came to dominate Question 2 coverage.

One primary area of agreement among observers is that coverage of the political conflict surrounding Question 2 — about the money being spent, who was on which side, and who was “winning” — too often seemed to eclipse coverage of the schools themselves, their past performance, and the experiences of those directly affected.

“One of the problems with the way media outlets cover policy is we generally cover the politics of policy,” said Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University journalism professor interviewed earlier this week. “When you cover the politics, certain emphases rise to the top.”

One drawback is that controversy can focus attention on narrower issues and draw attention away from broader ones.

“We have paid more attention to controversies — like harsh suspension policies in some places — than to an overwhelming pattern of success,” wrote the NYT’s David Leonhardt in a pro-charter column about the debate.

“It’s not a very good news story that government has found something that works and should do more of it,” said DFER’s Kerr. “Maybe you can do that story once, but it’s not like you can do that every day.”

In particular, the conflict coverage seemed to have affected the amount of coverage of research about school performance and also parent voices.

“While my co-authors and I have been quoted in NYT, and I am active on Twitter, I got ZERO requests from local media for comment,” said University of Michigan professor Susan Dynarksi in an email. A researcher on charter school performance in Massachusetts and other places, she “did not see my coauthors in the media much, either.”

The complexity of the research may have been part of what hindered the coverage, according to Scot Lehigh, a columnist at the Globe who has supported charter schools. “There’s been a series of very good, top notch research done by Harvard and MIT, and also the CREDO studies,” said Lehigh. “But overall, it seemed incredibly complex and you really have to have followed it very carefully. I think it is confusing.”

Opponents of Question 2 also raised a series of related questions about charter school services to ELL and special education students, as well as disciplinary problems and retention rates.

Another casualty of the focus on conflict was the voices of those who would have been directly affected — parents and community members. The Globe’s four-part series helped elevate those voices towards the end. One pro-charter parent appeared in several different stories. But several journalists lamented the relative scarcity of parent voices.

It’s not that journalists covering the story weren’t aware of the lure of the conflict narrative and its problems.

“There were these very simple narratives that were being pushed by both sides,” said MassLive reporter Shira Schoenberg, who wrote about the ballot question numerous times. “I tried in most of my stories to some of the underlying issues.”

Schoenberg cited as an example this story about contradictory claims about special education services that revealed problems with the underlying state data that was being used to track and compare efforts.

But breaking into the dominant storyline wasn’t easy, and the drumbeat of the political conflict was relentless.

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The second major complaint about the Question 2 coverage is that it failed to settle the argument over charter schools “draining” funding from district school systems.

Here’s a typically equivocal construction, taken from a WBUR explainer:

“Proponents say the money should follow the child to a charter school; opponents say that doesn’t factor in all costs for the district schools when children leave.”

Stories like this one from the Globe’s Michael Levenson reported the back and forth over the funding issue but didn’t make any attempt to tell readers which side’s claims were more accurate.

This is the much-derided “false equivalency” that journalism is so frequently accused of.

Editorial pages, which overwhelmingly came out in favor of the measure, often decided that charters didn’t drain money the way critics claimed. WGBH’s Adam Reilly attempted to cut through the rhetoric, asking a district superintendent to document the impact of charters on his budget and getting an “unexpectedly tentative” response.

But those pieces were one-offs, and existed separately from the stream of much more equivocal stories coming out of newsrooms.

“I know in my own reporting, I kept it to ‘he said, she said,’” Boston Herald reporter Kathleen McKiernan told me in a phone interview. “Technically, [charters] are not draining funds,” said the reporter, who estimated she wrote two stories a week about the debate for six months since she arrived at the paper. “But at the same time the state isn’t funding schools the way that it should be… It was a big political issue and I wanted to be fair to both sides.”

“How do you find the truth about whether charters are helping or hurting funding for education?,” asked MassLive’s Schoenberg. “The honest answer is that it depends on how you define a public school. It sounds ridiculous but it’s true.”

Of course, this wasn’t just a quandary for WBUR and MassLive: “Charter supporters frequently argue that the funding mechanism for the schools is fundamentally fair — when a student leaves a traditional public school for a charter, the money follows,” stated another Globe piece. “But charter school critics argue that the “money follows the child” dictum is not as fair as it sounds.”

This WBUR piece quoted a voter claiming that he didn’t want “some hedge fund manager in New York living high off the hog because of some amount of money they’re skimming off my taxes.” Another WBUR piece quoted a Boston city councilor who predicted that Question 2 would create “apocalyptic change” for the city’s school system.

No one’s questioning the quotes or that the argument wasn’t being made by critics of the charter measure, but there’s a responsibility to vet the claims being made and presented in the piece rather than merely passing them on.

At best, describing each side’s contradictory arguments strands readers. At worst, it encourages advocates to push claims that resonate with readers’ hopes and fears but may not be supported by the available facts.

In response to similar challenges at the national level, some news outlets have developed in-house fact-checking operations. Or, it might have taken a series of conversations with economists and school finance experts to have gotten to the bottom of the issue. But the question seems much more answerable than it was presented.

Even without settling the funding debate, it might have been useful to have broadened the scope of the coverage. The state has not fully funded its reimbursement program, or its basic education budget. “In many ways, there was a problem with state funding, not with charters,” said WBUR’s Kennedy. And yet very little of the ongoing coverage focused on that broader reality. (While incomplete, perhaps the best attempt to tackle the funding issues underlying the charter debate was this Globe story by Michael Levenson— from April.)

Another useful form of context for journalists to have explored would have been to report how districts respond to other kinds of student transfer scenarios (families moving away or choosing private or homeschool, businesses shutting down, etc), or how districts with charters have been directly affected by transfers (as opposed to budget cuts, changes in tax revenues, or other reasons).

Journalists might have compared the Massachusetts reimbursement program to other states’ efforts, or to other kinds of reimbursement programs that have been created by states and the federal government for similar situations. Five states (MA, IL, NH, NY, and PA) attempt to soften the impact of students transferring from district-run to charter-run schools, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which describes Massachusetts’ as the most generous.

For what it’s worth, the funding issue wasn’t the only example of false equivalency raised during interviews for this column. And it’s important to note that not everybody wants a more authoritative kind of journalism from reporters, anyway.

“What I’ve seen is an attempt to wrestle with that [funding] question without being able to come to a definitive conclusion,” said Northeastern’s Kennedy.

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Globe front page for November 2, 2016, featuring controversial Moody’s story

Just one of the coverage complaints — that opponents manipulated the Globe into publishing a story about possible financial ramifications of passing Question 2 — was especially serious.

Published in the Globe just a week before Election Day, the story in question noted that the credit ratings company Moody’s was warning cities about charter school enrollment pressures on some school districts’ finances. In a follow-up story, the Globe reported that the email was sent to four cities but that Moody’s declined to explain its position or provide a preview of its analysis.

Already suffering in the polls, the measure’s chances lessened greatly with the arrival of this bombshell. DFER’s Kerr called it “untouchable and unanswerable” because it lacked details that could reputed, and described the late-breaking coverage as “a work of art on the ‘no’ side.” He and others compared the story to the late-arriving letter from FBI Director Comey to Congress about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Some observers credited the Moody’s story for the unexpectedly weak showing for Question 2 on November 8th.

“How did this come about at the last moment?” asked Northeastern’s Kennedy. “Was somebody holding this in their hip pocket waiting to do damage to Question 2? We should know that too.”

Frank Phillips, the Globe’s State House Bureau Chief who wrote the story, said that there was nothing untoward about what happened. “When you send out an email to four mayors around the state, some of whom are against charters, it’s not all that unusual for some of them to pass that information on,” he said. He scoffed at the notion that Moody’s was involved. “Moody’s wouldn’t do that. They just stumbled into this.”

Phillips wasn’t sure that his story deserved the front-page prominence it was given, but he “never even suspected that” the email or the timing was political.

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Even Boston voted against Question 2, as this WBUR map shows.

Covering a high-pressure state ballot initiative is a serious challenge for journalists, whether they’re education reporters who need to learn the political process or political reporters who have to get up to speed on the substance.

To its credit, local media outlets devoted abundant attention to the ballot initiative, and attempted to cover it from as many angles as possible. National outlets? Not so much. However, too much of the coverage failed to get beyond the usual boilerplate and reveal deeper, secondary-level issues that were swirling underneath.

And so, for all the coverage that was generated, several intriguing mysteries remain: How did Boston’s historically pro-charter mayor end up coming out against Question 2? How did Senator Elizabeth Warren, who initially appeared come out against the measure only reluctantly, end up doing robo-calls against it the weekend before the vote? How close did advocates get to persuading Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to weigh in on the issue? And of course, is it accurate to say that charter schools drain funding from district schools?

“We kept trying to find sources who could walk us through the numbers and who hadn’t taken a side,” said WBUR’s Kennedy, reflecting on her team’s efforts to get to the bottom of the funding debate. “We never really did succeed.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Russo

Alexander Russo

Alexander Russo is founder and editor of The Grade, an award-winning effort to help improve media coverage of education issues. He’s also a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship winner and a book author. You can reach him at @alexanderrusso.

Visit their website at: https://the-grade.org/