{"id":1600,"date":"2009-04-07T07:00:32","date_gmt":"2009-04-07T11:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1600"},"modified":"2009-04-07T07:00:32","modified_gmt":"2009-04-07T11:00:32","slug":"mediocre-education-reporting-357","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1600","title":{"rendered":"Mediocre education reporting #357"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sam Dillon’s story this morning<\/a> on the evident pending Giant Teacher Shortage IV: Postapocalyptic Horror<\/em>… uh, pending retirement of many teachers struck me as extraordinarily poor reporting on a National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future report<\/a> because Dillon wrote his lede from the first two pages of the report.<\/p>\n

Here’s what the report says, or the gist of it: let’s develop alternative models of socializing new teachers, models that take advantage of the demographics of teaching.<\/p>\n

Here’s the lede in the article: “Over the next four years, more than a third of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers could retire, depriving classrooms of experienced instructors and straining taxpayer-financed retirement systems, according to a new report.”<\/p>\n

Do you see the same problem I do? The main argument of the report is not mentioned until paragraph #4 of Dillon’s story. (In addition, like many other reporters Dillon fails to mention whether the report was peer-reviewed.) Then Dillon apparently called up Michael Podgursky for a publishable quotation, who dutifully responded with his usual skepticism about demographic Chicken-Littleism. <\/p>\n

Except in this case, the primary Chicken Little was the reporter. Look at the chart in Appendix B, on p. 18, and you’ll see quite a bit of room for optimism. For those who need a hint: the Baby Boom echo cohort is now beginning careers.<\/p>\n

Update: Apparently USA Today has the same take<\/a> on the report as Dillon, and like the Times, it fails to note that the report did not appear in a refereed journal. C’mon, reporters: raise your game<\/a> when reporting on research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Dillon’s story this morning on the evident pending Giant Teacher Shortage IV: Postapocalyptic Horror… uh, pending retirement of many teachers struck me as extraordinarily poor reporting on a National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future report because Dillon wrote his lede from the first two pages of the report. Here’s what the report says, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-pO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}