Thursday, October 7, 2010
A national story on the charter-school lawsuit vanishes
Posted by Kevin Allman on Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 5:42 PM
Last night, Newsweek.com published a major story on the New Orleans charter school movement, concentrating on the lawsuit filed against the Louisiana Department of Education by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The story, by New Orleans investigative reporter Brentin Mock, said expulsion rates for special-needs students in the charter school system are "shockingly high," and asked the question "Does the much-touted academic progress of New Orleans’s post-Katrina charters come in part because special-needs students are being weeded out?".
As of this afternoon, the story has disappeared from the Newsweek site, his author page at Newsweek comes up empty, and Mock, reached by phone, says he doesn't know why: "I don't have any idea," he said, saying he'd last spoken to his editor, Ben Adler, this morning.
- Courtesy The Daily Beast
- Brentin Mock
Nowhere in the Newsweek story did either Mock or his editors disclose his relationship with the SPLC.
Mock said he saw no conflict of interest in his reportage. "This office is not the office I worked for," he said. "When I did work for them three years ago, it was not in New Orleans. I never covered any issue dealing with education down here at all." (Intelligence Report is published out of the SPLC's Montgomery, Ala. office; the lawsuit in the story was filed by SPLC's local office.) Asked if he had any relationship with the principal characters in the story, Mock said, "I don’t have any relationship with SPLC personally. I'm not on the payroll."
An email to Newsweek's Adler hasn't been returned; we'll update this post if it happens.
Last update: The story has now been reposted with an editor's note.
Update: A screen grab of the first page of the now-scrubbed story below the cut.
Comments (17)
Showing 1-17 of 17
This is a very important story that deserves national attention. It is a shame that Newsweek scrubbed the story. The question of proper accommodations for special needs students is an urgent one that MUST be answered. We could use a better focus on this by the local media (HINT).
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Can't do that, Amei -- copyright and all that. Here's the first three paragraphs, which should fall under fair-use rules.
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New Orleans, where more than 70 percent of public schools will be independently chartered after this school year, has been placed on a pedestal as a shining model by education reformers. The new documentary Waiting for “Superman”, which hopes to serve as a call to arms for education reform, devotes a page of its Web site to touting New Orleans’s new citywide school-choice system.
Charter-school advocates such as Caroline Roemer Shirley, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools (LAPCS), are boasting of the success they’ve had in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when much of the population of New Orleans that might have opposed those policies was displaced from the city. “I don’t think we need to wait for Superman,” says Shirley. “It is happening today.” National media outlets have similarly gushed over New Orleans, some going so far as to suggest that Katrina saved the public-education system in the city.
But is this supposed revolution really helping the most-disadvantaged students in New Orleans, those with special needs such as physical, behavioral, or mental disabilities? In July, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) filed a legal complaint against the Louisiana Department of Education alleging that schools have been turning away parents with disabled children and shirking their responsibilities to ensure that the special-needs students they do serve actually benefit from academic instruction. The complaint asserts that New Orleans schools are in violation of the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), particularly in terms of excessive punishment of children with emotional and behavioral problems.
The story you are referencing was pulled down by Newsweek over credibility questions of its author. He not only wrote for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, HE IS ALSO ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED WITH AN ATTORNEY CURRENTLY EMPLOYED BY SPLC. He didn’t think these factors might present a conflict? Newsweek was duped by the propaganda machine of SPLC disguised as journalism and corrected this mistake.
The story you are referencing was pulled down by Newsweek over credibility questions of its author. He not only wrote for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, HE IS ALSO ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED WITH AN ATTORNEY CURRENTLY EMPLOYED BY SPLC. He didn’t think this might present a conflict? Newsweek was duped by the propaganda machine of SPLC disguised as journalism and corrected this mistake.
If true this is a disgrace! Everything he has written on this subject is tainted garbage. Instead ofhefending it he sould come clean or he risks being put in the same category as those who have admitted to fabricating stories!
Claude
Umm. I could care less about the author's employment or social life. There are only two really important questions that have to be verified in this matter:
1. Does the legal complaint from the SPLC actually exist?
2. Are the numbers reported accurate?
Hey Moron Pat from Georgia, how are the public schools in Atlanta, and how few people even bother to send their kids to the county? I know the numbers so do yourself a favor and SHUT UP!!!!!
Cousin Pat from Georgia, you can see the complaint at the Southern Poverty Law Center's site, here:
http://tinyurl.com/32xfsyx
I was just at the SPLC looking that up, thank you ritamac.
For those of you keeping score at home, there is an actual legal complaint from the SPLC, with numbers to back it up. There appears to be some urge to shoot the messenger in relation to this Newsweek article, as opposed to examining the complaint on its own merits. But, by all means, let us persue someone's social life as opposed to talking about something that might actually affect how public dollars are spent on New Orleans schoolchildren.
As for the Atlanta school system, I don't live there, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, so let me take a shot at it: The APS's Superintendent is under investigation due to a large scale cheating-on-high-stakes-testing scandal, the Gwinnett County School Board has recently approved large scale experimentation with charter-school education based on "success" of the New Orleans model, and the DeKalb County School system is facing accreditation questions based on many suspect activities by members of its School Board. And those systems all appear to be functioning normally when compared to Clayton County's woes - last time I heard, they were all about to be put on probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).
But speaking of those Atlanta-area schools, and their constant focus on this "accreditation" thing, I wonder how many of the charter schools mentioned in the Newsweek article are accredited by SACS?
Of course, I'm sure I'm not a credible or unbiased source to speak about Georgia public schools, since I am a product of those schools and have several friends who's work is to teach school in Georgia, even though I no longer live there. I even went on dates with a nice young lady who was a schoolteacher in Georgia once upon a time, so I'm sure that even further erodes my ability to speak on the subject.
First, the "you are an idiot Pat" and the "moron Pat" comments are unnecessary. I think you should be able to counter your opponents argument without personal attacks.
As for the arguments about bias, I have to say that I am tired of that line of reasoning in our discourse.
"He's a liberal so he's wrong."
"He's a right wing conservative so he's wrong."
We can't even agree on facts anymore because we automatically presume that our opponent is deceiving us because of his presumed biases.
As someone who advocates for gay rights, I actually think it does harm to gay rights to simply dismiss anti-gay claims by noting the bias of anti-gay people. Rather, when I take on anti-gay arguments I like to address the flaws in the reasoning, the distortion of facts, or the outright fabrications.
I don't merely say "this person is a right wing anti-gay bigot so they are wrong," instead I present logic, reasoning, and acts to counter the positions those people put forward.
I find that to be much more effective than to scream about someone's alleged biases. "He's a liberal!" "She's a conservative!"
It's annoying an unproductive. There are no completely objective human beings. We all have our biases. So, Pat's point that we should be more concerned about the quality of the reporting than this man's alleged biases is neither idiotic nor moronic.
What Newsweek did by scrubbing this article is, effectively, keep us all from fairly evaluating what this reporter had to say about the impact of the proliferation of charter schools on our most vulnerable populations.
Yeah - rules in this house: disagree all you want with writers or other posters, but no calling anyone stupid or a moron -- we're trying to keep our corner of the Internet free from that stuff. (I don't even need to do the spiel about no attacks on someone's race, looks, religion, sexual orientation, etc., because I know no one here would do that.)
As far as the original story goes: indeed the lawsuit is real; I can't speak to the numbers in the original Newsweek story; and Newsweek still hasn't gotten back to us about why the story was pulled. If you want to read the original, the New Orleans blogger Liprap has posted it in its entirety:
http://tinyurl.com/newsweekmock
It's back with a disclosure.
The author is engaged to a lawyer from SPLC working on the case.
This guy is a fraud and a human with NO journalistic credibility! He not only wrote for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, HE IS ALSO ENGAGED TO THENA ROBINSON AN ATTORNEY CURRENTLY EMPLOYED BY SPLC AND INVOLVED IN THIS SUIT. He didn’t think this might present a conflict? Newsweek was duped by the propaganda machi...ne of SPLC disguised as journalism and corrected this mistake. Please write to stop this abuse of the first amendment that a man can get published in newsweek what the woman who wakes up next to him tells him is real, or maybe its the group who used to sign his paycheck, oh wait its the same group!
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/06/new-orl…
The fact that this "reporter" is literally in bed with the organization filing a complaint clearly brings the fairness into question. It's an example clearly slanted and highly questionable journalism.... and very bad judgment by Newsweek.
And what's the big deal if the charter schools won't let everybody in? Let's just continue to live in la-la land in this country. Sure we can continue to afford to have our little Utopia here in the U.S.A.
Wake up to the real world, You have to match perfect idealism with perfect pragmatism if you want a true utopia. So far, all we understand is that we think we can indulge everyone's expensive desires. Our schools spend unbelievable amounts of money to babysit our children while claiming it is education.
We pursue perfect idealism to our detriment. Want to give everybody that can't afford a lawyer a great one? Fine. At the same time you better make sure that your police have cameras on every street in every house or else all you are doing is letting the system get out of balance. A perfect system gives everyone a perfect defense while giving the prosecution the PERFECT OFFENSE. But you must have BOTH in a truly ideal system.
How about throwing money at every poor family without making any effort to make sure that those who don't seem to be able to afford to have or simply don't need to have children stop having them?
You think we can continue to indulge yin without giving any thought to yang?
If New Orleans school system is actually performing well, it is likely because a lot of the crap that says that EVERY single child is going to get EXACTLY the same education and reach EXACTLY the same level of competence is NOT APPLYING to New Orleans new system.
Go ahead, MAKE our nation's school continue to dump our tax dollars in the trash with total disregard to the advisability of the way we spend the nation's money.
Continue to pursue your completely twisted idea of a Utopia by wanting things that a sustainable economy could not possibly sustain.
Grow up. I know EXACTLY why this country is becoming unmanageable.
Education should have NEVER been the government's business. The current generation is NOT ready to take the helm because education, and the rest of the decisions that are supposed to belong to parents, have been taken from the parents and given to the state. And the state, without regard to its best research, its best teachers and its best intentions, can't replace parents in deciding what their children need. Neither should it be offering to pay for things that people must learn to save up and pay for.
Get the government out of our personal decisions. Surely you can see the wisdom in that. Or can you?
