Houston Chronicle Won't Admit Its School Reform Coverage is Coming Apart
Their piece on Houston schools volunteering to join the Mike Miles school reform program was what we call a "skinback."
OK, OK, I guess I'm supposed to say now that The Houston Chronicle played the NES schools story straight today. They did. And they did not.
Look.
I've been writing newspaper stories for about 150 years.
There's a way to tell a story. There's a way to not tell a story.
The story in The Houston Chronicle Friday about the schools that have asked voluntarily to be included in Superintendent Mike Miles’ special school reform program is what we in the business call a skinback. A skinback is a story that tries to hide a mistake by correcting the mistake.
It’s done in a way that somebody thinks is clever so that you won’t notice. But in the wrong hands, it’s always too clever by half.
For months now, the Chronicle has been publishing stories painting a dismal picture of Miles’ “New Education System,” called NES. Supposedly everybody hates it. The Chronicle’s headlines have been, “It felt like a prison;” “We didn’t choose this;” “A horrible waste;” “Plummeting morale.”
But this week, a thing happened. Not a story. A real thing. And the thing proved that the newspaper’s stories about NES as a torture chamber that everybody hates cannot be true.
The administration announced recently it was adding several dozen schools to NES. It wasn’t optional. The schools were coming into the new program whether they liked it or not.
But for various reasons, the district also created a list of two dozen schools that could come into NES or not on a strictly voluntary basis. In fact, the district told the principals not to opt in or out until after they had carried out a set of prescribed steps to make sure parents and faculty at the schools were onboard with the decision, in or out of NES.
Five of the 24 schools opted out. But 19 of them – more than two-thirds – opted in.
At two-thirds of these schools, the principals after consulting with faculty and parents said they wanted into NES. That is an outcome that directly refutes the drumbeat narrative of universal doom and agony presented all this time in the Chronicle.
I said here yesterday I was on pins and needles to see how the Chronicle would play this story that so directly contradicts the narrative they have offered in their news columns. The Chronicle’s stories have all been thinly anecdotal, based on a few scattered interviews, often unattributed, always bearing an uncanny fidelity to the anti-Miles party line preached by the teachers’ unions.
But this new outcome -- schools coming in voluntarily midway through the school year after everyone has had ample opportunity to see NES in operation -- is action on the ground. It’s hard evidence.
I said yesterday I wondered how The Chronicle would play it. They did do a story that factually recounts the decision by 19 of the 24 school to join NES. It was matter-of-fact and dull as toast, like instructions on a pill bottle.
But guess what the story never said? It never said this outcome contradicts the narrative of bad morale and chaos that the paper has been selling its readers for five months.
The bad morale narrative is what we call the lede. The story. Nobody gives a rat’s posterior about bureaucratic ins and outs. The Chronicle hasn’t been selling bureaucratic ins and outs to us for five months. It has been selling OMG the sky is falling at HISD. The story today is that the sky ain’t falling at HISD.
The Chronicle’s tone is sort, “Sky? What sky? Oh dear, is something wrong with the sky?”
It’s a way to tell the story and not tell the story. I know all about this stuff. Back in the day, when the paper I was working for needed somebody to write a really bad skinback, the editors scanned around the newsroom, crooked a finger and shouted, “Schutze, get up here.”
I love this two pronged story. Prong 1 is reforming the crappy school system that had been captured and strangled by the teachers union. Prong 2 is exposing the crappy journalism that covered up Prong 1. Today’s development is a win for Prong 1 fans.
Poor Michelle.
The next couple months are going to be good theatre.