According to Mike Thomas of EdFly, the Jeb Bush financed blog, they are. He complains that the recent FLDOE study on charter schools didn’t get enough mention and he wrote: by and large, the media is hostile to education reform. Bias rears its head in many ways. And one way is selective reporting.
Maybe they are too busy writing about all the failed charter schools, about a half dozen have failed during the school year alone, among 226 overall or all the charter school scandals including the late night sex parties in Miami and about the operator of a small mid Florida school who made 800 grand in a year, among many others.
I can’t say how many papers actually covered the story but the Orlando Sentinel did and they had a slightly different take than Mr. Thomas. Instead of throwing charter schools a parade, they mentioned how they take fewer poor kids, disabled kids and ESOL kids and how when poverty is factored in charter schools were doing worse than public schools.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2013/03/charter-schools-outpace-traditional-schools-doe-report-
The truth is something has been hijacked but it is not the media, it is the Florida Department of Education. Mike Thomas might have seen this too had he not been paid to look elsewhere.
To read his piece check out the link below: http://excelined.org/2013/03/why-good-news-in-education-is-not-deemed-newsworthy/
Maybe they are too busy writing about all the failed charter schools, about a half dozen have failed during the school year alone, among 226 overall or all the charter school scandals including the late night sex parties in Miami and about the operator of a small mid Florida school who made 800 grand in a year, among many others.
I can’t say how many papers actually covered the story but the Orlando Sentinel did and they had a slightly different take than Mr. Thomas. Instead of throwing charter schools a parade, they mentioned how they take fewer poor kids, disabled kids and ESOL kids and how when poverty is factored in charter schools were doing worse than public schools.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2013/03/charter-schools-outpace-traditional-schools-doe-report-
The truth is something has been hijacked but it is not the media, it is the Florida Department of Education. Mike Thomas might have seen this too had he not been paid to look elsewhere.
To read his piece check out the link below: http://excelined.org/2013/03/why-good-news-in-education-is-not-deemed-newsworthy/
I enjoyed this quick read. I wish there were more professional, unbiased people in the media who were paid to do actual investigative reporting. While StateImpact Florida is somewhat useful, I think they take the FLDOE data as "truth". I don't think they have the time to verify or question the data...so glad you are doing it! I also think many of these Charter schools are just havens for narrow-minded people who shun diversity. Honestly, "The Villages" has almost no diversity anyway, but they also (according to the US Census Data) don't have any significant population of children under the age of 18 - so how in the world did they get a charter school that apparently services almost a quarter of the students in Sumter County?
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