Given how much grief charter schools and other creative initiatives get from the government-school establishment if they don’t instantly turn at risk kids into Einsteins, along with the hounding of homeschoolers that seems to be on the rise, this story shouldn’t be allowed to fall through the cracks, or remain confined to its local area.

Last Sunday’s Rochester Democrat and Chronicle story (HT One News Now), which really should be read in full, would be humorous (”Kids Get Answers, Still Can’t Pass”) if it weren’t for the fact that real children are clearly not getting educated. This systemic failure will affect them, and, to at least a slight degree, everyone reading this, for years to come (bolds are mine):

Rochester students get peek at exam questions

Thousands of city school students got a sneak peek at dozens of questions on two exams last month — a scenario that has baffled testing experts, outraged local officials and raised concerns about the validity of the exams and the Rochester School District’s method of test preparation.

The multiple-choice questions appeared in review materials produced by the district and issued to teachers to prep seventh- and eighth-graders for their final social-studies exams, one of four required district exams.

….. District officials could not say how many of the 4,329 students who took the exams had also participated in the review sessions or received copies of the materials. But those who did so were drilled on multiple-choice questions and answers that were identical to and presented in the same sequence as those on the tests.

….. Each of the exams totaled 100 points, and the multiple-choice questions were each worth one point. The exams, in turn, accounted for 25 percent of the final grade in each course.

….. District officials defended studying actual exam questions in advance of a test as a legitimate method of preparation and expressed little concern about the potential impact that repeated questions might have on the validity of the exam’s results.

They noted that the final social-studies exams, unlike those for math and English, have no bearing on whether a student is promoted to the next grade.

Connie Leech, the district’s supervisor for secondary schools, said the fact that the questions and their answers appeared in the same order on the review as the exam was “probably not in the best judgment” but added that she doubted any student could commit the order of so many questions to memory.

“I’m not concerned that it’s a cheat,” Leech said. “What we were doing is giving kids a better sense of the knowledge that they needed for the test. It’s like giving them an open-book test. This isn’t a Regents exam.”

….. Exactly half of the seventh-graders passed their exam, an increase of 6 percentage points over last year, according to the district. The passing rate in the eighth grade was 56 percent, compared with 51 percent a year earlier

In my opinion, the newspaper’s headline and text characterizations of the students’ exposure to answers as “peeks” represent a deliberate attempt to understate the seriousness of what is being described. The district is acknowledging that at least some students “received copies of the materials.” Some “peek.”

Reporter Dave Andreatta appeared not to ask if any disciplinary actions would be taken; based on Ms. Leech’s defense, it would appear not. Andreatta also used what happened as a jumping-off point to air teacher grievances over having to “teach to the test” — as if any of that is relevant to what really should be seen as an obvious case of cheating. Finally, even though the mulitple-choice questions were only a part of the exam, he seemed oddly indifferent to the appalling failure rate, even given the artificial help.

You can explore the paper’s pages over the week that has since transpired to gauge reader reaction, which you will see ranges from understandable calls for get-tough measures to inexcusable excuse-making.

This story is a more glaring example of what I believe is a common local media tendency to cut underperforming public schools — especially urban public schools — breaks they don’t deserve. Meanwhile, as noted earlier, media sympathies usually are not with ideas designed to help parents looking for better alternatives that will enable them to break away from the public school monopoly, or with those who choose to take on the serious responsibility of educating their children themselves, and tend to perform that task fairly well.

Why is that?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From London, England:

Jul 27, 2008 / 01:31 pm – A priest who is a close family friend and former tennis partner of former prime minister Tony Blair has been celebrating 60 years of life as a Catholic priest.

Fr. John Caden realized he wanted become a priest from a very early age and went to Ushaw College. He has been serving the Catholic community at Sedgefield, County Durham for 42 years despite being told “it wasn’t the sort of place you’d want to stay for life.”

The Universe reports that the 85-year-old priest baptized the four Blair children and was one of the few present at the former Labour leader’s reception into the Catholic Church.

Fr. Jack, as he is affectionately known, has many special memories of his time at Sedgefield, including sharing a meal and getting a round of drinks for Blair and the U.S. president George W. Bush.

“I remember getting non-alcoholic lager for President Bush and a Coke for Tony Blair and then actually having lunch with them on a table for 10. I had to keep pinching myself to reassure myself it was happening to me aged 80. Surreal is the only word to describe it.”

Fr. Caden now helps run the parishes of Sedgefield, Trimdon and Coxhoe. At St. John Fisher Catholic Church, Sedgefield, two Sunday Masses are barely sufficient to accommodate worshippers, a situation that he describes as “a wonderful problem to have.” …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

Robert Burns and Robert H. Reid created quite a stir in the blogosphere yesterday with their dispatch from Baghdad, “Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost.” NewsBusters colleague Noel Sheppard accurately called it a “stop the presses” story, and ended his post with an important perspective that you really must read if you haven’t already.

Now that the story has had one overnight news cycle since its appearance at about 9 AM yesterday, I looked around to see how much coverage Burns’s and Reid’s work received.

I looked at what the three “newspapers of record” did (if anything) with the AP item; searched Google News for other coverage; and reviewed headline revisions made by outlets that carried it.

What I found is that the “newspapers of record” have given the pair’s analysis attention ranging from short shrift to omission. Additionally, the number of outlets around the country that are carrying Burns’s and Reid’s piece is much lighter than saturation. Finally, there seems to be a bit more revising of the item’s headline going on than I have normally seen done to an AP work; those revisions overwhelmingly serve to understate the impact of Burns’s and Reid’s content.

All of these items in combination lead me to believe that some journalists around this great land of ours are not handling what Burns and Reid laid out very well.

First, let’s look at what’s left of the three “newspapers of record,” and see what they have done:

• The AP analysis is not in the print edition of today’s New York Times., Instead, the Times has a story by Sabrina Tavernise (”Shiite Militia in Baghdad Sees Its Power Ebb”). In nearly 2,000 words chronicling the decline of the Mahdi Army and its leader, Moktada al-Sadr, Tavernise “somehow” forgot to mention an important point that Burns and Reid noted, namely that “Al-Sadr and top lieutenants are now in Iran.” In fact, the word “Iran” does not appear in Tavernise’s story, as the Times appears to be clinging to its foreign influence-free “civil war” fantasy.
• The Washington Post is carrying the AP analysis online, but not in its print edition’s “A” section. The Post does have a Page A15 story on Raid Juhi Hamadi al-Saedi, the judge who presided over Saddam Hussein’s trial.
• The Los Angeles Times, based on a search on the first eight words of the AP analysis (”The United States is now winning the war” – not in quotes), is not carrying it at its web site. Burn’s and Reid’s work is not on the Times’s front page, nor is it anywhere else in the “A” section. There is a front-page article (”U.S. war on terrorism loses ground in Pakistan”) with this dour assessment: “The Bush administration may leave the region the same way it found it, with Al Qaeda entrenched and U.S. intelligence officials frustrated.”

As to other news coverage, a Google News search on “Associated Press Iraq” (not in quotes) at 9 AM ET returned the article in its results, and had a link indicating “206 related articles.” That link led to a results page with two items, but after selecting “Sort by date with duplicates included,” there were 188 results.

That’s not awful, but I’ve seen plenty of AP reports get covered in over 1,000 outlets.

What’s also interesting is what some of them did with AP’s original headline. The alternatives chosen by many AP subscribers seemed mostly to dilute the message in the original headline, which in my opinion was not strong enough in the first place:

The New London (CT) Day — “Are we winning the unwinnable war?”

Arizona (Tucson) Daily Star — “Focus shifts away from combat”

Peoria (IL) Journal Star — “Inching along to victory in Iraq”

Salt Lake City Deseret News — “Is U.S. now winning war in Iraq?”

Fort Worth Star Telegram — “Iraq war’s tide appears to have turned in favor of US”

Newsday (Long Island, NY) — “Analysis: U.S. can shift from combat to peace in Iraq”

WCSH-TV in Maine — “Signs Indicate US Winning War In Iraq”

The Wenatchee (WA) World Online — “Tide seems to be turned in Iraq”

Leave it to the Christian Broadcasting Network to go in a more positive direction. Its headline, “Analysis: US Now Winning Iraq War,” dropped the “That Seemed Lost” that Burns and Reid supplied — just as Noel Sheppard did at NewsBusters yesterday.

Perhaps the most important takeaways from what I have presented here are these:

• AP’s decision to run the story on a Saturday greatly reduced its exposure. Though it can’t be proven, it apears that the authors may have had what they needed to complete their work in time to send it over the wires on Friday morning US time. They indicated that they spoke to General Petraeus “this past week,” and to US ambassador to Iraq Crocker on Thursday. They did provide a troop casualty figure as of Friday, but that figure could have been provided as of a couple of days earlier without affecting the analysis.
• The relatively few outlets carrying the story, and the headline dilutions done at some of them, probably mean that the 85% of Americans who don’t closely follow the news are not going to be aware of what Burns and Reid wrote.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.