D.C. Voice to Media: How About Some Good News on DCPS?
Are you tired of hearing how bad D.C. Public Schools are? Do you want to read some good news about the 45,000-student system? Well, then, does D.C. Voice have a petition for you!
D.C. Voice, a nonprofit advocate group for public education run by former D.C. Board of Education member Jeff Smith, is asking residents to join the fight against "biased" reporting and the push for "a more equitable media portrayal" of the system.
According to an email from Smith, the group conducted a survey that showed 68 percent of respondents read mostly bad news about DCPS, 9 percent heard mostly good things and 19 percent thought coverage was essentially down the middle.
Of course, the fact that DCPS is one of the lowest-performing systems in the nation, that it's losing up to 5,000 students a year, and that public charter schools are growing at a fast clip probably means that a lot of the coverage is going to seem "negative" no matter what.
Here's the full text of the petition declaration:
We the citizens of the District of Columbia tire of the media's persistent, negative coverage of events pertaining to public schools in the District. I sign this petition as both a declaration of my aggravation by this biased media reportage and as a plea for a more equitable media portrayal of local public schools' affairs.
By David A Nakamura |
November 10, 2008; 1:06 PM ET
| Category:
Education
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Posted by: IMGoph | November 10, 2008 1:46 PM
If the news is bad then to NOT report it would be doing a disservice to the city and the students. If our schools our some of the lowest performing in the nation then it would be lying for the Washington Post to report that the schools were doing fine. I would like to ask DCVOICE this question. Do they want the newspapers to just make up false stories?
Posted by: cambel1 | November 10, 2008 5:06 PM
Excuse me? I believe it was DC Voice that went in front of the city council and reported the bad things that happened as a result of the school closings and consolidations. EX: records being lost, students not knowing what school to report to, IEP's lost! Get real!
Posted by: candycane1 | November 10, 2008 7:14 PM
Here's some good news about a DC school:
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/476350.aspx
Posted by: pfish | November 11, 2008 8:07 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.
oh jesus, dcvoice, you sound like some communist party apparatchik, whining about how the latest 5-year plan isn't being praised enough by pravda!
there is a lot of bad news. deal with it. fight to make things better, but realize that the world isn't perfect, and just saying that it is won't make it so.