By John Thompson.

While I disagree with PBS’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, I believe we should take his statement on John Merrow’s News Hour finale as a learning experience opportunity for education activists. Then we can make it a teachable moment for the non-education press.

Merrow closed his illustrious career with a hugely important report on suspensions at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy. Getler doesn’t seem to understand how big of a story it is.

PBS News Hour acknowledges that as the story unfolded there was a miscommunication with Merrow, the News Hour, and Moskowitz about student privacy laws. Getler doesn’t seem to understand the complexity of those laws — and how inappropriate Moskowitz was in flouting them. If Merrow had done something wrong, I sense Getler would have said so explicitly. Instead, he focuses on a new issue – the use of confidential sources.

The ombudsman recognizes that “Merrow is a highly-experienced, well-respected specialist in this field of reporting, so what he reports and says may be absolutely true and very important in disclosing questionable activities of a high-profile school system and the impact on young children.” He further admits, “I have no special insight into education procedures, can’t evaluate the battle that still rages over the accuracy of the statistical analysis used in this segment, and can’t really tell who is right and wrong on the substance of school policy and procedure.”

Getler’s complaint was that Merrow had to use too many sources who would not go on the record. I wonder if he has the same complaint with the New York Times Magazine’s coverage of Moskowitz. Daniel Bergner watched Moskowitz for months and says her, “impatience with dissent emerged as one part of a furious and almost crazed passion.” He cites two unnamed sources to support the seemingly noncontroversial statement that Moskowitz is “downright imperious.” When reporting on another charge that is intertwined with the battle over her Success Academy, the Times’s wording is very similar to Merrow’s on suspensions, “In talking to dozens of current and former Success Academy employees and parents, the critique with the most staying power involved the schools’ overly heated preparation for the state exams.” (emphasis mine) The names of those dozens of sources were not revealed.

Getler understands that the use of confidential sources is often necessary but, “This is not a big national security issue or something like that when sources frequently decline to be identified. This is charter schools and policies that we are talking about, a big universe and surely not everyone out there with a supportable case to make is afraid of Eva Moskowitz. Or are they?”

(I should also add that given the pervasive nature of Success Academy’s test prep, the universe of Bergner’s potential sources is big. Given the charter schools’ ability to “cream” the easiest-to-teach students, the universe from which Merrow could search for sources is much smaller.)

In asking such a question, Getler also seems out of touch with a much bigger universe. It has always been difficult get employees and others who are financially dependent on monied elites to openly criticize their bosses. This is an extra complex dilemma in today’s world where the corporate workplace has become so dominant. The difficulty of getting educators and education policy people dependent on corporate donors to go on record is especially acute.

Edu-philanthropy and federal school policy have bowed to a culture known as “convergence” where everyone is committed to being “on the same page.” I don’t think Getler comprehends the nature of education’s long term “culture of compliance,” and how top-down school reformers have created educational monocultures where dissent is a cardinal sin.

A much better analysis of the PBS/Success Academy dispute is found in the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple Blog. Wemple understands that:

Merrow had alighted upon one of public education’s most consequential issues. As outlined in this New York Times Magazine profile of Success Academy Charter Schools Founder Eva Moskowitz, suspension policy is at the heart of a debate over fairness and inclusiveness in the allocation of tax dollars for public education.

The big school reform issue, Wemple notes, is that in an age of competition-driven reform the charge is that “administrators foist suspensions on problem students to push them out of Success Academies and into other schools. The beneficiary of this approach, say those critics, is the test scores of Success Academies and their fellow charters.” Wemple also places the controversy in its context, “To illustrate his piece, Merrow tracked down a child who’d left a Success Academy after sustaining a number of suspensions in a nearly three-year run at the school.” (emphasis mine)

Wemple seems to be taken aback by a student’s three-year record, but I doubt it would be a surprise to any inner city teachers who I know. We tend to have multiple students per class who have “meltdowns” and “outbursts.” Wemple praises News Hour for an on-air apology related to that student’s record, but then he says the only thing in his post that I found inappropriate. Wemple writes:

Somehow, the clarification managed to echo a point from Merrow’s e-mail correspondence, as it strove to somehow extract the central characters from the piece: “Mr. Merrow’s report was not about any particular child but about suspension policy. The reporting included conversations with nearly a dozen families about their young children’s suspensions from Success Academy, as well as other sources, including one within Success Academy.” That’s what you call Ex Post Facto Story Redefinition, or EPFSR.

No! For anyone involved in our education wars, it is not a “somehow” issue. Education reporters and advocates on all sides of the battle know that the big question is “not about any particular child but about suspension policy.” Suspension policies, even on their own, are extremely controversial and important issues. Neighborhood schools and charters have very different ways of addressing their very different percentages of students who act out their emotional pain.

The reason why suspension policy rises to such an important issue, however, is that Moskowitz, and others who don’t have to accept and retain troubled students, have launched a fight to the end against traditional public schools. When any journalist worth his salt, in the course of researching a story, accumulates enough evidence that illustrates those dynamics, the story must be redefined to a greater or lesser degree. (Had Merrow found that Moskowitz’s critics were all wrong and had manufactured a slanderous campaign against her, would that have not prompted some redefinition of the story?)

Moskowitz tells Merrow, “No. We don’t suspend in order to boost our academics. Like, that’s just crazy talk.”

Any good reporter would then ask a follow-up question. It took a great reporter who had done his homework to counter as Merrow did, stating:

But our sources, including several public school principals, quite a few former Success Academy parents, and one person inside her organization, charge that is exactly what she does, repeatedly suspend certain kids to push them out. However, none of these critics were willing to publicly confront Moskowitz.

That being said, Wemple did us a service by linking the PBS controversy with what he says is the bigger conflict between the New York Times and Amazon. He cites the words of a former employee, Bo Olson, “‘Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk,’ Olson told the newspaper in a tone-setting quote.”

Wemple then makes the standard disclosure: “Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post.” He then explains that Amazon did what would be expected of such a company (and what Moskowitz and other reformers would surely do?), and it “looked at its personnel records as part of an inquest to check whether the complaints surfaced in the New York Times piece ‘were made inside the company.'”

Amazon then made charges against the employee who spoke out. The employee denies them.

Rather than be “shocked, shocked” that the rich and powerful fight back when challenged, Wemple writes, “There’s no claim here that after-the-fact attacks are a new thing. In fact, they date back years and have many veteran practitioners.” He cites both the big-money Koch Brothers and Hillary Clinton’s strategic research and rapid response team. The last word goes to the New York Times editor who “welcomes the use of new platforms … to take a chunk out of the New York Times.”

PBS, like the Times, knows that that when John Merrow or Times correspondents ask tough, “tone-setting” questions about Moskowitz or Bezos, or when they challenge corporate hegemony, there will be serious efforts to take a chunk out of them. Few people would be surprised that sources fearful of Bezos (or the National Security Agency) would be reluctant to speak on the record. I doubt the PBS ombudsman would be the least bit surprised if reporters challenging corporate power (or the NSA) were forced to rely on confidential sources.

The PBS ombudsman, Getler, seems to be making an attack on the News Hour that is based on two things. First, he doesn’t know much about education and, second, if he, who is an ombudsman, doesn’t know much about a subject then it is not important enough to justify the use of the confidential sources that the big stories require.

Conversely, it is hard for a teacher to understand that non-educators don’t understand how big of a thing it is to violate federal FERPA laws protecting the privacy of students. From my first day in public school, it was made clear that such violations, especially if they involve students on special education IEPs, can do more than get you fired. My colleagues and I were repeatedly told that we could lose our licenses over such transgressions. I still remember my shock when I walked into a high-performing charter school and saw its data wall, listing the names and grades of all its students. Obviously, I had stumbled across one more example of the way that favored charters – like elite activists – operate under different rules.

And, that gets us back to the story that PBS’s Getler doesn’t seem to grasp, even though Wemple seems to understand. The battle between corporate reform and traditional public schools is about education, as well as inner city schooling (which seems alien to many non-education reporters) but it is about more than that. It is about democracy, the rule of law, and the respect for our legal traditions. It is about the increasing resegregation of society and how corporate power is making it worse. It is about the working lives of persons whose paychecks are signed by members of the 1%.

If we want all reporters to treat education reporters with the respect they deserve (and that John Merrow has earned), we must explain why suspensions, charters, the edu-politics of destruction, and Eva Moskowitz’s vitriol are a part of world historical 21st century forces that routinely make the front page.

What do you think? Were you shocked that Eva Moskowitz revealed private student records? Are you surprised that people are afraid to go on record regarding Success Academy’s nonstop test prep and suspensions? Even if sources demand confidentiality, does the public have a right to know what Merrow, PBS, and the New York Times Magazine reported?