Columbia Journalism Review Reveals What's Really Going On With Our Schools

Dig deep into the world of education with the Columbia Journalism Review article, "How Are the Kids?" The article deals with the shady activities hidden within the walls of most schools, the media's efforts to uncover these issues, and....

you guessed it! The NCLB Act!

Here's a piece of what you'll find in the article:

If No Child Left Behind raised the stakes for school districts, it also raised the stakes for those who cover them. The education story became a national political story (read: more important) the day the bill passed, and its initial handler was the Washington press corps. The coverage underscored the benefits of the unusual Democratic-Republican alliance that helped push the bill into being. It heralded the importance of imposing high standards and requiring full disclosure for schools that can no longer hide the failure of their most vulnerable students. And it forecast four years of welcome attention to the public schools. In other words, the news was good. But Washington reporters did little to shed light on the 1,000-page measure’s finer points, at least initially, preferring instead to parse its political implications.

Now that the law’s full effects are settling into elementary and middle school classroom reality, more critics are speaking out against it, and talking to reporters. The Department of Education was so concerned about the growing bipartisan wave of criticism that it paid $700,000 to a public relations firm to promote No Child and rank individual reporters’ coverage of it. Then, in January, USA Today broke the story that the department had paid Armstrong Williams, a conservative black pundit and radio host, $240,000 to shill for the Bush administration’s main education initiative.