Reporting on education

It's hard to fix a problem when you're poorly informed on exactly what the problem is and unfortunately, the media is doing a really horrible job of informing the American public about educational issues. Media Matters reported in November 2014 that only 9% of the people discussing education on TV news shows were educators. Unfortunately, this appears to be part of a pattern. In January 2015, MMFA also reported that only 16% of the people quoted in reports about climate change were scientists.

Alternet reported in March 2015 that reporters who really don't know what they're talking about on education are being lionized as “experts” when they're really nothing of the kind. A real problem a researcher quoted by Alternet was that “the 'experts' who are cited the most often are neither career educators nor scholars who've published and achieved advanced degrees; rather, they tend to be individuals from influential right-wing think tanks, with little to no scholarly work or graduate-level degree work in education.”

So if anyone is depending on the traditional media to inform them about educational problems, they're wasting their time.