wasting bandwidth since 1999
Speaking of clueless education writers, as in the previous post, Jay Mathews again promoted charter schools in his column from last week.
It starts in the headline with a completely false conditional statement: “If charters do more with less, why can’t traditional schools do the same?”.
In his column this week, Jay Mathews begins with a premise I can agree with. I know. I was also surprised.
His concept is that schools don’t make writing a priority and that students don’t engage in writing nearly enough.
So far, so good. But then he heads off into well-worn territory, making the case largely about himself.
Returning to the topic of reporting on COVID-19, coverage in The Washington Post has been actually pretty good over the past eight months. Not perfect (leaning too much on the political angle), but certainly a whole lot better than the information provided by television.
One area in which they have fallen short is in writing about the impact of the pandemic on education. Their reporters jump all over a story when the conflict is pretty easy to explain, but rarely go deeper into how the crisis could affect kids, families, teachers, and the community.
I wish I understood why The Washington Post continues to provide print space for Jay Mathews.
Mathews was a long-time education reporter for The Washington Post and is now a weekly columnist. But then as now, his focus is extremely narrow. Most of his writing involves cheerleading for the Advanced Placement program1 and making excuses for charter schools.
Last month, Post education columnist Jay Mathews wrote a provocative little piece suggesting that maybe most high school students didn’t need to take Algebra II as part of their math program. As always, he applied his experience with school and life after to cover the rest of the world. Continue reading
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