When it comes to journalism, the Washington Post usually does a pretty good job.1 Their reporting on climate change over the past few years has been especially good (this story on The Drowning South is a recent example)
But that doesn’t carry over into the opinion section, where I’m pretty sure editors don’t live in the same world as the rest of us.
A recent op-ed in the Washington Post starts with the very click-baity headline “Why not pay teachers $100,000 a year?”.
So, what’s the catch?
Because when it comes to paying teachers what they’re worth, there’s always a catch.
An opinion editor at the Post says “The trouble with schools is too much math”.
He’s both right and wrong.
Education reporting in The Washington Post is very often tone deaf (see also almost everything from Jay Mathews). It has been especially so during the pandemic.
A recent case in point is an article based on statistics from the overly-large school district with the blaring headline “Failing grades spike in Virginia’s largest school system as online learning gap emerges nationwide”. A similar story a week later declares “Failing grades double and triple — some rising sixfold — amid pandemic learning”1, followed today by yet another article about failing grades in another Northern Virginia district.
One more bit of education-related bad commentary from The Washington Post, and then I’ll give up on this topic for a while.1
This particular column comes from executives at a “nonprofit working with education organizations”, which is another way of saying consulting firm in these parts. They’ve been given this space to explain “why Joe Biden shouldn’t give up on public charter schools or standardized testing”.