Tennessean Gets it Wrong Again
A teacher ended her subscription to the Tennessean this week after almost 40 years in Nashville. The reason was the flawed reporting in the Sunday front page of July 29, 2007. The article was wrong on so many levels but the central problem is greater than Nashville itself: it is a problem with news media nationwide.
Source material: The interpretation and analysis here is adaptation locally of what Al Gore in his book, Assault on Reason, and Glen Greenwald in his study A Tragic Legacy presents as a problem with the national media. The simple fact is that since 2001, Pedro Garcia's relation with the local news media resembles in miniature what George Bush's has been with the national reporters.
Reporters complain that bloggers have unlimited space and can go into tedious detail. Bloggers complain that reporters do little more than copy press releases written by the school system's public relations people with no analysis whatsoever. The nearest thing that passes for objectivity would be the dueling quotes that may happen near the end of an article. To the teachers involved, details make all the difference in having a job or losing a job.
The reporter, Jamie Sarrio, may not be responsible for the headline. But the headline at the top of the front page contains the first two errors. Who is to decide when a teacher is a "problem" teacher? To be so labeled means that any protection for an employee against discrimination is a "problem" for the employer. Therefore, since employers in Nashville would love for everyone to be an "at will" employee, then everyone can be dismissed or otherwise discriminated against with impunity. The examples in the article related to age discrimination and discrimination against those with health conditions. Anyone looking deeper into the plan would see opportunities for racial and gender discrimination. They could also find potential for civil rights punishments: free speech, academic freedom, and union activity.
The second error in the headline was to mention the tenure law. This does nothing to violate the tenure law at all. The violation is in the contract with the teachers' union, the MNEA. Many counties which do not have transfer rights in their contract see teachers shuffled to distant schools almost on a routine basis. One of the advantages of teaching in Davidson County in contrast to Knox County, is that teachers are not subject to transfer for arbitrary and capricious reasons. This plan of Garcia's is simply to ignore parts of the contract and hope that no one can bring about a correction. The reality that is presented in the newspaper and on television is the only one that matters. To the extent that teachers think they can be transferred, everyone can be afraid. By presenting in the way that Garcia wishes, he creates his own reality, as Al Gore pointed out.
Sure enough, the reporter was distracted by tenure enough to devote seven column-inches to the topic. She even found a Professor Smith to say that this had never been heard of elsewhere. The professor must be very young. What is probably rare is for a Director of Schools to publicly claim that the teacher he is transferring is a "problem" teacher. But transfers in counties around Middle Tennessee are common knowledge for discriminatory reasons. The political problem with calling someone a "problem" teacher is that the community itself wants to know why the school board cannot get rid of the teacher. And the simple truth is that if the teacher is incompetent, inefficient, insubordinate, or otherwise in violation of ethical rules, the school board can and does get rid of such teachers.
Third, a teacher Beverly Jones, was quoted as saying she was being transferred for health related issues. The school system would not let the reporter see the teacher's personnel file in violation of the Open Records Act of Tennessee. At any other time, for the school system's purposes, personnel files are opened quickly to reporters who ask. The reporter did not point out the school system's violation of the law.
Fourth, the reporter took Pedro Garcia's claim of getting the idea from his California district, at face value. This begs the question of why he waited six years before trying it. In fact, the idea of making teachers uncomfortable has been long advocated by the Tennessee School Boards Association. When Garcia first arrived, school board member Kathy Nevill was the most verbal about moving teachers from grades where they had experience to grades which were totally new so they would be unhappy. She also advocated and succeeded in getting adopted the plan to move teachers from classroom to classroom just to add to their workload. So the idea of moving teachers to make them uncomfortable has been done and is legal, though not moral, under the tenure law.
Finally, the unsupported opinion of several administrators was that a teacher who "undermines" the principal should go. By any legal standard, being an "underminer" is unconstitutionally vague. Does this mean that the teacher complains about mold? Does the teacher have different ideas about how the "line up" of cars could be done in the afternoon? Does the teacher draw comparisons of how the Nazis, after taking over France, put all the French children in uniforms? Did the teacher file a grievance because her pay was incorrect? Did the teacher ask for accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act? Literally, any one of these things creates a problem for the principal that needs to be solved. In previous years in Metro, solving the problem did not mean getting rid of the one who pointed out the problem.
At no point did the reporter show awareness that the school board itself has rated Garcia lowest on his treatment of employees. At no point did the reporter consider the value of intimidation for other teachers upon seeing the possibility of themselves being transferred. There was no awareness of the priority of the school board's to "attract and retain quality teachers," and how this potential action would drive away young teachers. There was no mention of how a teacher could teach kindergarten for over 30 years in one school and then a first year principal, less than 30 years old, claims that the teacher is a "problem" teacher.
Newspaper people have a lot of problems, not the least of which is that Rupert Murdock is trying to destroy the idea of reportable truth itself. If Fox News and the Wall Street Journal can present themselves as just like CBS News or the New York Times, only on a different side, then the citizen can feel justified in believing whatever he wants to believe because nothing is true. This is an age-old struggle for educated people. Unfortunately, as more newspapers go the direction of propaganda, people seeking the truth have to turn to the blogs. The Tennessean has moved another step toward Pravda.