This must be a first: a New York Times blog post about a blog post about a phone call about a blog post.

The world has truly changed forever.

The usually sensible Washington Post editorial board sizes up the presidential candidates’ education platforms in today’s lead editorial, part of its “Ideas Primary” series, but shoots and misses. It’s not that its descriptions of Obama’s and McCain’s platforms were inaccurate; by and large, its analysis was fair. Obama wants more money and a litany of new programs; McCain seeks more parental choice, including online options, and more alternate routes to the classroom for teachers. I also have no complaint with the Post’s call for national standards and tests—of course “it is madness that there are 50 different definitions of what constitutes proficiency in math and reading or of what a high school graduate should know.”

Where the Post goes wrong is with its call for “something bolder.”

Would either [candidate] be willing to embrace the dramatic changes needed to shake up a system that fails far too many children?.... There’s a crisis in urban education. To significantly improve achievement levels among poor and minority children, scripted and predictable responses won’t do.

The Post hasn’t learned lesson number one of the No Child Left Behind era: what’s sorely lacking in Washington isn’t ambition, but hubris. The federal government (thankfully) doesn’t run our schools and has little knowledge about how or capacity to turn failing ones around. What it could do is provide greater transparancy about how schools are performing—yes, through said national standards and tests. But “significantly improving achievment levels among poor and minority children” is a job for governors and superintendents, not presidents and senators. It would be refreshing to see the Post explain that.

Update: This letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune, however, makes a whole lot of sense. (Consider the title, referring to education: “Washington has bigger fish to fry.”) Maybe the Post should bring him on staff.

No, it’s not Kati Haycock or George Miller or even Margaret Spellings. It’s Jo-Ann Armao, the education writer for the Washington Post editorial page. Consider today’s editorial on charter school facilities, or July 23rd’s piece blasting D.C.’s teachers union for playing games with its membership, or July 8th’s editorial praising Michele Rhee’s teacher pay proposal, or July 7th’s essay encouraging the candidates to make education a top-tier issue, or June 24th’s missive in support of the D.C. school voucher program.

Other editorial pages are good on education reform too, but not this good.

Mike and Stafford discuss Miley Cyrus’s new single, “Breakout,” which disparages school-going.

Some days our blog exhausts me. Not writing for it—I’m usually too busy—just reading it and thinking how I would have said something differently myself or would have bitten my tongue and said nothing at all. When we started it, I promised not to edit, just occasionally to point out what I take to be errors—and once in a while to pen items myself that can’t wait for next Thursday’s Gadfly or aren’t appropriate there.

In the past, these are the sorts of “corrections” I would have sought to make via quiet meetings in the office, but Mike insists that today’s fashion is to air our internal disagreements in public. So here are a few that cropped up today (which is just half over):

For reasons not clear to me, Liam wants to prove that the Democratic party is not anti-charter school or anti-merit pay. So he names a few worthy Democrats and Democrat-leaning organizations that themselves have advanced the charter and/or merit-pay cause. He’s right about the names. Indeed, there are more. But a few swallows do not prove that spring has come. Go to state capital after state capital around this broad land and anywhere that charter schools or some form of merit pay are on the table observe which legislators (with rare and honorable exception) are trying to make it happen and which (with rare and less honorable exception) are trying to kill it. Case closed. I’d love to see it reopened. But the ground is still mostly frozen.

Speaking of charter schools, I agree with our newest arrival, Stafford, that a two-hour-a-week high school is idiotic; but far from being a charter school, I read that Los Angeles Times article to suggest that the school system is very likely going to shut down a (somewhat idiotic) charter and then create this bizarre inside-the-system alternative for the displaced kids (and to recapture more state dollars for itself). With a little more digging I’m sure that Stafford, who is very able, can find out what’s actually happening in LaLa land rather than simply commenting on two short and less-than-clear grafs in a newspaper article.

And then there’s Coby. He’s very able, too (as is Liam, by the way), but I surely wouldn’t have issued his vigorous defense of the NYC education department’s new “truth squad.” He suggests therein that the poor mayor and chancellor don’t get nearly the media exposure that teacher union chief Weingarten gets (because she buys it) and that the poor, underappreciated bureaucracy thus doesn’t get its “sensible reforms” adequately noticed. Balderdash. Some of those reforms are sensible, some not, but I have rarely seen as overwhelming and relentless a governmental PR machine as the one that Joel Klein presides over—at least not in what we used to call the free world. Overexposure might be more accurate.

By the by, the Checker quote in the New York Sun that Coby tees off from, while accurately reprinted, originated in my own error. When Elizabeth Green called to ask what I thought of the “Department of Education’s new ‘truth squad’,” I, like any self-respecting Beltway dweller, assumed she was referring to the FEDERAL Department of Education. That’s what I was referring to when I said they might better use their money for NCLB repair work or vouchers than to add media watchdogs and blog eagles. It was Margaret in my imagination, not Joel.

And now I’m truly pooped.

While we’re on the topic, Checker had this to say of the New York City ed department’s new Truth Squad (from the same New York Sun article):

“I’d rather see them use their money to fix NCLB or to give a kid a voucher,” Mr. Finn said. “But I really do see this as a kind of natural evolution of a long-standing government activity.”

I’d like to see that, too. On the other hand, I’d argue that the ed department’s aggressive PR machine serves an important, under-appreciated role.

Readers of the Sunday New York Times find each week a rented column by union head Randi Weingarten, a space in which she typically appeals to the newspaper’s wide, influential readership to oppose sensible reforms. The Times and the city’s other dailies also run her (usually preposterous) comments any time Mayor Bloomberg or Schools Chancellor Joel Klein propose new ideas, a great many of which have real merit. And while Flypaper unequivocally has just cause when it elects on rare occasions to pillory a proposal out of the Big Apple, it’s equally clear that many of the bloggers falling under the Truth Squad’s watchful eye are guilty of employing the same warped logic that Weingarten wields on a regular basis.

Considering the proven power of unions and their supporters to wage effective media campaigns against important reforms in public education, it seems to me we should be asking not Why does the department of ed have such a big PR office?, but rather, Why has it taken this long for the department of ed to adequately staff its PR office?

Over at National Review Online, Liam reviews the HBO documentary Hard Times at Douglass High, which chronicles the plight of a failing Baltimore high school.

A lot of normally smart and generally sincere people have just made the dreadful blunder of affiliating themselves with Al Sharpton, one of America’s more unlovable figures, whose fingerprints can be found on an appalling list of divisive, racist, anti-Semitic, violent, and often bloody episodes over the past quarter century. (For starters, see here and here.) This man doesn’t deserve to be dignified with the label “civil rights leader” and we find ourselves wondering what the likes of Joel Klein, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Kati Haycock, Joe Williams, and Andy Rotherham think they’re doing. (For a full list of this dubious new coalition’s members, see here.) Though many of the group’s principles are sound (see here), if one is known by the company one keeps, a lot of people with solid reform reputations have just blemished them by association with Sharpton.

Update: Yet more evidence that Sharpton is greedy and opportunistic.

As lickety-split Liam just mentioned, the latest Education Next just got posted online and includes a short piece of mine examining the editorial board positions of the nation’s largest-circulation newspapers on two key policy issues: No Child Left Behind and charter schools. (Click on the thumbnail at right for a bigger chart of the results.) The latter fared much better than the former:

The charter school advantage is clear: 19 papers are somewhat or strongly supportive, versus only 3 that are somewhat opposed. (One is neutral and 2 did not write any editorials about the subject.) Meanwhile, the papers are split on NCLB, with 15 somewhat or strongly supportive, 9 somewhat or strongly opposed, and 1 neutral.

Still, at a time when national audiences erupt with applause when presidential candidates bash NCLB, it’s worth noting that a majority of newspapers are remaining steadfast in defending the law. And who knew that charter schools enjoyed such strong support from local papers? Here’s hoping they don’t all go out of business.

No, I’m not referring to this survey from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, though there are some promising tidbits. (Six in ten parents express interest in enrolling their children in charter schools once they are described as “independent public schools that are free to be more innovative and are held accountable for improved student achievement.”)

I am referring to the fantastic news (hat tip to Alexander Russo) that reporter Diana Jean Schemo is leaving the New York Times. Schemo wrote the infamous 2004 front-page story, “Nation’s Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal,” which was an AFT-aided hit job on the charter movement. (Read all about it in Jeff Henig’s newish book on the topic.) She also completely politicized the paper’s coverage of the Reading First program (see here and pages 28 to 31 here) and, in a 2006 column, finally admitted her own skepticism that schools can do much good for kids in poverty:

A growing body of research suggests that while schools can make a difference for individual students, the fabric of children’s lives outside of school can either nurture, or choke, what progress poor children do make academically.

Russo reports that Schemo is now working on a book about the Naval Academy. That’s too bad for the Academy—but good for K-12 schools.