Emoting is not reporting
A spat has broken out between WRKO talk-show host Scott Allen Miller and Boston Globe metro columnist Eileen McNamara over a column by the latter on the decision by Needham High School’s school council to stop sending the honor roll to Needham Times, where it has been published for some unspecified period of time. In her column Ms. McNamara claimed that Mr. Miller discussed the issue sneeringly and implied that he is an uncaring “media mouth.” Mr. Miller has complained that his treatment of the subject hasn’t been sneering at all and that he, as a Needham resident with school-age children, has been personally touched by the tragedies that have befallen Needham’s youth in recent years. Professor Media Critic Dan Kennedy thinks the Globe owes its readers a clarification, if only because the newspaper seems rather loose with them anyway.
While Mr. Miller is concerned about his reputation in Needham, I’m taken aback by Ms. McNamara’s not overly informative handling of the story.
The backdrop to the disccusion over whether to publush the honor roll or not are several tragedies that have befallen Needham in recent years, perhaps most notably four
suicides. The decision not to make the honor roll public is motivated by a desire to reduce pressure on children to reach the standards required to make the honor roll.
Ms. McNamara fails her readers in several ways:
1) She doesn’t write how the decision was made or who came up with the idea, leaving the reader with the impression that it was all the work of the school’s principal Paul Richards. According to Jim Boyd at TheBostonChannel.com, the idea originated with a parent and the
decision was made by the “school council,” whatever that is.
2) She writes:
This is [Richards's] third year as principal in a town that has suffered four suicides of young people since he took the helm at the high school.
That may well leave the reader with the impression that the four dead were high school students, but at least two of them were not: One was a middle school student and one was a former high-school student who’d gone off to college. The suicides took place in an 18 month span from Thanksgiving 2004 to April this year.
3) Ms. McNamara gives the impression that the decision was based on facts from a student-attitude survey. She quotes a letter from Mr. Richards:
“Our stress survey data identifies a sub-culture among students where grades are scrutinized, argued over, compared within groups, and are a contributor to a general environment of comparisons between peers. While any of these behaviors are not extreme when isolated, the cumulative effect can be stress inducing (and not the good kind of stress that helps us all perform, meet deadlines and grow.)”
Ms. McNamara seems unbothered by the disconnect between the supposed problem, which is that students scrutinize and discuss grades, and the proposed solution, which is to not make the honor roll public.
It’s as if the school had banned the display apples to prevent students from eating oranges. Nor does she find anything problematic about the open-ended, catch-all nature of the phrase “the cumulative effect can be stress inducing.”
4) Previous reporting in the Globe suggests that Mr. Richards had already taken steps to reduce stress on his students before last spring’s suicide by banning homework assignments over the summer break, except for “reading for English class.” Ms. McNamara makes no mention of this in her column.
5) Ms. McNamara again quotes a letter from Mr. Richards:
“By having an Honor Roll in the first place, the school participates in a sorting of students.”
But previous reporting by the Globe shows that Mr. Richards advocates “sorting” of students who apply for Advanced Placement classes. That is at it should be, but demolishes the notion that the school can avoid “sorting” its students. Ms. McNamara, who may well not have asked the principal a single critical question, or any question at all, let’s the principal’s rather disingenous claim go unchallenged.
6) Ms. McNamara writes:
Talk to honor roll students in the parking lot after class and it is clear that not many of them care whether their name makes it into print. All of them care about the suicides that have, in part, defined their high school years.
Everyone knows the names of the academic stars as well as they know the names of their school’s sports heroes. All of them deserve to be celebrated. Richards has only questioned the method.
Considering the topic of Ms. McNamara’s column it ought to be clear to her that Mr. Richards hasn’t “only questioned” the method. He has actually helped change it. Heck, he changed it if one is to understand Ms. McNamara properly.
One could also take issue with phrases like “all of them care about the suicides,” “everyone knows,” “talk to honor roll students in the parking lot” or how Ms. McNamara believes the honor roll students can be both celebrated and kept secret, but, as everyone knows, perhaps through osmosis, Ms. McNamara is a Pulitzer Prize winner so one probably souldn’t.
Besides those reporting deficiencies, Ms. McNamara advances a a dubious proposition to support the de-emphasis of academic acheivement:
Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at MIT, has made a mission of talking to parents and school administrators across the country about the need to reduce the pressure to compete. She calls it “turning down the flame.”
I call it a brilliant IQ-test of sorts: If you’re dumb enough to heed that advice you’re clearly not MIT material. Those who keep the flame burning brightly will thank those who drop out of the competition.
From June 4: The economic reactionism of Eileen McNamara.
