The real threat to our children goes ignored by education reformers' "report card"

The Nashville Chamber of Commerce, the preeminent and wealthy business lobby group, released their latest "report card" on Metro Nashville Public Schools. I only found one mention of poverty and it was in reference to Teach for America, which the Mayor indicated last May is a stop-gap for the loss of professional teachers due to budget constraints. The report's two comments on "low-income students" are relegated to an appendix and a glossary like footnotes.

Conversely, I found no references to wealth or the upper class. Such omissions insinuate that affluence does not have influence over the quality of education of truly advantaged students.

While the Chamber of Commerce may slight the ill affects of poverty on student achievement and try to shift more blame to teachers and families, some observers refuse to ignore destitution and pauperism as real threats to student achievement. Strong assumptions about and faith in the American meritocracy hinder real reform based on guaranteed equity of opportunity:

The first step to education reform, then, in the U.S. is to acknowledge some sobering realities about our society as we move further into the second decade of the twenty-first century:

• Childhood poverty in the U.S. (about 22%) is both relatively high when compared to other countries similar to the U.S. and inexcusable in the wealthiest society of all human history.
• Upward mobility in the U.S. has not materialized, and remains something to which we should aspire—but is not something we have achieved.
• The economic and equity gap between the top 1% and remaining 99% is growing, and thus threatening our goal of meritocracy. That 1% maintains disproportionate control over wealth in the U.S. and by extension disproportionate control over politics, commerce, and (most significantly) public discourse. The 1% must perpetuate a faith among the 99% in meritocracy as a reality to preserve their status.
• Childhood poverty is a subset of adult poverty, employment, and wages. Even if we decide to address childhood poverty and the conditions of those children's lives, to ignore adult and family conditions is to ignore childhood poverty still.

Ignoring the reality of the underdevelopment in the communities of many public school students and denying widespread paucity and the shrinking middle class, the Nashville Chamber of Commerce is not engaging in authentic education reform, but merely morphing a new separate-but-equal system oblivious to increasing income disparity. Rich kids will keep getting smarter; poor kids will be held back.

East coast blogger asks Crystal Bridges official why museum enabling Fisk art sale

O'Keeffe donated collection to Fisk in 1949

The day was a day that will live in infamy almost 6 years ago when news broke that North Nashville's Fisk University was trying to sell art pieces in its renowned Stieglitz Collection to pay its bills. Thanks to baffling of the school's more recent attempts to sell to the Wal-Mart Empire heiress, who has been busy scoring art from other places, the demand for Steiglitz seems to be waning, according to art blogger Lee Rosenbaum. She hits a museum official with a hard set of questions:

Q: The point is that [Association of Art Museum Directors] was directing its comment at Fisk, over which it has no leverage. And the place where it does have leverage is the place that desires membership in AAMD. My question is: How do you justify in your mind being the other side of a transaction that has been condemned by the leading professional organization in your field?

Dethroned journos

Timothy B. Lee considers the results for news dissemination of the Internet removing journalists from the paternalistic, privileged gatekeeping positions:

The reality is that a great many people still read newspapers, so it shouldn’t surprise us that the local metro daily is still one of the most prominent soapboxes in a given metropolitan area. But we’ve seen a proliferation of locally-focused blogs and news sites that help to disseminate news to civically-minded people in a metropolitan area ....

Things look even better if we look at the hyper-local level. Virtually every neighborhood has a neighborhood mailing list for exchanging local community information. Here the reporter-middleman is cut out of the loop entirely: people who care about local politics communicate directly with one another. A neighborhood mailing list is going to have vastly more information than would be available in a local newspaper a generation ago. Not everyone will have the patience for that, but the ones who matter most will. And the rest will take their cues from their politically-engaged friends and neighbors.

Reporters no longer have a technologically-imposed monopoly on their readers’ attention. Readers are no longer stuck with whichever local newspaper happens to be in their home town, and so reporters have to work harder to keep the audiences that used to be theirs by default. Not surprisingly, established journalists don’t like this trend. They liked the privileged position they enjoyed in the pre-Internet age, and they built an elaborate self-justifying ideology that portrayed their privileged position as a benefit to readers. It’s a letdown for journalists to suddenly find themselves on a level playing field with hordes of amateurs. But frankly, that’s just the world works: if a bunch of amateurs can do your job as well as you can, then you should probably find a new job.

HT: Freddie O'Connell

In case there is anyone still left who still wonders what bloggers do

Dave Winer and Jay Rosen discuss:

The natural born blogger (Dave says) is “someone whose nature is to do stuff without waiting for permission. To explain things, knowing they could easily be wrong. To go first. To err on the side of saying too much.” ....

Jay: ... Bloggers aren’t intimidated by expertise or certification .... “we need people who can just look at what needs to be done, look at the tools they have for doing it, and just start in.”

Seattle news site gives up advertising for non-profit journalism

Inevitable in many discussions I have about local journalism are quizzical responses to my suggestion that an untried model for sustaining good reporting pioneered at a few places elsewhere is 501-c-3. Last month Seattle's local news site Crosscut.com announced its conversion to non-profit status and enumerated the benefits:

In the summer of 2008, I began to suspect that an advertising-only model for revenue was not going to support high-quality journalism. The migration of advertising to the Web had slowed and the rates were staying low. The board weighed further investment against other models, notably the public-broadcast, member-supported model. We engaged Mike Crystal, my longtime colleague as publisher of Seattle Weekly, to look into the nonprofit model, noting encouraging examples in other cities .... Late last year, the board and owners voted to shift to this new model, and the owners of Crosscut LLC generously donated all assets of the company to the newly formed Washington state nonprofit corporation, Crosscut Public Media.

Setting all this in motion has taken some time as we assembled a new board, the case statements, budgets, and business plans, as well as securing our tax-exempt status and lining up early seed funding. Last November, we had to furlough much of the staff while we regrouped. Our contributing writers, now about 40 strong, continued to produce fine stories, and you readers have stayed with us and helped the site to grow. Another factor during the past year has been the very unsettled media landscape, particularly after the Post-Intelligencer stopped its print edition and many journalists were cut adrift by layoffs at other publications.

That landscape is still tossing about and discovering new fault lines, but I do think that one clear model (among several) that has emerged is the Crosscut model: serious about quality journalism, independent, nonpartisan, broad in its range of topics as well as geography and demography, and dedicated to "journalism in the public interest" as a mission-driven, community-supported nonprofit. This model has greater stability from three sources of income: annual memberships, grants and major gifts, and advertising and sponsorships. (No government funding, though; a difference from public broadcast.) Diverse sources of revenue translate into greater sustainability and flexibility. Community ownership means mission-driven and not tempted to be sold to other owners or out-of-town companies.

As an editor, I love the new framework for picking stories and writers and focusing coverage. In the commercial context, particularly in Web journalism, there is great pressure to run stories that get a lot of hits (gossip about Sarah Palin, for example), and also to do stories that reinforce a niche that advertisers covet (technology breakthroughs, for instance). Now those pressures are reduced, and we can think primarily of running stories that the public needs to know, including somewhat longer and therefore more nuanced stories that lead people out of their comfort zones.

Nashville really has a limited number of alternatives to the traditionally funded media. The Tennessean still operates on the wilting advertisement and subscription model of news gathering. So, does its competitor SouthComm, which also may be leaning on the state to infuse its source of venture capitalism in the near future.

We don't have a non-profit alternative news source here in middle Tennessee but there are plenty of models for founding one:

There are similar efforts around the country. The closest parallels are Minnpost in Minnesota; VoiceofSanDiego in San Diego; the St. Louis Beacon; the New Haven Independent; NewWest in Missoula and other Rocky Mountain cities; TheTyee in Vancouver, B.C.; and Chi-Town Daily News in Chicago. The general definition of these sites is: all-local, Web-only, locally owned, news-oriented (as opposed to ideological sites), publishing daily, and broad range of topics.

Is "Web 2.0" a replication of "Web 1.0" services?

Tim Berners-Lee rejects any talk of the sociality of "Web 2.0" as a misunderstanding of the web itself:

Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

When I survey current discussions about social media, I am struck by the romanticism and idealism based on assumptions that new forms of communication are fundamentally different than old ones. Berners-Lee reminds us that the web itself is a social medium rather than merely a network of computers containing social media.

Why journos be hatin'

Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.

- - Jay Rosen

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government

Not that I belong to an anarcho-syndicalist commune, but sometimes blogging makes me feel like an annoying peasant.

Netroots and Power

In his review of a couple of books looking at the role of the netroots in electoral politics, Henry Farrell downplays the impact of bloggers that some see in the 2008 Obama win. While he doesn't see their influence on behalf of the current White House, he does see more a more substantive role for the netroots in a broader context:

The story of the netroots is less one of individual heroes and villains than of the revival of an overt left-of-center partisanship that had largely disappeared from mainstream debate. Although many elite journalists and opinion makers continued to be liberal, they were genteelly so, preferring to maintain a polite consensus around the proper limits of debate than to engage in fisticuffs with conservatives.

The netroots are neither genteel nor interested in nuance. They want to aggressively confront a right that they see as dangerous and an establishment that they see as at best semi-corrupt. Their combativeness can be a problem ....

But they also potentially provide a model for a politics that can actually engage citizens. As political scientists such as Theda Skocpol and Nancy Rosenblum have argued, vigorous political contention mobilizes people and gets them involved in civil society.

The netroots may help to create a more participatory American politics. If they do succeed, however, it will be the result of their long-term effects in building political movements, not their short-term effects in an election like that of 2008, when they were not especially consequential.

It seems to me that the tactics of good bloggers lie somewhere between the genteel and the coarse. Participatory democracy is fractious and unkempt. But public discourse should not be reduced to free-for-all or a no-holds-barred brawl. Bloggers should be willing to mix-it-up under something akin to Queensberry rules.

And I agree with Farrell, that the netroots is better suited to influencing everyday politics than it is the party- and campaign-dominated election calendar. Frankly, it is wise for bloggers to form associations with interest groups outside of parties and political campaigns:

If the netroots are to have any hope of pushing back against the parts of Obama's agenda that they don't like, they are going to need more allies. These will not be hard to find. Civil-liberties organizations are unhappy about Obama's policies on wiretapping and lack of interest in prosecuting Bush administration officials who signed off on torture. Union leaders are increasingly impatient with the administration's reluctance to move forward on the Employee Free Choice Act. Left-wing economic think tanks are critical of bailout deals for large financial institutions.I believe that blogs operate at their best when they push agendas instead of candidates.

They're at their best and not likely to be turned into tools or to be discarded by agendas.

NY Times Blog Doesn't Leave the South's First LEED Certified Neighborhood Hanging

The Moment blog had a fist tap for Nashville this morning:

Now, it’s probably true that for anyone monitoring the Brooklynization of other midsize cities, from Baltimore to Minneapolis to Seattle, the Gulch in this early stage may seem like small beer. But for a city that, like many others, gave way long ago to corporate parks and spaghetti junctions, it’s a noteworthy thing for the New South to give up even one block to New Urbanism.

However, blogger Jeffries Blackerby, who says that Nashville is a city that he has "tried to love for many years," exaggerates the greenness of the initiatives with which Karl Dean campaigned and won in 2007.

I followed that campaign closely, and more than any other subjects I heard Karl Dean emphasize public schools, public safety, and economic development. In fact, if you look to Karl Dean's inaugural address, those are the very issues he embraces, referring to air pollution once in passing only as a means to focus on regionwide economic development. While Mayor Dean did appoint a green ribbon committee, I would not characterize environmental protection as the effective cause of Karl Dean's win or the hallmark of his tenure. Beyond the green ribbon committee he has had many opportunities to underscore sustainable economic development as raison d'etre and has not.

Thanks for the neighborhoods blog love, New York Times, but let's not hype the progressiveness of our Mayor's Office or forget that there are significant campaign promises he made that have yet to be realized.

Racist E-mail Story First Broken by a West Tennessee Blogger

Pro journalist and avid blogger Newscoma was the first to publish the story on Sherri Lynn Goforth (a state employee who sent a race-based .gov e-mail attack on President Obama to Capitol Hill Republicans); that story has been picked up by Tennessee's mainstream media:

Just to Prepare Those Metro Planning Commissioners for Their Trip to Virginia

A Reston, VA hyper-local blog has been chronicling and opining on the Reston Town Center (inspiration for Nashville's proposed May Town Center concept) since 2007. Here is the author's short description of that city on a hill Reston Town Center:

Reston Town Center (tm). Home to both Reston's Fake Downtown (which, like Disney's Main Street USA, seems built to 7/8th scale) and a godawful succession of strip malls and condos. But hey -- there's a Macaroni Grill(tm)!

If that is not enough for Bells Bend/Scottsboro residents to look forward to, then click to jump to a series of short documentaries on mid-scale retail amenities, pretentious boutique lifestyle options, and stylish color schemes that await the prospective Bells Bend traffic artery once May Town Center gets built. Did I mention the $90 million 3,200-space parking garage? Can you envision such a monolith to automobiles hovering over the Cumberland River at May Town Center where whooping cranes once frolicked when there was only one road in and out?

Hyper-local News Aggregators Follow Growth of Neighborhood Blogs

Build it and they will come.

Gone National?

A Politico blog linked this morning's liveblogging event that I sat in on with Blue Dog Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper.

TNDEM Makes Progress on Social Neworking Platform

Steve Ross on the Tennessee Democratic Party's new interactive website:

The new site is built on a social networking platform that allows users to not only friend each other, but also other party organizations and groups throughout the state.

Other improvements over the previous site is the ability to access just about anything and everything a user might want in relation to the state, or their county’s party organization.

This represents a quantum leap over previous efforts, and puts in place one of the campaign promises of the new Chair.

While a new site may or may not be “the” thing to turn the state blue, it represents a new tool for candidates and county parties to use in their efforts to better organize and inform their constituents, and that’s what grassroots organizing is about, making as many tools as possible available to as many people as possible.

Way Late Adopters

NYU's Jay Rosen with the media quote of the day:

More and more journalists are taking up blogging. But skeptics ask: can a few corporate newsies *replace* what hundreds of indy bloggers do?

UPDATE: Okay, we've got an honorable mention:

maybe people would be less likely to take a show on Comedy Central so fucking seriously if real news organizations, you know, the kind that tend to run for 24 hours, did actual reporting rather than let us know what their Twitter followers are thinking.

Washington Lobbyists Give Blue Dog Democrats Cover to Slash and Burn Obama's Domestic Budget?

President Barack Obama's popularity is still high and Congress's is not.

So, it is no surprise that Blue Dogs like Tennessee's Jim Cooper are ostensibly praising Obama's budget without having even deliberated on it in committees and on the House floor. However, financial, health, and oil industry lobbyists are promising to unleash their dogs of war on it as it makes its way through the approval process. Keep in mind that Mr. Cooper represents a huge Middle Tennessee medical industry and the Blue Dogs have a bad reputation for accepting corporate patronage. So, last week's faint praise may soon be forgotten if it does not serve as disingenuous posturing.

Guardian reporter Gary Younge identifies two disadvantages that the lobbyists face, and the second one concerns lefty bloggers:

First, conservatives are in ideological retreat and organisational disarray. The system they cherish - capitalism - is collapsing around their ears and taking their mantras with it. This was patently clear last week when Louisiana's governor, Bobby Jindal, delivered his ill-received response to Obama's congressional address. The problem wasn't just the delivery, but the goods. At a time when one in five home owners believes they are in negative equity, and fear of unemployment is rising in every region and class, people don't want to hear about the perils of big government and the joys of low taxes. Particularly from a party fresh from bloating the deficit.

Second, the left is better organised than it has been since the 1960s. It has a popular president, controls both houses of Congress, has a grassroots presence and - thanks to eight years of Bush - fire in its belly. A group of leftwing bloggers, unions and other activists have just teamed up to form a leftwing pressure group within the Democratic party. The blogosphere has done for the left what talk radio did for the right in the 1990s - provided the base with a platform and organising potential to put pressure on its leadership.

"The battle had been lost by the time the progressive community and its allies began rallying around the Clinton bill," Ralph Neas, the chief executive of the National Coalition on Health Care, told the New York Times. "Now, people are prepared."

Strap yourself in. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Bloggers v. Reporters: More Than Just Boredom

Whet Moser explains why reporters are getting their lunch money taken by bloggers. Moser guesses that risk aversion is much of the reason for journalists' passion-less (not to be confused with "dispassionate") writing. I would maintain that it is also because journalists' sources collapse their own interests with that of journalists, who serve as gatekeepers and pitchers for those in control. Consequently, critical questions are left to outsiders like bloggers, who as Moser points out are willing to write and to analyze for free.

HT: Jay Rosen

The Final Days of Blogging

R. Neal takes the Tennessee media to the woodshed:

People who should know better throw the term "blogging" around as a catch-all to describe every kind of internet writing. The media does it, and even supposedly educated professionals such as lawyers (see the WBIR link above) who presumably research their cases yet still use the terms incorrectly in their arguments ....

[T]he terms "blog," "blogger," and "blogging" have been hijacked, co-opted and corrupted by idiots and some people who should know better. Blogging has taken on a negative connotation that is undeserved. Any semblance of responsibility and respectability has been lost and will never be regained.

And that's why bloggers should stop using the term. I strongly urge writers formerly known as bloggers to start using the term "new media" or "independent media" (or something -- suggestions?) instead of "blog," the term "citizen journalist" or "new/independent media reporter/writer" for "blogger," and "new/independent media publishing" or just "internet publishing" instead of "blogging."

Blogs are dead. Long live independent media writing. Or something. And thanks a lot to the creeps who killed blogging.

Liberal Bloggers Join Others to Form Liberal PAC

According to the NY Times, several national bloggers raised $500,000 in September and brought it with them into a PAC with Moveon.org and unions with the intention of recruiting progressive candidates to run against centrist Democratic incumbents.