School lockout tied to principals p.7

Your May 23 article on the press being shut out of public schools ("Do Press Freedoms Stop At Schoolhouse Door?" May 23, pp. 8-10, 33) was largely accurate and long overdue. However, it left out an important factor: the degree to which building principals assume ownership of their buildings and responsibility for events in them.
This is a double-edged sword. Principals answer to superintendents and school boards, but also want to feel proud of the building, faculty and students. Those concerns drive principals to exert maximum control. They are also extremely sensitive to image and dread the idea of others controlling news about their schools.
As any CEO would concur, a principal's very job sometimes rests upon image, accurate or not. That, of course, is where the comparison ends. The public has no need to know what is happening inside public schools, if nothing else to show that far more good than bad takes place, especially in light of the negative image in which most public schools are presently cast, school shootings notwithstanding. But principals fear the twisting of facts into inaccurate images, and if it happens, their distrust of the press becomes pervasive and immutable.
I have taught in a high school for 25 years, and for 18 of them, I also moonlighted by writing a sports column for the local newspaper in Cedarburg, Wis. At times covering high school sports, I maintained credibility by calling things as I saw them, sometimes pulling off negative articles by generalizing. Even then, administrators were critical rather than perspicacious and feared one negative article would ruin their careers.
It's also a matter of reader interest. School successes don't make Page One because nobody's interested in what should be happening. The few incidents of violence and sexual misconduct catch the public eye — along with simplistic solutions from politicians out of touch with real life in public schools. Stories about National Merit Scholarships and ACT overachievers don't sell papers. Principals know that and resent the lack of credit schools get for what many do so well. And what does make print rarely has the same impact as a scandal. Negative always outsells positive.
I'm not sure that chasm of trust can be bridged, especially in light of today's attacks on public education. If administrators could be persuaded the press would treat schools fairly, it would be a huge step toward an understanding and access. But their "fair" usually differs from an outsider's — and probably ne'er the twain shall meet.
As it stands, ironically, everybody loses — the press, the public and the principals — because all stand to gain from an accurate understanding of what happens inside schools. And that is more about what children are doing than about mistakes others make.
As in most kinds of journalism, we have lost that focus, so the inclination of principals to err on the side of protection becomes quite understandable.

•(Mark Cebulski, Whitefish Bay, Wis.) [Caption]

•( Editor & Publisher Web Site: http://www.mediainfo. com) [Caption]
•(copyrigh: Editor & Publisher July 11, 1998) [Caption]