Today the Washington Post in an editorial decided to not just advocate or defend but to act as a spokesperson for Mayor Adrian Fenty. In an editorial entitled A School for the Fentys the Post editorial board did what Mr. Fenty has refused to do and Ms. Rhee has only alluded to, that is explain in more detail why his children ended up at Lafayette Elementary School in the NW – one of the three most desireable schools in the district for parents to send their kids.  The editorial has much faulty thinking and reasoning not the least of which is the idea that the Fenty boys, twins, could not be in the same classroom at their own neighborhood school, West Elementary. While it is true that it is best to have twins be in different classrooms it is not the end of the world if they end up in the same classroom – it does happen (it did at my school).

Another example of the Post’s faulty reasoning is this line: “…-Ms. Rhee – using a process employed for other families in similar circumstances – assigned the boys to Lafayette.  This is faulty as well as desembling.  The Fenty’s bypassed a process used by other families – they not only skipped to the head of the line but were allowed entrance after the doors were closed. Lafayette had stopped taking out-of-boundary students by the time the Fenty’s made their decision. To suggest that they followed the lottery process just as everyone else does (and must) and received their spots legitimately is a slap in the face to each and every family that could not get their kids into the same school.

I won’t go into the obvious problem of what the Fenty’s did to get their kids into Lafayette. His actions and his response to journalists about his actions speaks for themselves. My problem is with the Washington Post.  It is imperative that we have a local newspaper that investigates and reports, not advocates and ignores. The Post has backed Mayor Fenty in most of his endeavors. They have treated transgressions by Fenty and failures by Michelle Rhee with kid gloves, often pushing these stories onto their online blog The Wire.  They refuse to pursue any story that might suggest that things are not going so smoothly on the education reform front, consistently advocating that Fenty and Rhee be allowed to do what they need to do to change the system in DCPS.  What the Washington Post does not state in any of their editorials or articles on education is that they are the owner of the Kaplan Testing Services and that Kaplan makes more money for the Washington Post then their newspaper.  They have such a big dog in this fight that the idea that they are an unbiased observer, able to report the facts of the issues and give the public at large a balanced view of what is happening, is patently absurd.

The Washington Post has a responsibility to acknowledge their conflict of interest and make clear with each, and every, editorial in which they back school reform in DC by way of Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee, that they have a vested interest in this reform taking place. After all, reform brings more testing and more testing means more customers for your Kaplan books and Kaplan tutoring programs as well as your testing services.

When others suggest, as DC Teacher Chic did in an online Tweet, that this is much ado about nothing I would direct them to go back a week or two and listen to Michelle Rhee’s podcast in which she says she sees nothing wrong with teaching to the test and implies that this is in fact getting the curriculum across to our students. It matters greatly if our biggest, and most prestigious, city newspaper is abrogating its responsibility to report in favor of advocating for its financial interest. The Fenty’s bypassing a process through political clout is a story that, had their name been Barry, would have been a front page, serialized investigation. Look hard at this picture and you will see what is so very wrong with it.