Losing the News: The National Crisis in Local News

Photo courtesy of Todd Bainbridge

Do you recognize this building being built? It only took me about 30 seconds.

As a history buff, I often find myself looking backward for clarity and similarities during times of extreme change in this country.

History can also be a source of comfort by reminding us that things have been this bad before, and we survived.

Trying to get a handle on impeachment? Look at what happened last time we went through this.

What are the consequences of the concentration of extreme wealth? Read up on "the gilded age."

So there was a certain amount of synchronicity at work this week, during a time of extreme upheaval in the local news landscape, that brought Todd Bainbridge's photo to one of my favorite non-political Facebook pages.

There, on "Good Old Days of Pottstown," where folks mostly post old photos and "does anyone remember?" questions, was a photo of steel framework of a building being erected in 1925.

Recognizing the since-shortened watchtower at the Phillies Fire Company, where wet hoses were hung to dry; and the Trinity Reformed United Church of Christ I walked past for more than 20 years on the way to work, I realized it was The Mercury building at High and Hanover streets being constructed.

The Mercury building as it appears today.

It did not become The Mercury until 1937.

That's when William Heister and the paper's legendary first editor, Shandy Hill, moved the paper they had founded six years earlier, into the building.

But for all intents and purposes, everyone knows it as The Mercury building.

The sign remains on the corner one year after I wrote the obituary for news operations there.

In it's first issue, Hill wrote The Mercury would be “frank and fearless in all matters, especially in which Pottstown has a vital interest.”

In terms of the mission of local news, that remains as true today as it was in 1931. What is not the same, is our ability to continue to do so.

What's happened?

Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist for The Washington Post provided probably the most succinct round-up of last week's local news shockwaves:

Gannett and GateHouse, two major newspaper chains, finished their planned merger, and the combined company intends to cut the combined budget by at least $300 million. That will come on top of unending job losses over the past decade in the affected newsrooms of more than 500 papers.

The McClatchy newspaper group — parent of the Herald and Charlotte Observer — is so weighed down by debt and pension obligations that analysts think it is teetering on bankruptcy.

And the storied Chicago Tribune on Tuesday fell under the influence of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that has strip-mined the other important papers it owns, including the Denver Post and the Mercury News in San Jose.

Regular readers of this blog know that Alden also owns, and has gutted not only The Mercury, but the other papers it owns in its "Philadelphia Cluster" -- The Times-Herald in Norristown, The Daily

Space for rent in The Reading Eagle building.

Local News in West Chester, The Reporter in Lansdale, the Delaware County Daily Times, The Trentonian and its most recent addition, The Reading Eagle.

In addition to the relentless drumbeat of staff cuts, the most visible example of the strip-mining of local newspaper assets is off-loading the real estate.

In addition to selling The Mercury building, Alden has also sold or is actively marketing the Norristown, West Chester and Delaware County buildings and recently announced on The Reading Eagle's front page that there is "space for rent" inside.

Because irony never takes a holiday, I hasten to point out that this same cluster of papers provided Alden Global Capital, and its top man Heath Freeman, with a $18 million profit in 2017, as reported last May by the undisputed chronicler of these sad times, Ken Doctor and his Newsenomics column in Harvard University's Neiman Foundation for Journalism.

SOURCE: Ken Doctor

While not the highest dollar profit for the papers owned by Alden, at 30 percent, it was the highest percentage in the company.

"DFM reported a 17 percent operating margin — well above those of its peers — in its 2017 fiscal year, along with profits of almost $160 million. That’s the fruit of the repeated cutbacks," Doctor wrote, noting that none of that profit, none of it, was reinvested in the business.

Instead it was spirited away to invest in controlling stakes of distressed companies like Fred's Pharamacy and Payless Shoes, both of which almost immediately dove into bankruptcy under the leaden management of Alden and the "management" fees it extracts.

In the combined Fred’s and Payless store closures this year, roughly 22,000 people have lost their jobs.

Some of those workers stood with News Guild investigative reporter Julie Reynolds and myself in Washington, D.C. this summer when several Congress people and senators (and presidential candidates) announced a bill to try to regulate the wanton greed of hedge funds and private equity.

Alden's business practices are so shady, it is under investigation by the U.S. Labor Department for using employee pension funds as a piggy bank to prop up its bad investments.

And, as Reynolds reported last month, "A federal bankruptcy

Heath Freeman

judge on Oct. 16 ordered Alden to turn over requested documents to (Fred's Pharmacy) creditors and will allow them to question Alden president Heath Freeman under oath."

The creditors have claimed Alden's purchase of Fred's was "shrouded in suspicion" and the creditors told the court that Alden “funneled $158 million from a floundering newspaper business in order to purchase (Fred’s) stock—stock which has since that time lost 97% of its value.”

All of this to say that the employees of Tribune newspapers -- which include The Morning Call in Allentown, and the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Hartford Courant, the New York Daily News and The Virginian-Pilot -- are truly anxious about Alden's majority shares in Tribune.

"We're deeply concerned that Alden Global Capital has purchased a majority share in Tribune Publishing. Alden has hurt journalism and journalists," The Chicago Tribune Guild Tweeted as soon as the news of the sale of stocks to Alden made headlines.

The guilds of all Tribune's newspapers, including The Morning Call, immediately issued (and Tweeted) a statement that read, in part: 

Alden is not a company that invests in newspapers so they succeed. They buy into newspaper businesses with the express purpose of harvesting out huge profits -- well above industry standards -- and slashing staff and burning resources.

We know we are looking at the real threat that Alden is looking to bleed its next chain of newspapers dry.  

Adding insult to injury, Tribune announced just prior to the Alden stock purchase that it would issue a quarterly dividend to stockholders next month worth $36 million "despite the company being in the red by $9.1 million for the first three quarters of 2019," according to Doctor.

All this while telling the News Guild negotiators at the bargaining table for Chicago, Virginia, Hartford and Allentown that there is no money for raises and they have to eat a 6.4 percent hike in their health care costs.

Added to this Alden-apocalypse is the Gannett-Gatehouse merger which is also financed by private equity hedge funds, Fortress Investments and Apollo Global Management, which will harvest a whopping 11.5 percent interest rate on its loan, requiring savings of $400 million to make the payments.

Image filched from Ken Doctor's column

Some of those savings will come from cuts, particularly in markets where Gatehouse and Gannett both have papers. That means job cuts at the combined company of one in eight employees which, Doctor reported on Nov. 14, "would add up to 3,450 of the combined companies’ 27,600 jobs."

And at McClatchy, now the nation's second largest newspaper chain, a Bloomberg News headline indicating the company may be near bankruptcy due to its efforts to get out of its pension fund obligations, sent the company's shares tumbling 82 percent on the market across five trading days, according to Doctor.

With $700 million in debt, down from the $5 billion it took on in 2006 when it acquired Knight-Ridder, former owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, McClatchy owns 29 newspapers with a combined circulation of three million, including The Kansas City Star, The Miami Herald, The Charlotte Observer, The Sacramento Bee (California), and the Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, Texas).

If McClatchy gets reorganized through bankruptcy, another hedge fund, Chatham Asset Management, "the company’s biggest lender and shareholder, is in the driver’s seat," wrote Doctor.

And, Doctor is reporting there are rumors of a merger between Tribune and McClatchy which would once again put money in Alden's pocket. Similarly, Alden tried to scotch the Gannett-Gatehouse merger by making its own bid. When that failed, it bought stock in Gannett and supported the sale.

What does the threat of losing local news mean?

As Doctor wrote in his Nov. 20 analysis: "The impact is obvious. As America has moved from jokey indulgences in truthiness to a point where fact fights for its very life, it’s the bankers who are deciding what will be defined as news, and who and how many will people will be employed to report it."

Which is where I return to my refuge in history which, in this case, provides more warning than comfort.

We must use our time machine to go back to Medieval times to find the example of life without a free press. To be allowed to publish in Elizabethan England, for example, one needed to be in a guild (no relations to today's union other than the work done by both) which had permission from the crown.

And if you published without permission, or something the crown did not like, you were punished, sometimes with jail.

Martin Luther's 95 theses, a free press in action.

You suffered worse during the religious wars in Europe if, for example, you were in possession of a protestant Bible in a Catholic nation, or a Catholic Bible in a protestant one.

What were Martin Luther's 95 theses about the church other than an early example of the free press, the free expression of ideas presented to as broad an audience as possible?

There is no better indication of the importance of the role played by a free press in this country's founding than its presence in the very first of the Amendments made to the Constitution.

And while the First Amendments means the government can make no law abridging the freedom of the press, it is silent on whether the press can be abridged by other increasingly powereful interests in our society, like Wall Street's single-minded pursuit of profit over purpose.

That is the danger posed by monied ownership of newspapers and, perhaps, by the death of the traditional, long-standing but crumbling model of local news ownership.

As I said at that Washington news conference this summer:

"Wall Street exists to pursue profit. That’s its purpose.

 But maybe it’s time to recognize that some institutions in America are more important than profit; that these institutions should be in the hands of those dedicated to their preservation, not to those who willfully plunder them for a 16th mansion in Miami Beach or to put another addition to their Montauk beach house."

Yours truly speaks truth to power in Washington.

It's about more than my job, and the jobs of journalists across the country. It's the function those jobs perform that matters.

I've lost track of the number of studies I've referenced that show people's taxes go up without a local news source, largely because those same Wall Street firms that are breaking the back of newspapers to make more money, charge higher interest rates on bonds taken out by local governments that are not curbed by the watchdog oversight of a local news source.

Pretty nice deal. Wall Street makes more money on both ends of that equation. Yay vulture capitalism.

Other studies show without local people become less engaged in their communities, more polarized, vote less and fewer people run for office.

Thankfully Joshua Benton did it for me when he wrote the following in April for Neiman Lab:

What do strong local newspapers do? Well, past research has shown they increase voter turnout, reduce government corruption, make cities financially healthier, make citizens more knowledgable about politics and more likely to engage with local government, force local TV to raise its game, encourage split-ticket (and thus less uniformly partisan) voting, make elected officials more responsive and efficient, and bake the most delicious apple pies. Okay, not that last one.

Local newspapers are basically little machines that spit out healthier democracies. And the best part is that you get to reap the benefits of all those positive outcomes even if you don’t read them yourself. (On behalf of newspaper readers everywhere: You’re welcome.)

Without local news, or with newspapers that are a shadow of their former healthy selves, a gap opens.

"With fewer resources, though, reporters are more likely to report on an issue only when it reaches a public state of prominence — by which time the city’s plans may have already been shaped without much public input," Benton wrote Friday, undermining the "early warning system" that more robust local news coverage traditionally provided.

"As newspapers cut back on coverage — just as when they cut back on distribution — the first things to go are the farthest away from headquarters," he wrote.

Look no further than the Mercury for an example of that. I can't remember the last time I was able to get to a meeting of the Upper Perkiomen School Board, North Coventry Supervisors or Trappe Borough Council.

With meetings occurring the same night, I have to make my best guess and as a result, I miss things. 

For a perfect example, look no further than the Phoenixville School Board. 

Attending Thursday's public hearing on the purchase of a 30-acre East Pikeland property for a new school, I suddenly became aware that Superintendent Alan Fegley had a new four-year contract.

More significantly, I checked the minutes of previous meetings and was dismayed to discover it was adopted in September, several months before the current contract expires and ahead of the installation of a new majority on the incoming school board.

Phoenixville readers got no early warning from The Mercury on that development, despite the fact that it played out over several meetings and happened at about the same time an investigation into the mishandling of funds by the district's chief financial officer had begun.

Fake local news?

Sometimes, citizens fill that gap left by the loss of local news with more national news which is becoming more partisan and more fractious.

Many local journalists then find themselves painted with the same brush.

As Benson wrote: "as media consumption becomes more nationalized, the yelling and spinning on cable news colors how people think about their hometown daily."

He was citing a second research paper by Cleveland State’s Meghan Rubado and the University of Texas’ Jay Jennings titled “Newspaper Decline and the Effect on Local Government Coverage,” that interviewed local journalists.

One reporter was quoted in the report as follows:

One reporter said these resident attitudes were further tainted by negative attitudes about national mainstream media outlets. “You know, we’re not CNN; we’re not Fox News; we’re not MSNBC…we’re your neighbors. We want to do good by you, but we can’t do that if you hate us or you think that we’re out to get you or you think that we’re out there with an agenda. We’re not and I don’t — sometimes I just don’t know how to get that across to people who vehemently believe otherwise.”

Look no further than The Mercury's Facebook page to see claims of "fake news" being thrown at stories and opinion columns with which some readers take issue.

And sometimes, the gap is filled with actual fake news, and I'm not talking about actual news that Donald Trump doesn't like.

On Tuesday, The Guardian newspaper, which has an online U.S. edition, published a troubling story about "Locality Labs, a shadowy, controversial company that purports to be a local news organization, but is facing increasing criticism as being part of a nationwide rightwing lobbying effort masquerading as journalism."

It offered the example of an Illinois school referendum into which a Locality Labs inserted itself.

Hinsdale School News, a print newspaper that was distributed around Hinsdale voters. The paper had the Hinsdale high school district logo, and the look of a journalistic organization. But, as the Hinsdalean reported, the “newspaper” was stuffed full of articles, mostly byline-free, which had a distinct anti-referendum skew.

“The depths of what they went to were pretty egregious,” said Joan Brandeis, who was part of the Vote Yes Campaign.

“This was purposely done to mislead people into thinking that was a publication from the district.”

Apparently, it's not the first time. Here is the gist of the scheme as reported by Adam Gabbat:

Locality Labs operates scores of sites across Illinois, Michigan, Maryland and Wisconsin, often sharing content. In Michigan alone, the Lansing State Journal reported, almost 40 sites opened in one fell swoop this fall.

“It is always a bit troubling in the current environment when websites don’t really indicate what they’re all about, and sort of hide who is behind them, and I think that’s clearly the case here,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the not-for-profit press watchdog Media Matters.

“In the fractured media environment that we’re operating in now, if you’re just scrolling through your Facebook feed or your Twitter feed and you see an article, you click on it and you might take in the information from there without really ever wondering what the source actually is.”

The CEO of Locality Labs is Brian Timpone, an ex-journalist with a track record of operating dubious news organizations. Timpone’s predecessor to Locality Labs was a company called Journatic, which saw a licensing contract with the Chicago Tribune torn up after it published plagiarized articles and made up quotes and fake names for its writers. Locality Labs did not respond to a request for comment.

Locality Labs’ sites are almost identical in layout. The Great Lakes Wire is similar to the Ann Arbor Times, which bears a striking resemblance to the DuPage Policy Journal and the Prairie State Wire.

There's more:

What the sites all have in common is praising Republican politicians, and denigrating Democratic ones.

Last week Illinois sites – including the West Cook News, Grundy Reporter, South Central Reporter and Illinois Valley Times – each ran a story about a thinktank criticizing JB Pritzker, the state’s Democratic governor.

The stories were all written by Glenn Minnis – whose byline was also listed in the Hinsdale School News. None of the articles mentioned that the thinktank in question was a rightwing, anti-tax lobbying organization.

And the kicker that makes this all relevant to this column:

Opinion as news is nothing new. But the appearance of the rightwing-skewed Locality Labs sites, presented as merely local news, has been aided by the demise of the local news industry in America as real local newspapers have shut down in droves, sometimes leading to “news deserts.”

About 1,800 newspapers closed between 2004 and 2018, while a University of North Carolina study last year found that 1,300 US communities have completely lost news coverage.

... Gertz said people still tend to have more faith in local news than in national outlets.

“And so there’s an idea here that you can move in and take advantage of that, of both the lack of local news options and the fact that people are inclined to trust local news by creating these hyperlocal news sites and provide no little bit of conservative propaganda.”

As Doctor warned us, “the old world is over, and the new one — one of ghost newspapers, news deserts, and underinformed communities — is headed straight for us.”

What can be done?

Photo shamelessly stolen from The Colorado Independent.

Uncharacteristically, I will end this screed on a positive note.

There are success stories out there.

• In Denver, some who left, voluntarily and otherwise, the Alden-owned Denver Post started an alternative local news site called The Colorado Sun.

It is now in its second year and attracting more readers.

• Also in Denver, "where two major papers once thrived, a host of locally run, community-focused outlets are proliferating. One such outlet, Chalkbeat, is reporting from public schools and school board meetings, covering education, one of the biggest casualties of the attrition in local news—and successfully scaling to other states. Nationwide, over 6,500 philanthropic foundations, as well as tech giants, are now financing media initiatives," wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar.

• James Fallows of The Atlantic and his wife Deborah has been touring the nation finding all sorts of examples of small-scale local news operations that are sustainable.

They have visited and profiled operations in Mississippi, Maine, Massachusetts, southern California and the Bay Area and Houston.

In his latest installment, on Oct. 27, visiting the Shawangunk Journal in New York's Hudson Valley, Fallows wrote:

A theme that runs through nearly all of these reports is the importance of ownership structure.

Times are tough for little newspapers everywhere, but the papers least likely to survive are those that have fallen under the control of hedge-fund and private-equity chains, which are starving them into short-term profitability and longer-term demise. The successful counterexamples are mainly family-owned, community-owned, or in some other way bolstered against the pressure to cut the publication into insignificance.

Founded in 2006, The Shawangunk Journal is a print publication, now with a paid circulation of about 2,000.

What I found most interesting about it is its "subscription-and-micropayments business model. As you’ll see if you register (for free) on the paper’s site, NewsAtomic, after an introductory-offer period, articles from the paper for non-subscribers cost 25 cents apiece."

The paper is also recruiting future readers, and training future journalists, by partnering with the local high school newspaper.

• On Nov. 18, Christine Schmidt profiled the northeast Kansas-based Shawnee Mission Post for Neiman Lab and found that the thing everyone loves to complain about, paywalls, are making that site sustainable.

"More civic-info coverage replaced restaurant closures and car crashes, and the Post has now grown to 2,650 fully paying subscribers. That’s an annual run rate of nearly $190,000," Schmidt wrote.

“We started to look at what was converting people who just visited the page to people who wanted to pay us,” Jay Senter who founded the site with his wife Julia Westhoff, told Schmidt.

“The accountability journalism, the Civics 101 content we put out there — that was the kind of stuff that seemed to get people over the hump and giving us money every month…Things that were on the fires-and-car-accident side of things would get a lot of pageviews, but didn’t seem to have lasting impact on the way that people live their lives around here.”

• Or you can try the non-profit model.

This is something I've been musing about for several years, creating a non-profit community foundation that owns and operates a local paper, print or otherwise, and can accept donations and contributions which are tax deductible.

Salt Lake Tribune building.

It keeps the site accountable, and owned, by the community it serves.

The Salt Lake City Tribune, is the second to do it on a larger scale, having obtained non-profit status from the Internal Revenue Service.

Closer to home, our own Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News operation went non-profit in 2016 under the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

But it is not a panacea.

As Schmidt wrote in April, "unresolved financial issues, a new round of buyouts, less-than-stellar staff morale, and a leadership vision some consider hazy on specifics remind the Inquirer that it’s not safe yet."

As negotiations with the News Guild of Greater Philadelphia, of which I am a proud member, continue, the Twitter account there notes workers have gone more than 3,700 days without a raise.

On a smaller scale, Schmidt writes in a Nov. 20 article for Neiman, "alt weeklies," those often free publications you see in honor boxes in most major cities, are experimenting with this approach.

Last week a new report was issued (I told you it was a crazy busy week in local news) by PEN America, a non-profit founded in 1922 by such luminaries as Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, Robert Frost and others "to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others."

Titled "Losing the News," it covers all the concerns mentioned above, what one local official once described to me as "worshiping the problem," but also highlights some success stories includes some potential solutions.

Among the recommendations are: 

News organizations should:

• Collaborating with other local news sources on broader, enterprise coverage of major issues:
• "Investment in revenue-generating staff, such as subscription, membership, sponsorship, and development teams."

Non-profit news sites should:

• Build diversified revenue streams, including subscriptions, membership, events, sponsorships, and other channels to lessen reliance on grant funding.
• Implement and defend safeguards to ensure editorial independence from funders, adapting existing newsroom traditions, norms, and rules and enacting news ones for noncommercial models.
• Invest in systems and hiring in the areas of nonprofit management and revenue development, including teams to seek, manage, and report on grant funding
• Commit greater resources to preserving public service journalism that is local, rather than national, and that meets the critical information needs of communities

Tech companies should:

• Negotiate with news outlets to develop new, robust, equitable licensing and ad-revenue-sharing agreements. These agreements should incorporate the explicit aim of supporting the financial viability of local news outlets that produce online content. Negotiations for such agreements must include substantive participation from news outlets—including small and midsize ones and those that serve under-represented communities.

The federal and state governments should:

• Restore pre-2017 regulations governing the ownership of TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers to prevent further consolidation and homogenization in local news media.
• Explore legislation and policy to reduce roadblocks for media outlets aiming to innovate or adapt to new market realities.
• Recognize the civic and democratic necessity of strong local news ecosystems and approach the industry as a “public good” rather than a “market good.” 
• Increase financial support for local news to approach the levels of support in other democratic, high-income countries

News consumers should:

• Subscribe to and join membership programs for local news outlets.
• Donate to local news outlets (such as public media and nonprofit outlets).
• Speak or write to elected and appointed officials about the importance of local news and the need for more public funding and send comments to the FCC about their deregulation efforts.
• Inform news outlets of local stories that need to be told.

As Schmidt wrote: "The voices of the future of local news are yet to be determined; but the more creative the thinking, the better."

Because if we don't, as a nation, we're history.

The Sporting Life

As you might imagine, with my face now at the bottom of every story on The Mercury's new web site, it gets hard to go shopping without someone stopping me to tell me "you know what you should do a story on..."

That's OK, it comes with the territory and, more often than not, they are often pretty good story ideas.

But we can't always get to them all.

So the other day, a parent of a Pottstown High School student suggests I "highlight the fact that Pottstown High School athletes compete against much bigger and better funded athletic departments and still play with heart."

While this strikes me as a lovely sentiment, it is hardly "news" in the traditional sense, I replied.

As someone who played high school sports (Captain of the soccer team. No really. Stop laughing.), I understand the value of athletics, particularly in terms of team dynamics, teaching us to get along and work together with those with whom we might not otherwise associate.

(Flash forward to the adult work place.)

But it did get me wondering about the whole phenomena of high school sports.

Then, BAM!, no sooner does the thought hit my brain than this link to an article in The Atlantic arrives in my e-mailbox.

You'll forgive me blotting out my address. This post is
likely to piss off enough people as it is. I would just as
soon they not bring their arguments to my house.

Then the hard copy, at left, arrived in my actual mail box.

The case made in this article by writer Amanda Ripley is fairly straightforward, if not fraught with controversy for anyone educated in this country.

Her point is simple.

No other developed country in the world, pours as much focus and financial resources into high school athletics as the United States.

And, by what she sees as being no coincidence, all those countries are kicking our ass in terms of scores on math and science tests.

Now I'll be the first one to say those two facts laid side by side do not prove causality. 

But it is worth consideration, even if you would have a tough time raising the point without being shouted down by angry parents.

Here are some samples from the article:

...in South Korea, whose 15-year-olds rank fourth in the world (behind Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong) on a test of critical thinking in math, Jenny’s classmates played pickup soccer on a dirt field at lunchtime. They brought badminton rackets from home and pretended there was a net. If they made it into the newspaper, it was usually for their academic accomplishments.

Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education. (The U.S. ranks 31st on the same international math test.) The challenges we do talk about are real ones, from under-trained teachers to entrenched poverty. But what to make of this other glaring reality, and the signal it sends to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school?

 Another passage:

Even in eighth grade, American kids spend more than twice the time Korean kids spend playing sports, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Advanced Academics. In countries with more-holistic, less hard-driving education systems than Korea’s, like Finland and Germany, many kids play club sports in their local towns—outside of school. Most schools do not staff, manage, transport, insure, or glorify sports teams, because, well, why would they?

It's a question few people would ask out loud in the United States; at least not without a helmet.

Understand, this is not to knock high school sports per se, so much as to ask the question: If we really are serious about wanting to improve education without bankrupting our society, why is this question never on the table?

I found this example of 'keeping up with
the Jones's' on the Internet.

If the primary job of a school is to provide an academic education, and we're failing to do that because some of the resources that could be devoted to the classroom are devoted to the gridiron and the hardwood, are we not failing in our primary responsibility?

Athletics are often lumped in with other "extras" like art and music when budgets get tight, but there are quite a few studies out there indicating the academic benefits of art and music. Fewer, at least that I am aware of, about athletics.

Often, this discussion only gets put on the table in terms of an illustration of how dire a district's finances are. And often enough this is done, cynically to some extent, to get people to pay attention and come out to demand their continuance.

That's what happened in 2011 in Pottstown, when student athletes, artists and musicians stormed the school board meeting, their parents in tow, pleading to maintain those programs.

Few if any of those parents returned to the school board to see how else money was being spent once they were assured their programs were safe.

I confess I was surprised to see this self-same discussion, inspired by the self-same article, raised in a discussion Facebook page for Pottsgrove parents, yes Pottsgrove, home of the mighty Falcons.

At least one parent there thought it worthy of discussion. (However I can no longer find it on that page, otherwise I would provide a link.)

But often enough, the complaint is not "why are we spending money on athletics when we're cutting teachers," but "why isn't our gym as nice as the district next door."

One need only sit in the audience when the construction of the Pottsgrove High School renovations was being discussed, to hear that more people were worried about how big the new gym would be, and whether or not artificial turf would be used on the fields, than about how well equipped the science labs would be, to know important athletics is to most American parents.

During the Pottsgrove meeting I sat through, one parent got up and said, with outrage in his voice, that Pottstown's gymnasium was nicer than Pottsgrove's.

Pottstown High School's gymnasium is quite nice.

Imagine.

Pottstown's!

We can't have that!

What would OJR say?

Talk about keeping up with the Jones's.

(To be fair, there was as much time spent discussing the need for better music facilities as well in those Pottsgrove meetings. But, as I said above, I have less problems with this as, there is ample evidence that students who learn and play music have improved math scores. In fact, most schools require student athletes to keep up their grades to continue to be eligible play in sports, a requirement rarely required, I believe, for student musicians.)

Then there is the argument about physical education.

But really, how many 30 and 40-year-olds are still playing football?

Pottstown has installed exercise equipment

at the middle school that is open to the public.

As the article points out, you can spend half the money we do on athletics and invest it in wellness and exercise programs, as Pottstown is now doing, and teach children to be healthy for life and still have money left over for academics.

Others argue it is the only way to keep marginal students interested and motivated in school, and a shot at a scholarship to attend college and frankly, I consider this to be the best argument.

As I wrote about last Sunday, it is not only better for a society to keep kids in school and our of jail, it's also less expensive.

But I would point out that it is the only way "we know of" to keep marginal kids motivated and in school. And couldn't some of them get academic scholarships if we put more energy into teaching them?

Sadly, this skewed balance in favor of sports is more the rule than the exception.

To make this point, Ripley profiles a failing school district in Texas which turned its academic fortunes around once it eliminated high school sports, football in particular.

Even just a year without football saw not only better focus and better test scores, but fewer fights and less discipline problems.

Understand, to some extent, I consider this a largely intellectual exercise.

I have trouble envisioning a place where the Penn State football program is deified above the college's academic standing also being the place that decides to spend more money on academics at the expense of athletics.

Further, I am always leery of ever trying to promote one goal by cannibalizing another. We do enough of that in Pottstown already.


And hey, my own employer has an entire section of the newspaper dedicated to the coverage of high
school sports, so I have to step carefully around the hypocrisy land mines that litter this conversation for me.

People have on occasion asked me why we don't have a "Schools" or "Music" section covering school academics with the same vigor and dedication with which we cover athletics.

The answer, of course, is money.

It's expensive to put out a newspaper section and there needs to be enough advertising to support it. There is little to no evidence the readership or advertising base exists to support these sections, which really proves the point about how ingrained athletics are in our collective psyche.

Besides, the photos from sports are much more dramatic than a student with their hand up, or playing an instrument.

In the end, I have little expectation that posting this will alter the fundamental conversation we have about education in this country, the outsized role sports plays in the education dynamic.

But it would be nice if we could at least talk about it.

Has the American Dream Been Left Behind?

The wildly successful "Left Behind" book series imagines a series of events that revolve around what the "end times" some see described in the Bible's Book of Revelations.

But recently, I have had a few revelations of my own, and I think if something doesn't change, what we may already be witnessing is the "end times" of the American Dream as more and more Americans get "left behind."

It all starts, as so many things do, in our schools; or at least it is one of the places where it is most clearly reflected.

Conducted by Stanford University over 50 years, a new study has found that the gap in student achievement between students of rich families and those from poor families continues to widen.

Stanford researcher Sean Reardon found that the gap in test scores between the higher income and low-income children has grown by about 40 percent and is now nearly twice as large as the achievement gap between white and African-American students.

 "If you have money, generally your neighbors have money, which means you probably have access to better child care and preschools, and better elementary schools, parks and libraries," Reardon told the Stanford University News in this Feb. 13 article..

 
Cuts to social programs over the past several decades also may have had an effect, Reardon said.

"It's harder to be poor in America than it used to be," he said. "Some aspects of the social safety net have gotten weaker, and programs to help families through hard times have been dismantled."

Stanford researcher Sean Reardon

"It means that it's harder and harder to achieve the American dream that says it doesn't matter where you start, as long as you work hard you can rise above," he said.

Certainly, through history, family wealth has provided an advantage.

But there was a time in America when a good public education leveled that playing field, so that talent and ability allowed our best minds to rise to the top, what the founding fathers envisioned as a "meritocracy."


Now, as concerted efforts to use what's wrong with public education as a rationale to slowly starve public education continue to gain traction, it's what your parents portfolio holds, rather than what your skull holds, which pre-determines your success.

"We had expected the relationship between family income and children's test scores to be pretty stable over time. It's a well-known fact that the two are related,"Readon told the Stanford publication

Fareed Zakaria

"But the fact that the gap has grown substantially, especially in the last 25 years, was quite surprising, striking and troubling," he concluded.

Not surprising, but equally troubling was a recent post I saw on Fareed Zakaria's  GPS blog.

It suggests that as a society, we would rather imprison our youth then educate them.


"In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education," Zakaria wrote. 

"In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons, versus $5.7 billion on higher education. Since 1980, California has built one college campus; it's built 21 prisons. The state spends $8,667 per student per year. It spends about $50,000 per inmate per year."

As former Pottstown Borough Council President Jack Wolf once sagely said to me, "no matter what people say, look at their budget to see where their priorities are."


If that's true, and in a nation obsessed with wealth I think it's fair to assume it is, it is a sad commentary on what we have done to the American Dream Readon described and what Teddy Roosevelt, another president navigating the waters of an obscene wealth gap, used to call "the square deal."

An undated photo from the California Corrections Dept.

It's more than money, it's people.
 


"The total number of Americans under correctional supervision (prison, parole, etc.) is 7.1 million, more than the entire state of Massachusetts," wrote Zakaria.

He added that. "Adam Gopnik writes in the New Yorker, "Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America...than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."


America was once the "land of opportunity," where even if you didn't want to conquer wall street, a good public education and a good work ethic meant a good shot at a good job and that could support a family without mortgaging their future.



But those jobs seem fewer and far between these days and more and more families continue to slip beneath the poverty line where, the Stanford study tells us, their children will be statistically less and less able to achieve in school, dooming them to repeat the cycle and increasing the likelihood they will end up behind bars.

When you look at the long view, it becomes obvious that in many ways, we are shooting ourselves in the foot because the status quo is simply unsustainable.


Consider this demographic inevitability -- we're getting older.

By 2030, seniors will be 20% of the U.S. population

According to this blog on The New York Times web site: "In 2008, an estimated 39 million people in the United States were 65 or older — just over 13 percent of the population. By 2030, when all surviving baby boomers will be over 65, the report projects there will be 72 million seniors, about 20 percent of the population."

"Living longer does not come cheaply, the blog reports. "After adjustment for inflation, annual health care costs for the average senior increased from $9,224 in 1992 to $15,081 in 2006."

Ouch.

So we will be living longer, have fewer people working to pay into Social Security and Medicare and have more people than ever requiring more expensive medical care.

By itself, this demographic is frightening enough.

But now multiply the fiscal impact by the number of people who could be educated and trained to contribute toward those costs, but who we are incarcerating instead, making them a drain on our  society and economy instead of a resource.

Is this the only option left for paying our
medical costs as seniors?

Scared yet?

I am.

To better understand how a drop in the number of working-age adults affects an economy supporting a large senior population, read Megan McArdle's excellent analysis of Europe's financial problems in this month's Atlantic magazine.

The basics are that for an economy to grow its way out of deficit, which is the more efficient and less painful way than cutting costs, it needs a steady population growth to provide the workers and consumers that will push the economy toward health.

It also needs young people who are at the start of their earning cycle, and willing to take risks, rather than those at the end who, quite naturally, want to conserve what they have to live their remaining years in comfort.

But now, even those who are not yet at the end of the earning cycle, want their pile to be bigger.

Not only is America getting demographically heavy at the tail end of the life cycle, we are hoarding the money and keeping it from funding an adequate education that not only provides productive citizens to pay for our golden years, but also keeps them out of jail.

Not only is this morally preferable, but it's far less expensive, to educate children rather than to imprison them.

(But for some reason, it's far less politically palatable. I would hate to think the reason for that is that,  according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, blacks makes up nearly 40 percent of the federal prison population but only 13 percent of the total population of the nation over all, according to the U.S. Census.)

Even Wall Street is starting to see the undeniable.

Not only is it wrong, it's unsustainable.

Even Wall Street is getting clued in to the fact that we are shooting ourselves in both feet.

A report last fall in Bloomberg noted that: "A widening gap between rich and poor is reshaping the U.S. economy, leaving it more vulnerable to recurring financial crises and less likely to generate enduring expansions."

"Left unchecked, the decades-long trend toward increasing inequality may condemn Wall Street to a generation of unimpressive returns and even shake social stability, economists and financial-industry executives say," Bloomberg reported.

Since 1980, about 5 percent of annual national income has shifted from the middle class to the nation’s richest households. That means the wealthiest 5,934 households last year enjoyed an additional $650 billion -- about $109 million apiece -- beyond what they would have had if the economic pie had been divided as it was in 1980, according to Census Bureau data, Bloomberg reported. 

“Income inequality in this country is just getting worse and worse and worse,” James Chanos, president and founder of New York-based Kynikos Associates Ltd., told Bloomberg Radio. “And that is not a recipe for stable economic growth when the rich are getting richer and everybody else is being left behind.”

Remember when we pledged that there would be "No Child Left Behind?"

Undermining Public Education, Hobbles Our Hope for the Future

Undermining education undermines jobs

As the presidential campaign gears up and every candidate is sure to use the word "jobs" in every sentence they speak, I am sometimes struck by the acknowledgement gap that exists between the words "jobs" and "education."

Education, particularly public education, is a dirty word these days.

Depending on who you listen to, education is either the primary cause of Pennsylvania's budget deficit, a financial black hole into which the public's money is recklessly and unthinkingly flung, the refuge of lazy teachers who get every summer off; or, in some extreme cases, "factories" where "weird socialization" occurs.

To which I say, even if all of that were true, and I doubt it is, that does not do away with the need for the function.

Why can't we agree to fix public education, instead of "throwing the baby out with the bath water," or trying to starve public education into some kind of stasis, so we then can blame it for not adequately educating our kids.

The educator bubble?

I will be the first person to say that sometimes it seems that educators live in a bubble, separated from the real world where the rest of us have been paying a heavy share of their own health benefits for more than a decade and go years without a raise.

At the same time, not many of us can say we've spent any time in their world, struggling to deliver a mandated curriculum to a room packed with 20 to 30 6-year-olds, several of whom have severe learning disabilities but are nevertheless judged by the same standardized tests which have become the only measure for the value we place on education.

What got me started on all this was, first, this article in The Atlantic about how complicated manufacturing jobs have become in America and the need for an educated work force to man the factory jobs for which a high school education is no longer adequate.

Then I saw this article in Sunday's Washington Post and I really got riled.

Today's manufacturing machines are complex

We keep talking about how manufacturing jobs have left the U.S. for Asia, Mexico and elsewhere, and it's true they have.

The U.S. has lost nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs in the past 10 years.

(And how is China preparing to receive those jobs? A massive public education effort.Would that we had that much foresight.)

But significantly, the Post also revealed that a recent report for the Manufacturing Institute found that as many as 600,000 manufacturing jobs in this country are going unfilled.

Why?

A shortage of skilled workers.

Factory floors these days look more like laboratory clean rooms than grease and metal-filing filled machine shops, with high-tech computers doing the work once done by 10 un-skilled laborers.

Lament it if you will, but we won't be going back -- ever. Time to adjust to the present and plan for the future.

Here's the thing, those machines need at least one skilled workers to run, program and maintain them. Add to that the fact that many of the workers who remain and run these machines are aging and we may soon find even more jobs leaving for overseas, not because it's cheaper, but because the workers there are better educated.


So what's our plan?

Apparently, cut public funding for public education.

Have we not learned yet that it's cheaper to educate our citizens, then to imprison them or support them indefinitely on Welfare?

The Post article quotes 27-year-old Greg Rowles who got a job paying between $18 to $28 per hour because he "took some classes at the local community college."

Pottstown's Western Campus of Montgomery County Community College is among the 50-fastest growing in the country, but when it comes time to prepare for a future of high-tech manufacturing jobs, what is our plan?

Cut community college funding.

In a Feb. 7 article I wrote for The Mercury, MCCC President Karen Stout lamented this short-sighted approach as is proposed on Gov. Tom Corbett's budget.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett

In his budget address, Gov. Corbett said: “Maintaining our commitment to the technical professions and practical trades keeps a bargain with today and builds for tomorrow. As our energy sector expands and manufacturing revives, Pennsylvania needs a trained work force ready to meet the demand for workers."

This will apparently be achieved with a  4 percent cut to MCCC's budget, on top of last year's cut of 10 percent.

“On a per-student basis, we’re looking at the same level of state funding that we received in 1994,” Stout told me.

Like the Post story, Stout said that manufacturers here in Montgomery County need qualified workers.

A Feb. 17 lasagna dinner raised $1,187 for West Campus scholarships

" I was meeting with CEOs of manufacturing firms in the Upper Perk area and they were explaining how important the work we’re doing is to those companies, and the jobs it will create, but we can’t keep offering new programs that adapt to the needs of the job market with these constant cuts to our funding,” said Stout.

The cuts will, in all likelihood, lead to an increase in tuition costs and a need for more lasagna dinners like the one shown here to raise more money for more scholarships.

Which brings me to another aspect of how we're sabotaging our best chances of growing our way out of this recession.

Rich kids are doing better than poor kids in testing

The third spoke in this tirade of mine was this Reuters article, which also ran in The Atlantic, which looks at new research showing that "the difference in test scores between affluent and underprivileged students has grown 40 percent since the 1960s."

The achievement gap between rich and poor students is now twice the gap between white and black students.

More worrisome is information that indicates when it comes to college-completion rates, the rich-poor gulf has grown by 50 percent since the 1980s, according to the Reuters report, which was based on this more detailed report in The New York Times.

Poor kids are now 50% less likely to finish college than rich ones

So what are we doing to level the playing field for poor families? Why making it even more tilted in favor of affluent families of course.

As The Mercury reported last year, Pennsylvania's lopsided method for public education funding discriminates against the Commonwealth's children based solely on their zip code.

Poor communities like Pottstown are getting the scraps. Under Corbett's proposals, state funding was to be cut by $600 per student last year in Pottstown, leading to the painful contemplation of cuts to music and art.

But in places like affluent Lower Merion -- where two new high schools, one complete with an indoor pool, had just been completed -- Corbett wanted to cut funding by a mere $83 per student.

This year's spread, shown below in a chart I made for this story in Sunday's edition of The Mercury, is less extreme, but the pattern remains the same.

So let's put all this together.

Children, the workers of tomorrow, from low-income families have less chance of doing well in school and even less of a chance of completing college; so we cut the funding to their primary and secondary schools; this while the increasingly well-paying manufacturing jobs left in the U.S., will require even greater education; this while we cut funding to community colleges, the cheapest and most applicable college education to allow those poor children to access those jobs; and therefore make it even less likely those children can afford the education they need to get those jobs, and perhaps improve the odds for success of their children, the next generation of American workers after them.


Someone please explain to me how this is a sustainable plan for long-term success.


Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't see it.

Tell me how the above ensures the future success of all Americans and the continued success of our nation.

And don't tell me what you don't want to pay for.

I didn't want to pay trillions for the Iraq war, but that's the price we pay for living in a Democracy.

I agree, no one wants to pay for failing schools. But why can't we figure out how to make them successful schools?  Is it really that hard?

Shouldn't every politician prefer to pay for schools over prisons? Shouldn't we the taxpayers?


So enough fulminating, the real question is, what to do about it?

The answer, I believe, is to fix what's wrong with public education, not torpedo it and hope "the market" will get the job done. That's the easy way out.

(The market works for some things. I believe that now. I've seen it. But it is not a panacea for everything that ails us.)

Admittedly, fixing what's wrong with public schools  -- and I take a moment here to point out that there is a lot that is right with public schools -- is hard, complicated and politically explosive work.

But we don't elect our public officials to make easy choices do we? If that were the case, we could leave it all in the hands of Pottstown Borough Council.


It will require sacrificing some sacred cows.

In all likelihood, it will mean lower pensions for educators, more contributions toward their health benefits and consolidation of school districts, perhaps to the county level as is done in Maryland.

It will also require a state funding formula closer to the one implemented by the prior administration which is based on the "costing out study," which looks at a district's actual costs in determining how much aid it should receive and uses that to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students.

It could be funded by (shudder) a tax hike or a revenue source from, say, a natural resource we have in abundance and now being harvested at bargain basement prices.

But we have to do something other than let public education die on the vine. The founders realized this and saw the need for an educated population to make this republic work.

Until the founding of the United States, society had two models to choose from: either elites ran everything and enjoyed all the benefits, or, as was the case before that, there was chaos and all that mattered was who was strongest.

The founders tried to walk the line between those two, envisioning "the best" of the nation naturally assuming leadership (which, admittedly, to them, meant white, land-holding males); but they also pictured "the best" leading an educated populace, one that could understand the issues facing the nation and come to logical well-reasoned decisions (and votes) about how to face them.

To accomplish this, they favored a radical plan of raising public discourse and decision, by educating the public, at the cost of the public.

Thomas Jefferson proposed an extensive system of free public education in Virginia, and, as president, submitted to Congress in 1806 a proposed amendment to the Constitution to legalize federal support for education.

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right," Jefferson said.

John Adams

His fellow signatory on the Declaration of Independence, John Adams, put it, as he had a tendency sometimes to do, more bluntly: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”


Even Pennsylvania's founders enshrined it in our own Constitution.


Article III, Section 14 of the Pennsylvania Constitution requires it: "The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth."

Raise your hand if you think there is anything "thorough" or "efficient" about their efforts to provide for public education these days.

Seriously, raise your hand. I realize this is a volatile subject, post your thoughts on what should happen to public education. Maybe you think I'm totally off base on this. I invite you to say so civilly here.