Hey everyone …How do you cover an election with honesty and integrity? We are going to talk about that at the noon hour today.
Here we have Baltimore City elections with four democrats and one green running for President of the City Council. That’s not so hard, but you have nine candidates running for Mayor.
The media, even in the City Council President race, is focusing on the two “big names,” Stephanie Rawlings Blake and Michael Sarbanes. When we sponsored the President’s debate last week with the League of Women Voters, the Sun the next day focused on Rawlings-Blake and Sarbanes. They were really good that night, but Councilman Ken Harris and Green party candidate Maria Allwine had some really profound things to say, and one would never know that by reading the article.
So, what do we do? If you have no money, you can’t buy signs, media time or literature. So, you get forgotten by the voters and the media. Do we in the media have a special responsibility to raise the public debate to be all inconclusive? Is there a threshold in polls or money that should decide who gets covered? Is public financing the answer and how do you do that? How do you break through the clutter?
Let us know .. call in or blog on to give us your ideas.
And at one, it is Jonathan Kozol … he is amazing. He is one of the most cogent, brilliant thinkers about education anywhere. His books like Savage Inequalities are milestones in educational writing. All of you have been to school or have kids in school or had kids in school. We all have opinions about what education should be.
He and I will cover vouchers, No Child Left Behind, standardized testing and most importantly from his book, Letters to a Young Teacher, the art and beauty of teaching.
That art and beauty of teaching is something we are losing all too rapidly. Did you see the Sunday Sun with the article about pre-school? We are taking the play out of nursery school and kindergarten … kindergarten mean children’s garden, where they can blossom, learning through play.
What are we doing to our children? Unless you can afford private school it seems we are regulated by mind numbing regulations, testing and boredom. Thank God for the creative teachers who love our kids and teaching enough to make it alive despite the rules “to teach for the tests!”
What are your thoughts? I would really like to know.
Hear you on the air… read your thoughts on the blog,
marc
