The News launched its new DISD blog today, and if you’re interested in learning more about public education in Dallas — and if you’re a taxpayer in the city, you should be — it’s worth checking out periodically to see how it goes. Back Talk is mentioned (not by name but but link) a couple of times, and I’m taken to task in a post and comment for questioning the placement and organization of the News’ Sunday story concerning DISD’s internal investigation group. Sadly enough, there is such a dearth of DISD information available outside the News’ pages that our very occasional mentions rate that highly on this new blog.
Anything that can be done to focus attention on DISD is good, and the News plays a vital role in how public education is perceived here in Dallas, as several of our commentators have noted. There has been a bit of discussion here on our blogs about whether the News’ education reporters have children in DISD schools (they don’t) and whether the News editorial board members have kids in DISD schools (they don’t); having a couple of student irons in the fire certainly gives me pause when writing about DISD, but that doesn’t mean I have any greater insight into what’s going on than anyone at the News. And you don’t have to have a kid in DISD to understand the importance of DISD’s perception to our city’s economic health. If DISD is perceived to be sub-par, and that certainly is the outside perception for a variety of reasons, it makes recruiting new businesses and retaining young families in our city that much harder. At the same time, DISD is a huge and occasionally sloppy organization, and its inevitable mistakes and follies need to be chronicled by our daily newspaper, if for no other reason than the DMN is the only news organization in town in a position to provide daily coverage and analysis — the rest of us don’t have the format and/or the resources to do it on a daily basis. And there’s certainly no harm in talking about the issues and questioning, when appropriate, and praising, when appropriate, what the News is doing, just like they’re doing with our blog commentary. The thing about journalism is that there’s no single correct answer about how to handle an issue, so reader feedback is the way we all make adjustments and move forward every day.
Anyway, check out the News’ DISD blog and do what you can to help improve our public schools by forwarding story ideas to help them continue improving their coverage. Of course, we’d appreciate it if you would make your comments on Back Talk and run the story ideas by us first…
