Media: "Parent Trigger" Reporter Wins LA Journalism Award

Congrats to education reporter Patrick Range McDonald for being named best print journalist of the year by the LA Press Club. McDonald and his publication, the LA Weekly, took home a fistfull of awards (via  The Informer). He wrote California's Parent Trigger, Educating Maria, and "City of Airhead.  

Comments

[CarolineSF]

OMG. His reporting was outrageous -- if he had been that partisan and fiery on a side I agreed with, I'd still be uncomfortable with it.

That said, I learned a whole lot about the Parent Trigger and exactly what's wrong with it from McDonald's coverage. Either he didn't know enough about the issues to realize how damning some of what he wrote was (to Parent Revolution's tactics and practices, that is) or he was thorough enough to knowingly include the damning material too. I'll leave it at that because I can't speculate on which is the case.

Parent Revolution and the charter industry, with vast resources on their side and the mass media obligingly gushing as usual, won the PR war on that issue. But what matters is the long-range impact on kids and schools. In my view, the Parent Trigger concept truly is not logistically workable, so we just have to hope it doesn't do to much damage while its proponents wreak their experiments.

I know -- aside from parroting "defender of the failed status quo," the proponents will say "how could things be worse?" I submit that a destroyed school is worse than a struggling school -- burning the village in order to save it is not a strategy for success.

[Alexander Russo]

so you'd have rather had the LAT win for its value-added stories?

seriously, caroline -- journalism isn't what it used to be and all but give the folks who give out these awards some credit.

no schools were burned in the attempt to fix mckinley -- that's just ridiculous to say.

maybe you learned from the coverage because, well, he was covering the story.