I confess. I have become obsessed with the limitations of our local news media. Like a dog with an old bone, I can’t let go even though I know it won’t do any good to continue to struggle. Over the past half-year, I have used this column to complain about disappointing news coverage of at least six issues that seem to me central to the future well-being of this region: the debate over stronger regional governance, the linked crises in transportation and housing, the crucial but precarious water transfer with Imperial County, the possibility of a joint aqueduct with Baja California, the status of progress on school reform in San Diego City Schools, and a San Diego-based solution to the problem of border security. Better public understanding of these issues, I believe, would help to resolve them.

Exec. Dir. Chuck Nathanson

As a result of this mighty exercise of the editorial pen, I have been able to detect not one iota of change in media behavior, and I have now spoken with enough editors and reporters to believe that change is unlikely.

The media defense goes something like this: "Yes, the stories you are talking about should be covered more deeply and regularly, but we have a hard enough time just keeping up with the daily news grind. We are understaffed, overworked, and underpaid. The time and talent to do the more complicated stories you are asking for simply does not exist in this community at this time."

If true, this is a sad state of affairs, and I am prepared to believe that it is at least partly true. Still, community pressure might make some difference in the reallocation of media news priorities and resources.

But that isn’t the whole story, as this issue of San Diego Dialogue Report should make obvious. All the data presented here on test scores in San Diego City Schools is publicly available. Indeed, all of it except the material on the Focus Schools was presented at a school board meeting in the presence of the key news reporters. And getting the material on the Focus Schools merely took asking the question, "I wonder how these schools are doing in comparison with the rest of the District, since these troubled schools are where the greatest resources of reform have been concentrated?"

In other words, we aren’t talking about weeks of investigation by a team of New York Times-caliber reporters. This is run-of-the-mill stuff ready for use by any reporter with an interest in it.

And how could it not be judged interesting? Look at page 2 where we report the results of testing for the very first time how San Diego Unified students are doing with respect to the academic standards adopted by the State of California. Previous tests have merely shown how our students are doing relative to a national norm, and not what they know compared to what they are expected to know.

The results are dismal, and if properly presented in the media, could have served as a severe wake-up call to parents in the District, many of whom have no idea how poorly their children are doing. For example, nearly two-thirds of the students in the District are failing to meet state standards in English Language Arts. Only 15% of the District’s Hispanic students, and only 20% of its African-American students are scoring at a Proficient or Advanced level on this assessment.

But there are also very interesting positive stories in the data presented on pages 3 and 5. First, from data worked up for the first time by the District, we learn that English Language Learners have made tremendous progress in reading over the past four years. In other words, many of the same students who were scoring poorly against a national norm in 1998 are now scoring much higher.

And equally impressive are the results at the Focus Schools, which are all high poverty school sites with a majority of non-white student enrollment. The results show that a greater percentage of these students moved up out of “below grade level” categories than did students in the rest of the District.

In other words, it’s beginning to look as if the big investments in coaching teachers, especially teachers of our neediest students, are beginning to pay off. At least the results are tantalizing enough to warrant an editor sending out reporters to talk with some of these teachers and find out why it is that they seem to be having greater success.

Yet these are the stories we don’t see. Instead, we get high profile displays about the telephone bills and e-mails of school board members, and disputes about how to determine the Superintendent’s bonus pay.

So you tell me, please. Do we need as a community to go to work on the media’s priorities and news judgment? Or should I get off of this whining obsession? After all, it’s Spring, and the tulips are coming out.