Opt out of tests? Starve the Beast? Sure. But opt out of media kid wars, too

Here's me in high school. 1983.

I am the white kid.

Like most guys my age who played a lot of sports, I can describe every moment. This picture? The shot was not blocked. I drew contact from the other team's star, and put him in foul trouble early. Made 1, missed 1 at the line. We won in OT.

Glory days, as the Boss sings.

If you are interested, let me know, we'll get the guys together, get a beer, and I will start two weeks before that game and take you all the way through to the locker room after.

No thanks? Really?

I understand. Hold on to that smirk. I think it a good thing.

There are some other more important memories I want to discuss here, memories that for me explain much about the insidious current relationship of media to public education.

This photo comes from The Macomb Daily, my local county paper at the time. Every Wed and Saturday during basketball season I would ask my Dad to run out and pick up a copy of this, The Detroit News, and The Detroit Free Press and any other publication that might have coverage of high school sports.

At 17, I lived to see my name in print. A picture? Whoa.

In that, I was not unlike any other kid who played. We loved to see our names in print. So did our parents. Frankly, certain papers stay in existence only by reporting on kids' sports.

School sports.

 Public education has been under attack for 25 years now but local high school sports reporting hasn't changed much. This has been a sustainable business model. Pick up a high school sports page and you would think it is 1976 and everything is just peachy with public education.

Parents still love to see their kids get recognition in the "paper" -- even in an age that likes to think it uses considerably less paper. Schools, for their part, love to get their kids recognition in the paper, too, because it seemingly reflects well on the school, even though most schools have more or less "outsourced" their sports' programs to travel clubs for preparation and non-teacher itinerant coaches.

And the "paper" likes these stories because they sell papers. "Dad, get a couple extra copies" in the pre-digital age -- or "shares" and "likes" and "clicks" in the current age.

Ah, there's the game -- and therein lies the rub.

There is an unhealthy perversity to this relationship, a kind of sickening enabling that would drive an alcohol/substance abuse counselor crazy.

Here is the basic problem: self-promotion should have little to do with K12 children and schools where life is very up and down and the real battle is for growth and self-discovery. The adolescent desire to see one's name in print is, like mine, something we should manage and teach, not indulge.

That is one reason, for example, why we have very strict privacy laws for minors.

I kept this picture because of the size of the coverage and the particular nature of the victory (for which you would need to buy me, again, a beer to hear the full story).

But the reality behind the picture was that I had been suspended for two games prior for blowing a gasket about officiating and challenging an entire other team to an on court brawl. This pictured moment, then, captures the 8 seconds after I stepped on to the court the first game back after having been benched. I was furious, still, at that moment, and went straight to the basket not to draw a foul but because I wanted to run hard in to something, anything. I found that incredibly satisfying at the time.

The fact is simply this -- the photo marked me at my worst: violent to an extreme, with ill managed emotions, and narcissistic.

Pictures don't capture truths. We just think they do.

"Papers" or media, for their part, care little about self-growth and the day to day battles of learning.  And why should they when parents like me act as enablers? Papers and news media care about clicks and money that keep them afloat. Like schools, many are in an institutional death spiral, bending or twisting from the form many imagine them to be just to stay alive -- again, not unlike schools.

A story of student "outrage," for example, is worth much more financially than a story of student "achievement" and certainly much more than the day in day out grind of growing and learning. If it bleeds -- rather in gore or in sentimentality -- it leads. But these media engagements, good and bad, are some distance from education and reality.

Sports coverage makes it all possible, financially speaking.

And -- rather sickeningly -- it provides a template for all other coverage of schools.

Who is in the top 5%? Who moved out of the top 5%?

Are we talking about team rankings? Or failing schools?

The education story, then, is always of a miracle win. Or a catastrophic failure.

Shakespeare could be writing about parents, schools, and media when he writes, "Therefore I lie with her and she with me/And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be."

Historically, one is tempted to say that such "lies" make the world go around.

But here is where are basic problem gets more complicated. Current media is not driven by a particular desire to sell copies or even get clicks. In education "reporting," Gates and Broad Foundation support a great deal. In Michigan, the Devos family and the Mackinac Center. Local publications crumbled in the 2008 crash and all were given over to a single entity The Gannett Company. There was much promotional money to be had in conveying the simple message that schools are failing. Not a day passes where you haven't seen a promotional oped or story saying as much. Gannett has bought hard and its "hometown" papers now speak with one simple voice and that voice says and finds space only for one voice: "schools are failing."

In other words, if you are a casual observer, and you think schools are failing, you think so because many have invested so much money to tell you so, and you are reading prose that equates to high school sports' reporting.

Educational reporting exploded -- but in a very bad way. I have read almost every mainstream media piece of reporting in Michigan since 2012 and almost every piece of it is excrement.

Shit. Pure crap.

Schools, baffled at their inability to tell "their" story, started trying desperately to respond, create positive coverage. Those that could afford it hired communications directors. And these folks try to channel the positive affect that is certainly part of K12 ("go team"!) to counter the "schools are failing" narrative.

God bless them. There is a logic there.

But, for those interested in preserving some semblance of public education, this tactic is doomed to fail and, in fact, inadvertently make things worse. Even with the best of intentions, communication directors swirl in the same lies. You indulge partial pictures posing as truths while confronting an opponent with a single message ("schools are failing") and unlimited funding. And there is veritable feast every time a moment of discouraging human reality takes place and can be captured on film that threatens in a blink to blow everything up.

Schools won't win this game, in short, because it is not their game.

It is the media game.

Teaching and learning is different. It is about truth -- all the truth -- and not perception of a given moment. It is about the boogers and the fist fights and everything else that goes badly wrong in the course of a young life. For kids and teachers and parents school is life and bad and even horrible stuff happens in daily life. The media translates that as "schools are failing." And we are fast giving up the right to condemn bad actors in this game because, well, who isn't a bad actor in a game we all agree to play and, in fact, hunger to play?

Trying to "sell" the good story is no different to freakish runs of bad stories.

Across the country parents are finally starting to "opt out" of standardized testing, the corporate and political game that is insinuated itself in to public education and done so much harm. It won't be an easy fight, but it is critical. The tests are the key. The tests go and so does the big money.

Let me here try to start to open another comparable front in the battle while there is finally some hint of positive motion: parents and schools should, too, begin "opting out" of the media game.

Take your own pictures -- you have plenty. Write your own sports stories. Celebrate your own successes. Mark your own failures. You now have the technology. Starve the media. Starve the beast. Screw the rankings. And end the cycling of communication director to reporter and back again. Take your communications and consultant money and hire qualified school counselors. Tell your local media especially that you are no longer open for business. Contract cancelled. These are kids. Ask their parents directly.

That will require fortitude.

The temptation to see your kids' name or school's picture in the "paper" is profound. It has seeped into our DNA.

I dug that picture out when The Macomb Daily -- seeking clicks -- ran a fifty years of high school sports series (my opponent here, and also a fellow school parent, was ranked 8th of the players in the last 50 years -- that was wrong, too; he should have been 3 or 4) and friends started texting me for fun. Grown men. This series got a ton of clicks from my gen-gen-generation. I was enjoying the nostalgia immensely, until I started to think clearly about it. And I started to really think about the picture, the whole picture.

When I was a boy, I thought like a boy...but I was being took again.

Media shouldn't keep me perpetually a child and it should not shape our children's education. In that arena we have all kinds of restrictions. We resist porn. We resist certain song lyrics. We resist certain films.

It is time to tell the "hometown" papers to shove it until they want to engage collaboratively with schools, institutions trapped in comparable economic forces. There will be time enough for kids to have to deal with all that. At the moment, it is our job to keep them out of this game.

And to do that we have to be the adults and, finally, stop playing.