Sensationalized Headline Does Star-Ledger Reporters no Favors

In today’s print edition, The Star-Ledger’s front-page headline read, “Jersey’s $400M screw-up” and, just below it, “Application error costs the state Race to the Top funds.” Well, that’s true, but only partially. And it’s not what Jeanette Rundquist and Jessica Calefati, the two reporters who wrote the story said.

I know of Jeanette Rundquist’s work from when I sat on the Bridgewater-Raritan Board of Education in the early 1990’s. That was a time when newspapers could still afford to cover board of education meetings in person, and Jeanette was The Star-Ledger’s key reporter covering those meetings.

She was then, as she is now, an excellent reporter who did her best to dig into the background of board events and of its members to provide the community with accurate and full coverage of those meetings. Although I have no knowledge of Jessica Calefati, both she and Rundquist did a good job on today’s piece.

But what The Star-Ledger headline screams out is not what Rundquist and Calefati reported: What those two women wrote is:

“New Jersey fell three points short of receiving ‘Race to the Top’ funding in part because of an error by the Christie administration in the state’s application.” There is a big difference between “in part” and the headline's implied 'in whole'.

A table accompanying this story also qualifies New Jersey’s loss:  “A mistake in New Jersey’s application for the competitive Race to the Top grant program may have cost the state up to $400 million in federal education reform dollars.” For those of us who like accurate reporting, this is very different from the headline writer’s attention-grabbing words.

Look: It’s true that if the error had not been made, New Jersey would not have been penalized a precious 4.8 points. There is no getting around that.

But it is just as true that there was a total of 500 points for us to win or lose, and that New Jersey lost another 34.6 decisive points in two other vital categories over which school districts and the teachers’ association had a direct influence:

In the categories for State Success Factors (125 points) and Great Teachers and Leaders (138 points), the Round Two Scorecard in the sidebar to the story shows how New Jersey lost 34.6 points in part (my words) “for not securing enough school district and teacher union support for its proposals,” and that “More points were lost due to N. J. not using student performance to make decisions on teachers’ pay or job security.”

So there you have it. You shouldn’t have to read a post from a blogger like me to get the facts straight.