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Dave Comerford is unhappy with Scott Reeder and the
Small Newspaper Group, a family-owned chain of Illinois newspapers.
Comerford, media director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, says
he’s frustrated by what he sees as dishonest reporting and the
twisting of quotes to fit a political agenda. Four months ago, for example, as part of a series
called “Hidden Violations,” Reeder, the Springfield bureau
chief for the Kankakee-based chain, wrote: “Out of 95,000 tenured
teachers in Illinois an average of seven are fired each year.” It is
a claim he has made several times since first reporting it more than two
years ago in his first series on teachers in Illinois, packaged by the
Small group of papers as “The Hidden Costs of Tenure.” It is a
claim that Comerford says is dead wrong. Reeder won three national journalism awards for his
use of the Freedom of Information Act to get information from school
districts for “The Hidden Costs of Tenure” series. He sent FOIA
requests to all 876 school districts in Illinois asking for information on
disciplinary actions taken against tenured teachers, the most senior 75
percent of Illinois teachers. Tenured teachers
are teachers who have been on the job for more than four years and were
rated by their school districts at the end of those four years as good
enough to keep.
The number of seven firings a year comes from the
number of firings upheld by state tenure-hearing officers. In the
“Hidden Costs” series, Reeder wrote: “In 875 of
Illinois’ 876 school districts, it is left up to a hearing officer to
determine whether someone should be fired. An individual school board can
only make a recommendation to this hearing officer.” He stands by
that explanation. “Illinois statute allows for a school board to
recommend to a state hearing officer that a tenured teacher be
dismissed,” Reeder claims in a recent written statement he submitted
to Illinois Times.
However, that’s not what Illinois law actually
says. According to state statute, a teacher who has been fired by a school
board or superintendent has a right to receive a notice stating the reasons
for the dismissal and then has 10 days in which to file a written request
for a hearing; “otherwise no hearing is necessary.”
That is a crucial difference to Comerford, and it is
one he says he explained to Reeder but Reeder ignored. It means that Reeder
counted the wrong thing — the number of appeals, not the number of
firings. Not all fired teachers appeal their dismissals, Comerford says.
Sometimes, he adds, his union advises teachers that they haven’t a
chance of winning an appeal and shouldn’t bother. Confusing the
number of appeals with the number of firings is like confusing the number
of criminal cases that make it to the appellate court with the number of
criminal convictions, and that is just plain wrong, Comerford says.
The difference, according to Comerford, means that
the foundation of Reeder’s series — the claim that, on average,
only seven tenured teachers a year are fired in Illinois — is wrong.
The articles built on that error — including stories that reported
how teachers’ unions prevent administrators from firing bad teachers
and stories that estimated that cost of firing a teacher — are wrong
as well. Cicero Schools Superintendent Clyde Senters is
another critic of Reeder’s reporting. In the “Hidden
Costs” article headlined “Tenure
Frustrates Drive for Teacher Accountability,” Reeder recounted the trouble Senters went through to fire a teacher for
excessive absenteeism. He quoted Senters as saying that there is not a lot
that can be done to hold teachers accountable “because of
tenure.”
One problem with that story is that the teacher was
fired without going to a tenure hearing, so it was a dismissal that Reeder
does not count in the “seven a year” on which he based the
series. Another problem is that Senters claims he did not blame the lack of
accountability on tenure. Senters says he is a strong supporter of tenure,
and he even wrote an article for the IFT in which he said that teachers
should get tenure sooner, after three years instead of four. He says he has
used Reeder’s story in classes to teach students how easily
one’s words can be twisted by a reporter with an ax to grind. Reeder insists that he quoted Senters accurately. Comerford has other issues with Reeder’s
articles. Reeder has repeatedly contended that it is teachers unions’
“vigorous legal defenses of teachers
facing dismissal” that makes it expensive to fire a teacher, but the
case he chose to write about for pushing the limits of expensive is a case
in which the teacher did not use a union lawyer; he represented himself in
filing lawsuits against his former employer. To Comerford, such inaccuracies are not just
mistakes; they show a pattern of bias. With the “Hidden Violations” series,
Comerford takes greater issue with what Reeder did not write than with what
he did. The central point of “Hidden Violations”
is that Illinois does a poor job of handling teacher misconduct. Reeder reported that in the last eight years the
Illinois Department of Children and Family Services found 323 credible
allegations of abuse by teachers, or about 40 credible allegations a year
against the state’s 127,000 public schoolteachers. Some of those
cases are relatively minor, he noted, and some are more serious, but
“the certification board has not once suspended or revoked any
teaching certificate based solely on DCFS finding,” he added. Reeder reported that the Department of Education
lacked any staff to investigate those allegations. He failed to report that the state police investigate
the cases DCFS finds credible. “They refer the cases to us,”
says Master Sgt. Brian Ley, a spokesman for the Illinois State Police.
“Every post has a squad of specialists assigned to DCFS
cases.”
Reeder wrote that teachers should lose their licenses
even if there is not enough evidence of abuse for a criminal conviction.
The question, then, is what the standard of proof should be. Comerford says Reeder promoted a “presumption
of guilt,” and that, he says, raises a concern that false or
malicious allegations could ruin a teacher’s career. In his
“Hidden Violations” articles, Reeder wrote that Dennis Kuba, a
retired sergeant with the Illinois State Police, dismissed such concerns as
ridiculous and added, “In all the years he’s investigated sex
crimes he has never had a case prosecuted in which a child lied about being
abused by non-family member.”
Kuba denies that he dismissed Comerford’s
concerns as ridiculous and says that after reading the article he asked
Reeder to print a correction. Although the characterization of
“ridiculous” was not technically a quote, Reeder writes in his
statement to Illinois Times that he stands by the quotes he used. He adds that Kuba did
ask him to “clarify one quote.”
Another expert interviewed by Reeder says his
treatment of concerns about false accusations was one-sided. Mary Ann
Manos, assistant superintendent of the Community Unit School District 140
(Congerville-Eureka-Goodfield), and a former professor of education at
Bradley University, says she spent some time talking to Reeder about
instances of false allegations of abuse or sexual harassment and how those
allegations can ruin a teacher’s career.
While at Bradley, Manos authored Rumors, Lies, and Whispers: Classroom “Crush” or
Career Catastrophe? — a book, she says,
that was inspired by a false allegation against a teacher in Peoria. She
says she told Reeder about cases in Illinois, New Jersey, and Texas in
which teachers lost their jobs because of allegations that students later
confessed to making up. She mentioned one case, reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, in which a
third-grade student angry with his teacher paid classmates a dollar each to
tell the principal that the teacher had touched them inappropriately. “Students know how to get rid of
teachers,” she says. “Remember that kids are just being kids
and they do not understand the damage they do when they just say something
because they want to get a new soccer coach.”
She says she told Reeder that there will always be
headlines about pedophiles “but the headlines do not represent
mainstream education.”
Manos says Reeder’s failure to quote her does
not upset her but the one-sidedness of his reporting does. “I thought
professional standards dictated that you at least say there is another
point of view,” she says. She adds that his article on “passing the
trash” — letting a teacher who has been accused of sexual
harassment resign and get a good recommendation — is outdated.
Reeder focused on a case from 1996. Manos says the state superintendent of
education long since issued a policy directive to local school districts to
immediately report any teacher who resigns under an allegation of sexual
misconduct to the Illinois State Board of Education. If any district is
still “passing the trash,” she says, “they
shouldn’t be.”
Setting aside the questions of whether Reeder
interpreted data correctly and whether he fairly represented both sides of
the issue, Comerford says that the way in which Reeder’s work was
promoted raises additional questions about bias. Comerford notes that Small Newspaper Group hired Eric
Robinson and his company, Frontline Public Strategies, to promote interest
in Reeder’s articles. Frontline Public Strategies is an
“association management” company that counts as one of its
clients the Illinois Association of School Administrators, an organization
that often finds itself at odds with teachers’ organizations. Robinson has advised that association on how to get
its message out in the media. Robinson is a former spokesman for former Gov.
Jim Edgar, was director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 Illinois Victory Committee,
and worked for the gubernatorial campaign of Judy Baar Topinka. Reeder declines to answer questions about bias or his
or his employer’s relationship with Robinson.
Peter Downs, a veteran freelance writer and
editor, is also president of the St. Louis Board of Education. He can
be reached at pdowns@speakeasy.net.
This article appears in Feb 21-27, 2008.
