The Bad News Bears knock it out of the park!

SATURDAY, APRIL 13, 2019

The Bad News Bears are Us: How quickly will the mandated feel-good misstatement appear?

How quickly will the misstatement appear when the upper-end "press corps" presents the latest version of one of its standard stories?

(As you know, we avoid use of the L-bomb here. We'll speak instead of "misstatements.")

On the front page of today's New York Times, the basic mandated feel-good misstatement appears in paragraph 3. Absurdly embellished headlines included, the front-page report starts like this:

GREEN (4/13/19): LeBron James Opened a School That Was Considered an Experiment. It’s Showing Promise.
The inaugural class of third and fourth graders at the school has posted extraordinary results on its first set of test scores.

AKRON, Ohio—The students paraded through hugs and high-fives from staff, who danced as Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” blared through the hallways. They were showered with compliments as they walked through a buffet of breakfast foods.

The scene might be expected on a special occasion at any other public school. At LeBron James’s I Promise School, it was just Monday.

Every day, they are celebrated for walking through the door. This time last year, the students at the school—Mr. James’s biggest foray into educational philanthropy—were identified as the worst performers in the Akron public schools and branded with behavioral problems. Some as young as 8 were considered at risk of not graduating.

Now, they are helping close the achievement gap in Akron.

So cool! One year later, "the worst performers in the Akron schools" have posted "extraordinary results" on their current "test scores!"

So cool! After less than one year in a thrilling new school, The Bad News Bears are knocking it out of the park!

Our mainstream "press corps" has been writing versions of this feel-good story since at least the early 1970s. The genre was in existence even before that—in Herbert Kohl's 1967 book, 36 Children, to cite one high-profile example.

Let's return to the present. In paragraph 3 of that front-page report, Erica Green tells us that the kids in question were "the worst performers in the Akron schools" just one year ago. In hard copy, an excited editor seized upon that apparent misstatement in this caption to a large photograph which appears on page A12:

PHOTO CAPTION: I Promise students waited for a free breakfast. The school's students, identified as the worst performers in the Akron, Ohio public schools, were admitted by a lottery.

The school held a lottery among Akron's "worst performers." These are the kids who won!

Green's happy-talk statement in paragraph 3 sets the framework for this familiar old standard story. That said, this upper-end journalist's happy-talk statement seems to be a blatant misstatement, as is the long-standing norm within novelizations of this familiar type.

Why do we say that Green's feel-good statement seems to be a misstatement? We say that because we read all the way to paragraph 23, where the reader is finally handed the highlighted statement:

GREEN: I Promise students were among those identified by the district as performing in the 10th to 25th percentile on their second-grade assessments. They were then admitted through a lottery.

“These were the children where you went and talked with their old teachers, and they said, ‘This will never work,’ ” Dr. Campbell said. “We said give them to us.”

According to that passage, the students attending this new Akron school were quite explicitly not identified as the district's worst performers. On the contrary, it sounds like the district's worst performers—the kids performing below the 10th percentile—were specifically excluded from the lottery which brought these good decent kids to this potentially important new school.

Might we explain that further? Based on last year's performance, the bottom ten percent of Akron's kids were apparently excluded from this new school. They weren't allowed in the lottery from which the school's kids were chosen.

At the average Akron school, those excluded kids—the actual Bad News Bears—make up ten percent of the student enrollment. At this new school, those struggling kids don't exist.

When this new school was formed, it was no lowest performers need apply! Unless you read the New York Times, where an apparent flagrant misstatement—we don't refer to such statements as "lies"—will warm your cockles in paragraph 3, right there on page A1.

Is man [sic] really "the rational animal," as we've long been told, though always by ourselves? We've been discussing misstatements of this familiar old type since the early 1970s, when we began discussing this novelized genre in several op-ed columns for the Baltimore Sun.

When it comes to novelized stories of this type, it's No Misstatement Left Behind. Most simply put, those good and decent Akron kids actually aren't The Bad News Bears—and "rational animals" aren't Us!

Your lizard brain is currently saying that we liberals should simply enjoy this report. In this way, your lizard brain has always told you to throw black kids under a familiar old bus.

This is the way the New York Times plays. How rational are its types?

Next week: The history of this genre

One more basic element: We'd be remiss if we didn't identify one additional standard element in this standard novelized story.

We refer to the mandated Silly Remark Made by Some School Official. In this case, this element is found in this passage, which we reprint from above:

GREEN: I Promise students were among those identified by the district as performing in the 10th to 25th percentile on their second-grade assessments. They were then admitted through a lottery.

“These were the children where you went and talked with their old teachers, and they said, ‘This will never work,’ ” Dr. Campbell said. “We said give them to us.”

Did you spot the foolishness there?

Dr. Campbell is the executive director of the foundation which runs this new school. She's quoted saying that the kids who now attend the school "were the children where" their teachers said, "This will never work."

In short, these kids were The Bad News Bears! That said, what did those gloomy teachers say about the ten percent of Akron's kids who were performing even more poorly last year? Those kids have apparently been excluded from this school.

Every novel of this type must include at least one such remark! It's a basic part of the gruesome old genre, which has been a press corps favorite over the past fifty years.

Sub-rational animals keep churning such copy. Excluding Kierkegaard and Kant from any such judgment, could The Bad News Bears be Us?