When Corrections Don't Count
On November 18 the paper ran this: "A timeline Nov. 4 with a story about the resignation of city schools chief Ron Huberman incorrectly stated that 200 CPS teachers were laid off in June because of poor performance. Rather, of the 239 teachers discharged that month, only one had an unsatisfactory evaluation, while 149 had 'excellent' or 'superior' ratings, according to the Chicago Teachers Union."
More specifically, the timeline of Huberman's political career in Chicago had said that in June he laid off "the 200 lowest performing teachers rather than basing it on seniority." This was nonsense—as anyone who's read Ben Joravsky's Reader pieces on those layoffs would know.
It took a few days for the teachers' union to hear about the timeline, but on November 9 a letter from president Karen Lewis was messengered to editorial page editor Bruce Dold. "In the month of June 2010," Lewis wrote, "Huberman did not 'lay off' but fired 239 teachers, severing their benefits and employee status with the Chicago Board of Education. These 239 city-wide teachers consisted of nearly all the literacy coaches, math coaches and other elite teachers, all or nearly all of whom had evaluations of 'excellent,' 'superior,' or at the worst 'satisfactory.' Therefore, it is emphatically untrue that these 239 teachers—some of the best in the city—were 'lowest performing.'" The italics are Lewis's.
In fact, Lewis wrote to Dold, the board of education had fired 1,200 teachers in all, and after the union filed suit over these dismissals, the board's labor relations office testified in court that "fewer than 50" had been rated unsatisfactory.
"It is unpleasant for one of the elite teachers fired in June to pick up the November 4, 2010 Tribune to find Huberman praised as a genius and to see herself listed as 'lowest performing,' notwithstanding excellent evaluations," Lewis went on. "It is unpleasant to have to explain to her friends and prospective employers that the Tribune story about her is flat out wrong."
Lewis's larger complaint was that Huberman consistently insisted he was firing only the lowest-performing teachers, and though it wasn't true the media—"the Tribune in particular"—simply repeated what he said.
"Yes, the Tribune owes a retraction to these teachers," Lewis wrote. "But even more so, it owes a retraction to a readership that understandably believes that all or nearly all of the teachers fired by Huberman in June were the 'lowest performing.' . . .
She finished by asking, "What is the Tribune going to do about this?"
Dold had had nothing to do with the timeline, and education editor Tracy Van Moorlehem turned out to be the Trib person CTU spokeswoman Liz Brown dealt with. Nine days passed before the Tribune finally ran a correction. "Of the 239 teachers discharged that month [June], only one had an unsatisfactory evaluation," the paper noted, and 149 had excellent or superior ratings—"according to the Chicago Teachers Union."
Brown fumed—not simply over the delay, she tells me, but also because of the well-at-least-that's-what-they're-claiming ring to the correction. The CTU's source had been records provided by the school board to the teachers' union, backed up by testimony by a school board official in court.
It was a vintage skinback—grudging, ignoring the core complaint, and hinting that the paper didn't necessarily believe the whiners it was deferring to. Not to mention late. "Frankly," Tribune ombudsman Margaret Holt e-mailed me, "it slipped through the cracks."
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