A recent blog titled “Loose ends on my charter schools piece” by Morgan Josey Glover has attracted attention from our “Usual Commenter-American Teacher”. The “Usual Commenter” must be spending vast amount of his/her time filtering all those Google alerts, responding to the articles/blogs, and following up with the posted comments and responding to them. Such level of dedication could only be explained by at least a full time job for one or even a crew of misinforming agents as identified in the most recent Center for American Progress research named the Fear Inc
In her September 25, 2011 blog, Morgan Josey Glover was simply referring to her recent article on charter schools in Greensboro, NC, where she has provided such favorable information on the local charter schools, based on her thorough analysis and research. Glover met with members of such communities, searched on those schools’ data and even contacted the authorizing government agent the State Department of Instruction before she published her article with tangible facts and feedback.
Once you read the title of the follow up blog, you would expect that Glover would follow the same responsible practices she did while developing her article and talk about the fact based shortfalls of all those four charter schools she referred in her charter school article. Her blog title did not seem to be specified on any particular one. However, while reading through the blog something did not sound right. First of all Glover’s title did not represent the limited facts she has included in her blog. The title appeared to indicate the loose ends, but the facts from the first hand individuals and organizations stated otherwise.
Secondly the article was mainly dedicated to one of those four charter schools. No other charter schools’ name was indicated or any school specific concern was raised unlike TMSA case. Morgan was fair and responsible enough to talk to a parent, the State Department of Instruction, and the school principal. All have clearly stated that claims were irrelevant. However, there had to be some loose ends in order to support the title but she could not find such unfavorable evidences from the first hand parties. Then plan B was activated. The “but search the Google” effortless solution was tried. I think she did not even find plan B tangible enough and plan C was chosen to justify the title “loose ends” via referring to NY Times and USA Today articles. Based on the simplicity of errors she had in the blog (i.e. “an moderate”), it almost appeared like such a rushed blog for an upcoming purpose. Besides, when you “Google” there are other reference points that are parallel to what the state, parent and staff representatives have mentioned i.e. Washington Post and Huffington Post coverages. The answer to “Why Glover chose to focus on certain “Google” results but not results from both sides of the story?” is a bit of a concern in terms of responsible journalism practices. The next question would be why Glover would want to write a biased blog via providing an unbalanced coverage? At this point scrolling down the blog kind of gives you some hints on what’s really cooking. Almost immediately after the posting of the blog, the “Usual Commenter”, had to be working overtime since he/she launched the very first comment at 7:01p.m. There is always a possibility that he/she might be living in the West Coast and still working during his/her office hours. The commenter was doing nothing but simply attacking TMSA, a local community school without any TMSA Community related facts. He/she obviously did not even read the TMSA favorable feedback from the real people. An imaginary commenter, coming up with some imaginary claims on a real community school which is supported by hundreds of real members of their community…
The members of the community also responded back to defend their school community with very reasonable fact based comments and invited the “Usual Commenter” to come and visit the school, talk to more members of the community from various racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. What else one could possibly do to introduce a public organization? Open doors, open books, and public records… Transparency at its best!
On the other side the “Usual Commenter” did continue to hide behind some irrelevant and imaginary claims with additional false accusations and could not provide anything TMSA specific. After a quick plagiarism check it was identified that the “Usual Commenter” has used the same nick name and false accusations for more than 5000 times on the web. Let alone any other content related evidences of his/her postings, this fact itself talks for volumes in terms of his/her credibility.
As we always stand for, once you “Get the Fact” separated from your fiction, you see the real world around the blurriness of the falsehood. We thank to Morgan Glover for her responsible efforts to present the facts but the facts only in her initial article. In the mean time we would appreciate consistency of such efforts on her blogs as well.
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