Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I have a cover story out in this week’s Time Magazine about the new film by the director of An Inconvenient Truth. This new movie, Waiting for “Superman,” which won the audience award for U.S. documentaries at Sundance earlier this year, tells the story of five kids trying to get into better schools--in DC, NY, LA and Silicon Valley. The filmmakers leverage all the tools of movie-making to tell a story that is as complex as it is powerful.

In the story, we use this film as an excuse to talk about where we are at this moment in the history of America’s long, tedious battle to fix its schools. Are we turning the corner at last? Almost everyone I asked said “yes,” but it was equally clear that the revolution has only just begun.

For decades, Hollywood has churned out movies about lone teachers saving poor kids (Think Stand and Deliver or, oh lord, Dangerous Minds). This year, we have not one but at least three films coming out about poor kids and their families trying to save themselves. (Another documentary, The Lottery, follows a similar trajectory as Superman, but takes place entirely in New York City.)

Meanwhile, journalism is also trying to save itself. So you can’t see my entire story online, unfortunately. Time has started putting large magazine stories behind a firewall, so you have to actually buy the magazine (!!) at the store, buy it on your iPad, wait until goes online in a few weeks--or wait until you go to the doctor’s office in 6 months and read it in the waiting room. If you do see it, please let me know what you think.

Washington City Paper has come out with the most honest and knowing endorsement of a candidate I’ve seen in a long while: “Adrian Fenty for Mayor: The Jerk D.C. Needs.”

It’s hard to talk about this election intelligently. You either err on the side of unenlightened objectivity and endorse Fenty on his data alone; or you err on the side of emotion and punish Fenty for being callous in his treatment of a city with a tortured past.

As City Paper puts it:

Fenty has bungled the job of making poorer residents feel a part of the new D.C. Admirers say the only people who call Fenty a jerk are the hacks he’s ostracized. But as emotionally satisfying as it is to hear him elicit wails from the Washington Teachers Union, even a half-smart pol knows that gratuitous dissing of D.C. employees and insiders can play as disrespect for the African-American population that comprises most of those employees and insiders.

Personally, I worry about what Fenty’s opponent, Vincent Gray, might do on the issue that matters most in DC: the school system. With the future of 50,000 kids on the line, I don’t know how far nice gets you. Again, City Paper:

Michelle Rhee’s assault on the D.C. Public Schools status quo will go down as a rare attempt to raise local institutions above the low standards Washingtonians once accepted. Rhee shares Fenty’s abrasive traits, but in her case, it’s easy to be more charitable: When it comes to reforming a failed school system, you either go monomaniacal or go home.

The election is Tuesday, Sept. 14. Wherever you live, it will matter. Because if Fenty loses, the narrative will be that he and Rhee pushed too hard too fast to reform DC’s schools. Whether it’s true or not. And mayors everywhere will take note--and slow down.

Something remarkable happened in Los Angeles this weekend. The LA Times printed the first in what appears to be a groundbreaking series about teachers in LA. The newspaper somehow got access to the individual data for 6,000 public school teachers--and then, with the help of a Rand Corp. researcher, crunched the numbers to come up with a value-added analysis for these teachers. (To see the details of the methodology in PDF form, go here.) In other words, the newspaper now knows which teachers have dramatically increased their students’ test scores over time--and which have not.

Among the more interesting findings:

“Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas. Rather, these teachers were scattered throughout the district. The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.

Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students’ academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets.”

I am very curious to hear more about how the LA Times got this data. I had always been told that this kind of data was considered part of the confidential personnel record, at least in DC. At the same time, I suspected it could not remain confidential forever. Once parents begin to understand how dramatically kids’ scores can vary from one teacher to another--even within the same school--parents will begin to demand this information. It’s all well and good to say testing is out of control--until you are offered the chance to see the data for your own kid’s teachers.

Later this month, the newspaper will release a searchable database of the 6,000 teachers with their data attached. It will be fascinating to see how LA parents use this information--and whether teachers take the opportunity to respond to the assessments (as the newspaper has invited them to do.) For now, the union has called the series “dangerous” and is calling for a boycott of the newspaper. 

Paul Krugman has a dead-hit column in today’s NY Times about the ”pundit delusion,” or, “the belief that the stuff of daily political reporting--who won the news cycle, who had the snappiest comeback--actually matters.”

I suspect that this delusion extends to all political reporters and their editors, not just pundits. It’s a hubris that comes from being so deep in the woods you have forgotten what the sky looks like. You start thinking that everyone in America knows what is in the financial regulatory bill (or that there was one at all) and what Vice President Biden said on the Sunday shows and where Obama ate coconut ice cream. Worst of all, you start thinking that you the pundit can explain everything that happens in politics through tidy linear narratives, particularly in hindsight.

It’s the same kind of know-it-all-ism we see in business reporting ("Stocks are up slightly due to reports of higher than expected retail profits--and possibly due to a new rainbow spotted in the sky over Manhattan. Or any one of a million other complex and sometimes irrational reasons that we cannot actually identify with any level of confidence.")

In fact, as Krugman notes, most Americans care a lot about the economy, but they are not very well-informed on the details of the stimulus package--and most pundits are not able to identify causality in the world whizzing by around them.

But the delusion is powerful--and contagious, as Krugman writes: “This delusion is, of course, most prevalent among pundits themselves, but it’s also widespread among political operatives. And I’d argue that susceptibility to the pundit delusion is part of the Obama administration’s problem.”

I have listened to many well-meaning administration staffers lament the media obsession with insider games and horse races. But then these very same men (and I say that simply because they are almost always men) frantically react to every twitch and craving of the deluded, answering their calls, emails and Tweets with the same shared breathlessness.

In their defense, it’s hard to know what to ignore and what to attack, since the delusions can, on rare occasions, spread to the voting masses. So they feed the cycle, complaining bitterly all the way to the mad house.

For myself, I am happy to be on the sidelines of this particular insanity. Since 2009, I have been lucky enough to only write when I have something to say, and I often do not. I confess that on most days, I have nothing valuable to add to the cacophony. And instead I look up at the big open sky and thank God. 

You know you inhabit a strange corner of the world when you turn up to the office to find a mass mailing from a place called, BioSeal Systems. “Open Now! Disaster Response Temporary Morgue Planning...Sample Enclosed.”

Sample enclosed?

I had to know more. I didn’t even take off my sunglasses. Just opened it right up. Appears to be some kind of sealing wrap for dead bodies, complete with portable heat-sealing equipment.

“The only human remains containment solution that can be stored for 49 years without deterioration in performance.” There is a picture of a very serious looking nurse, a doctor and and some guy in a suit standing over what appears to be a body--all wrapped up.

Now this is actually a real thing. I have been at conferences with entire tracks dedicated to the logistics of setting up morgues in disaster zones. It’s not an easy matter. The people on those tracks look cold sober, like they have shed every last delusion about the world.

But I guess I’m not there yet. I still haven’t opened the sample. Maybe after lunch.