Voice For Liberty

Tag: Wichita news media

  • Reporting on Wichita’s new terminal

    A Wichita Eagle article published on June 29, 2006 explores the need for a new terminal at the Wichita Airport. I have some issues with the reporting in this article, as it is quite biased in favor of those advocating the new terminal. When you combine people eager to spend others’ money with sloppy newspaper reporting we have a situation where reason — not to mention sanity — is not likely to prevail.

    An example of the sloppy reporting is when it is noted that the existing terminal was dedicated in 1954, and the director of airports is quoted as saying the terminal “is functionally obsolete.” Never mind that the terminal has been expanded greatly and reworked and remodeled several times since then. Now I can understand the director of airports wanting a shiny new terminal to work in, perhaps even to be named for him after he retires. Neither is a good reason for building it, however.

    Advocates for a new terminal say we need one because the present terminal “Doesn’t have space for adequate security.” If this defect is actually present, I recommend we close the airport immediately! We can’t have an airport without adequate security. I hope no one from out of town — certainly no terrorists, at least — is reading this article.

    In the article, a photograph was captioned “Fliers must wait in line at the ticketing counter, then in another line at the checkpoint. A larger terminal, officials say, would lessen crowding.” I might ask, is there any airport where there are not separate lines for ticketing and security? Or are there plans for airports to be built that integrate check in and security? I realize that newspaper reporters are merely quoting someone, but to print a statement like this implies that a new terminal will somehow fix this problem.

    Also, many people today check in at home or office through the airlines’ websites, and therefore are able to bypass the ticket counter entirely if they don’t have checked baggage.

    Another photograph was captioned “The baggage claim area can get crowded very quickly, airport officials say, and there is no space available in the existing terminal to expand it.” I might remark that the baggage claim area is crowded not with travelers, but with the people who came to greet them. This is also a problem at the Wichita airport as arriving passengers depart the secure area. The throng of greeters makes it difficult to get by, sometimes. But a little remodeling might fix this.

    Also, advocates say the present airport “Doesn’t give visitors a good first impression of the city.” I guess whether this is true or not depends on one’s viewpoint. When I travel, I appreciate facilities that look like they were built economically and are operated efficiently, as I know it is I, the traveler and taxpayer, who pays for these things.

    Advocates claim that no local tax money will be spent to build a new terminal. They may be correct. But someone has to pay for it, be it the federal taxpayer or Wichita Airport user, and there is bound to be much local tax money spent on infrastructure improvements surrounding a new terminal. If airline tickets were itemized like hotel bills and rental car bills, showing the various taxes and charges that fliers pay, we would be more aware of who will pay, and how they will pay, for a new terminal.

    We should also remember that travelers to our city pay a lot of tax. As I travel, I am very aware of the huge taxes I pay when I use hotels and rental cars. As an example, a recent hotel bill in Pennsylvania with a room rate of $109 swelled to $124 with taxes. A car rental bill there for $409 really cost $532 after taxes, fees, and other charges imposed by local governments, taxing authorities, and airports. Many local governments, ours included, use these taxes to painlessly raise revenue, they say, as locals rarely pay them. But visitors do pay them, and they leave a bitter impression about the local governments that levy them.

  • What to do with others’ money

    Writing from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

    In a June 20, 2006 Wichita Eagle editorial, Rhonda Holman writes about the WaterWalk project in Wichita.

    Evidently there is controversy over the public not knowing the name of the “destination restaurant” that is being courted and favored with a gift of $1 million. To me, the controversy is not the identify of the restaurant or when and how the city should conduct its negotiations, but that we are paying for a restaurant to be built.

    We are not lacking for fine restaurants in Wichita. On both the east and west sides of town (and other parts, too), many excellent restaurants have been opened recently, and more are being built as I write. The Eagle has even reported on their astonishment at how many there are.

    The problem is, I believe, that these restaurants were not built where Ms. Holman and our local government leaders feel they should have been built. But that’s not a problem, except to her and them.

    The people who built these restaurants did so by investing their own money, or the money that others entrusted to them. These people did so voluntarily. They presumably built their restaurants where they thought they could earn the best return on their investment. And having invested several million dollars of their own money in the restaurant, they have a strong incentive to make the restaurant a success.

    But that’s not good enough for Ms. Holman. Evidently she does not appreciate the sacrifice that people have made in order to accumulate the funds needed to make these spectacular investments. She may not be aware of — or maybe she does not respect or value — the tremendous effort and work it takes to run a successful restaurant.

    Just because these people did not build their restaurants where she (and our local government leaders) thought they should have been built, she wants to tax them — and the rest of us, too — and give the proceeds of that tax to a new competitor.

    Is this the type of behavior by our local government and our town’s leading newspaper that is likely to lead to other new private investment?

    Ms. Holman’s editorial stance, along with the actions of our local government leaders, constitute a slap in the fact for those who have been foolish enough (we can now conclude this) to invest money in any industry in which the government is likely to set up their competitor.

    This harmful attitude is summarized in this plea to get the WaterWalk project moving faster, “… so that citizens not only can see where their money is going but also soon start enjoying more of their investment.”

    Making an investment, I might remind Ms. Holman, is something that people do voluntarily because they believe it is in their interest.

    The WaterWalk project and the new downtown restaurant are being paid for by taxes. The expenditure is being made to serve the interests of politicians, subsidized developers, and people like Ms. Holman who believe they know best what to do with others’ money. There is a tremendous difference between the two.

  • Wichita Eagle Editorial Blog not recommended

    In June, 2005, the editors of The Wichita Eagle started a blog, the Wichita Eagle Editorial blog, or WE Blog.

    The way this blog works it that one of the Eagle editors starts a topic, and then the public can add comments.

    A small group of the posters who make these comments seem to know each others’ reputations well, and postings from this group account for nearly all the content of the blog. They have had, by my count, two social gatherings. From posts filed by the attendees, they seemed like enjoyable affairs. I was surprised to read these pleasant accounts, as on the blog, people are usually quite mean and nasty.

    It usually doesn’t take very long before the posts on many topics disintegrate into name-calling, sometimes using the foulest language imaginable, language that The Eagle won’t print in the newspaper. In fact, even the editors won’t use this language themselves on the blog, although from time to time they may use these words in sanitized form.

    Often when someone who has a history of posting — and therefore a reputation — posts an opinion or makes an argument, someone will point that the poster is a Democrat or a Republican, or is liberal or conservative, and therefore the opinion or argument is to be discounted. This is a common form of argument. Or someone will point out that the poster said something stupid in the past, so this is stupid, too.

    Often posters use terms of art such as “BushBots,” “BushCo,” “Repukes,” and “Wingnuts” when referring to others. Conservative posters have similar terms they use, too. These terms are used as insults or to advance an argument or opinion.

    Commonly, when someone presses a point a follow-up post makes the demand “show me a link.” Dutifully the original poster finds a link that supports their argument, and almost always it will be derided as coming from a source that is not valid or trustworthy because it is liberal, conservative, or has some other defect in the eyes of the poster. Sometimes entire articles are posted, almost certainly in violation of the copyright.

    It is my sense that many of the topics started by the editors are calculated to allow those with left-leaning sensibilities the opportunity to launch attacks on conservatives and right-leaning posters. It does seem to me that the majority of the regulars on the blog are near the left of the political spectrum.

    The left, too, seems to get the best of the conservatives much of the time. But that’s not surprising. Government, at all levels, is too big and powerful and tries to do too many things. As government overreaches, it inevitably makes mistakes, and therefore is an easy target for criticism. If the left wins political power over the next few years, it too will be on the defensive for all the misguided things that it tries to do.

    When a person posts to the blog, they enter a name — real or otherwise — and an email address, again real or not. There is no security of any type, and it is therefore possible for one person to make a post using the identity of some other poster. There is no way for readers of the blog to detect that this has happened, except from an analysis of the content of the message. A few posters claim this happens regularly to them.

    This lack of accountability as to the origin of the post is a problem. One’s identity is not safe, as others can post in your name. Other discussion forum systems often require some form of registration, tracing an identity back to an email address, usually, and then requiring login with a password before posting. With this, readers can be sure that something posted under a name did, in fact, come from that person.

    The discussions also die prematurely in some cases. Not that the topics disappear, but after a few weeks they move to an archive section, where they can still be read and posted to, but it seems like few topics survive this archiving. So some discussions that have merit in continuation stop.

    There is also the problem that the only issues that are discussed are ones that the editors decide to start a topic on, although topics can drift to any subject, and there are “open threads” that are started occasionally. Most discussion forum systems, though, have threaded topics and allow users to start topics on their own. Threaded topics would allow new threads of discussion to be split off as the flow of discussion changes. These systems also allow replies to be associated with a specific post, so that readers can easily read a reply in the context of the post that inspired it. That isn’t present with the current system the Wichita Eagle Editorial Blog uses.

    A curious fact is that The Eagle has discussion boards that have many of the features that make discussion forums work better. These boards are not as popular as the blog, and seem to have their own small group of regular posters.

    I do not recommend spending time reading the Wichita Eagle Editorial Blog. The mean-spirited nastiness of the bulk of the posts far outweighs the few redeeming things you might learn. The group of regular posters is so partisan, the discourse so bitter and shrill, so full of cruel sarcasm, that readers are likely to come away angry and disillusioned. In fact, a topic started today by Phillip Brownlee titled “Hard to shake faith of the faithful” points out how a person’s perspective colors their judgment of events, and how each party believes they are right, no matter what the facts and evidence show. There’s lots of evidence of this type of behavior on this blog. Still, I must confess that sometimes, like when passing a car wreck, I can’t resist taking a peek.

    My preference is to reduce the power of government to the point that there is little that government does that is important enough to argue over.

  • The descent of the good column

    Writing from Miami, Florida

    Last week I explained how a column in The Wichita Eagle (see How a Good Column on the Bad Lottery Fell Apart) started out well but took a sharp turn downwards.

    What Mr. Scholfield did to destroy this potentially valuable newspaper column was to propose higher minimum wage laws as the solution for people who aren’t paid enough. He even proposes a living wage law that reflects the costs people face rather than the value of what they are able to produce.

    Either of these proposals will harm the very people that Mr. Scholfield seeks to help. As Milton Friedman writes in Capitalism and Freedom:

    Minimum wage laws are about as clear a case as one can find of a measure the effects of which are precisely the opposite of those intended by the men of good will who support it. Many proponents of minimum wage laws quite properly deplore extremely low rates; they regard them as a sign of poverty; and they hope, by outlawing wage rates below some specified level, to reduce poverty. In fact, insofar as minimum wage laws have any effect at all, their effect is clearly to increase poverty. The state can legislate a minimum wage rate. It can hardly require employers to hire at that minimum all who were formerly employed at wages below the minimum. … The effect of the minimum wage is therefore to make unemployment higher than it otherwise would be.

    The great appeal of a higher minimum wage, or a living wage rate as some localities have passed, is that it seems like a wonderfully magical way to increase the wellbeing of many people. Those earning less than the new lawful wage and keep their jobs after the increase are happy. They are grateful to the lawmakers, labor leaders, newspaper editorialists, and others who pleaded for the higher minimum wage. News stories will report their good fortune.

    But as Frederic Bastiat wrote a long time ago: “Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favourable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse.”

    The not-so-visible effect of the higher wage law is that demand for labor will be reduced. Those workers whose productivity, as measured by the give and take of supply and demand, lies below the new lawful wage rate are in danger of losing their jobs. As Dr. Friedman says, the law says if you hire someone you must pay them a certain amount. The law can’t compel you to hire someone, or to keep workers on the payroll.

    The difficulty is that people lose their jobs in dribs and drabs. A few workers here; a few there. They may not know who is to blame. The newspaper and television reporters will not seek these people, as they are largely invisible, especially so in the case of the people who are not hired because of the higher wage law.

    If we are truly concerned about the plight of low-wage workers (and I am very concerned, personally), we can face some harsh realities and deal with them openly.

    The simple fact is that some people are not able to produce output that our economy values very much. Passing a law that requires employers to pay them more doesn’t change the fact that we still don’t value their output very much. So a law that requires these employees to be paid more than their output is worth means, in all likelihood, that their jobs disappear.

    Some may say that it is a harsh judgment to say that someone’s work isn’t valued very much. But it really isn’t the greedy evil employers that make that judgment is it? If so, why are some employees, say physicians, paid very well? Is it because the hospital likes to pay high salaries? Or that we as healthcare consumers like to pay high doctor bills? Instead, it’s realizing that we place a high value on the output of a physician. And because it’s difficult to become a physician, and therefore the supply of physicians is low, we have a situation where there is a high demand for something that is in short supply. That means high wages for physicians.

    Henry Hazlitt, writing over 50 years ago in his important work Economics In One Lesson explained how to increase wages:

    The best way to raise wages, therefore, is to raise marginal labor productivity. This can be done by many methods: by an increase in capital accumulation — i.e., by an increase in the machines with which the workers are aided; by new inventions and improvements; by more efficient management on the part of employers; by more industriousness and efficiency on the part of workers; by better education and training. The more the individual worker produces, the more he increases the wealth of the whole community. The more he produces, the more his services are worth to consumers, and hence to employers. And the more he is worth to employers, the more he will be paid. Real wages come out of production, not out of government decrees. (emphasis added)

    One way to increase the value of workers’ output, as explained above, is education. Sadly, as documented in many articles on this website, our public education system is failing children badly.

    Capital — another way to increase wages — may be a dirty word to some. But as the economist Walter E. Williams says, ask yourself this question: who earns the higher wage: a man digging a ditch with a shovel, or a man digging a ditch using a power backhoe? The difference between the two is that the man with the backhoe is more productive. That productivity is provided by capital — the savings that someone accumulated (instead of spending on immediate consumption) and invested in a piece of equipment that increased the output of our economy. Those who call for higher taxes make it more difficult to accumulate capital.

    Technology, innovation, and efficiency improvements are important, too. But I feel the two most important things that government can do to help low-wage workers are these: First, get out of the way of progress in education. Let parents have more control over education. Let markets rather than bureaucrats shape the future of education. Second, eliminate taxes and policies that promote immediate consumption rather than saving and investment, that is, eliminate policies that work against the accumulation of capital.

    If the solution was really as simple as Mr. Scholfield claims, that in order to increase the wellbeing of low-wage workers we could merely pass a law, shouldn’t we be outraged that this law wasn’t passed a long time ago?

    Then, if a law is passed to raise the minimum wage to x, shouldn’t we insist that it have been increased to x + $1, or x + $2, or x + …?

    No, the solution to low wages is much more difficult than that.

  • How a good column on the bad lottery fell apart

    Writing from Miami, Florida

    A recent column in The Wichita Eagle by Randy Scholfield starts out fine, but falls apart near the end. (“Is the lottery the best bet for workers?” February 24, 2006, available at http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/columnists/randy_scholfield/13945602.htm.)

    Mr. Scholfield tells us how the lottery is not a very good bet. He references a survey that tells us how about half of us believe we have a better chance of obtaining a retirement nest egg through winning the lottery rather than by saving and investing.

    He then tells us that the large majority of those playing the lottery are poor and don’t have college degrees.

    What Mr. Scholfield writes is true. I’d like to illustrate in more detail just how true it is.

    Here is how the math works: If you invest $1.00 each week of the year, and you earn 10% on those contributions, at the end of 30 years you will have $9,409. After 40 years you would have $25,316.

    These amounts may not seem like much, but you get that for saving just $1.00 per week. If you saved $10.00 each week (I suspect many people spend that much or more on the lottery each week) you would have about $253,000 after 40 years. That’s a significant sum of money.

    Plus, if you hold these savings in a Roth IRA, this money will be tax-free when you withdraw it. Lottery winnings are taxed.

    Can you earn 10% on your savings? You almost certainly can if you invest these funds in a mutual fund that invests in a broad range of U.S. stocks. That is, invest in an index fund that is based on the S&P 500 index or a broader stock market index. (See Book Review: The Random Walk Guide to Investing.)

    The 10% figure is approximately the return of the U.S. stock market over the last 100 or so years. Some years the market goes up more than that, and some years it goes down a lot. But over a long period of time, we can expect returns of about 10%. (If investing in something that has risk concerns you, consider the risk of gambling on the lottery.)

    The index fund you select must have low costs. An index fund with high costs will return much less. An index fund that has expenses of 1.5% per year, which some do, would return only $16,682 instead of $25,316 for each dollar invested each week. That’s due to the power of compounding over long periods. You must also select a fund with no sales charges, called a “no-load” fund. If you selected a “load” fund, where part of what you save goes to sales commissions rather than shares of the fund, you might have less than $16,000 rather than the $25,316 you could have by selecting a no-load fund.

    (To simply these calculations, I have assumed that you make the contribution for the whole year at the start of the year, rather than a little each week. This doesn’t have much impact on the final figures.)

    Now consider the lottery: The average jackpot of the Super Kansas Cash game over the last year was about $360,000. By investing $22 each week as illustrated above, you would have about that much after 40 years.

    If you instead spent $22 each week on this game (each play costing $.50, probability of jackpot is 1 in 2,517,200) for 40 years, you would have about a 1 in 28 chance of ever winning the jackpot. Contrast this with the near certainty of the long-term returns of the stock market.

    There are other lesser prizes that you would certainly win many of as you made all these bets, and I haven’t considered these prizes. But offsetting these small prizes is the realization that you’d pay income tax on the jackpot from the lottery. The earnings in a Roth IRA, on the other hand, are yours tax-free.

    So far, so good for Mr. Scholfield. But then his column takes a downward spiral. We’ll see just how far down it goes in a future post.

  • More Under Reported Kansas News

    More Under Reported Kansas News
    By Karl Peterjohn, Executive Director Kansas Taxpayers Network

    There are at least two stories that have not received the mainstream news media attention that they deserve in Kansas. Kansans need more information than they have received and the readers should decide whether the following is unreported or just under reported in their daily, mainstream newspaper coverage.

    It was headlines across Kansas when Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison announced his candidacy for Attorney General. Morrison, a liberal Johnson County Republican prior to his announcement, bailed out of the GOP said he was going to run as a Democrat. This announcement and the headline news stories that followed led to analysis pieces discussing the split in the Kansas Republican Party and the “problems” facing Attorney General Phill Kline’s 2006 campaign for reelection.

    What is fascinating in seeing the mainstream Kansas press’ bias was a couple of weeks later when Attorney General Kline announced that 89 of 105 county sheriffs were endorsing him for reelection. Even more remarkable was the fact that 8 of 13 Democrat sheriffs were among the 89.

    There has been very little news media coverage of this announcement in the Kansas press. In a few cases the information has been grudgingly and belatedly provided. There have not been any “analysis” articles discussing the weakness in Morrison’s candidacy when over half of the sheriffs in his new party are already rejecting his candidacy. These endorsements have been filling the internet sites with comments about the 89 endorsements. It is noteworthy that the Kansas City Star did not mention this until over two weeks after the news conference where the Attorney General Kline made this announcement. This belated mention of this story in early December in the Kansas City Star is likely due to the pressure from internet bloggers’ commentaries.

    This reflects more badly upon the news coverage in the Kansas City Star, the Wichita Eagle, and the other daily papers that are trying to skew state news coverage the way the New York Times and Washington Post have been caught skewing national news.

    A second story that has been ignored involves the Texas Supreme Court’s decision on school finance. Texas’ highest court threw out their statewide property tax but specifically told the legislature that additional funds were not a solution needed to make their state’s school finance system pass constitutional requirements.

    This case is similar to the ongoing Kansas litigation in terms of subject but not in terms of remedy or violating the separation of powers provisions. So, the Texas case is not only timely but is also quite relevant since it contrasts with the Kansas court’s $853 million in new spending demands. The Texas court ruling is going to set the stage for that state’s 2006 legislative session. However, this ruling specifically avoids the ongoing spending edicts being issued by the top Kansas court’s school finance edicts. Kansas is awaiting more edicts from our judicial masters.

    That’s a notable judicial difference. Kansans should know that five of the seven members of the Kansas Supreme Court are registered Democrats. Kansas Chief Justice Kay McFarland may complain about the fact that citizens are restless about her court’s edicts and activism on school finance, the death penalty, the court’s support for eminent domain abuses, and other hot button social issues. There are consequences to judicial short-circuiting of the political process to arrive at the politically correct conclusions of our new judicial oligarchs.

    The Kansas Supreme Court needs to be seen as the Sebelius court with her appointments, her campaign manager’s family ties to this court, and the Democratic domination among its members. The contrast, as well as the similarities, between Kansas and Texas in this school finance litigation is an important story that deserves more attention than it has received.

  • Randy Scholfield and less government

    In an editorial in the September 18, 2005 Wichita Eagle, Randy Scholfield wrote “Less government is a laudable goal.”

    The dictionary defines laudable as “Deserving commendation; praiseworthy” or “Deserving honor, respect, or admiration.” Mr. Scholfield’s past writings don’t treat the goal of less government this way. In fact, it doesn’t seem there is a single government program that Mr. Scholfield doesn’t like and praise.

    On September 13, 2004, he advocated more funding for early childhood education, writing “… the state Legislature needs to do the right thing for the state’s children and future, and invest in early childhood education.”

    He seems to automatically believe that schools need more money.

    He believes in government subsidies. In an editorial in The Wichita Eagle published on April 19, 2005, he wrote: “Wichita should stick to its subsidies. They’re fostering competition, not stifling it, and paying off big-time for the community by lowering airfares and boosting economic development.”

    He has consistently supported the government building the downtown Wichita arena.

    He advocates more government spending on arts (August 9, 2005 “Culture requires community support”).

    He supports more funding for Exploration Place.

    Mr. Scholfield, is there any government program you have opposed, any example that would lend credibility to your claim that less government is a laudable goal?

  • Untold and Under Reported Stories From the Kansas Special Session: Part II

    Thank you, Karl, for this insight into the character of our leading Kansas politicians, and for another example of how Kansas newspapers and other news media aren’t giving us the information we need.

    Untold and Under Reported Stories From the Kansas Special Session: Part II

    By Karl Peterjohn, Executive Director, Kansas Taxpayers Network

    Early in the special session of the Kansas legislature the house speaker, Representative Doug Mays, R-Topeka, spoke one-on-one with Governor Sebelius. Following this conversation Rep. Mays relayed his discussion with the governor to his house GOP caucus as he laid out a variety of public policy options for the special session. This event deserves more public attention than it has received.

    Speaker Mays said that he and Governor Sebelius did not find a lot of common ground. Mays did say that the governor was willing to do a deal. The governor wanted expanded gambling while the conservative GOP legislators behind Mays wanted a constitutional amendment to defend the budgetary authority of elected officials from the Kansas courts.

    The two constitutional amendments both ended in failure on the house floor with 41 of 42 house Democrats voting against both proposals to limit the Kansas Supreme Court’s spending edict. A 2/3 vote or 84 out of 125 house members would be needed to send a constitutional amendment to Kansas voters after two separate amendments passed the senate. Unified house Democrats have the votes to stop any constitutional amendment.

    This proposal to swap gambling for constitutional restrictions on judicial activism and protecting legislative budget power is major news. I asked Rep. Mays why this has not been reported statewide? “I have no idea why they (the press) didn’t,” Mays said. He also said, “It’s public knowledge,” based upon the caucus discussion. Some press members sit in on the caucuses since they fall under open meetings provisions.

    The governor’s spokeswoman Nicole Corcoran said that the governor spoke with many legislators during the special session but that her office had no knowledge of this proposed swap on these two major issues.

    I asked Mays if he was surprised that this has not been reported statewide. Mays expressed frustration that this deal has not become public knowledge. Mays went on to explain that is most of the state house press, “Didn’t seem to be inclined to report anything to put the governor in a bad light.”

    Mays went on to acknowledge that he had been clobbered by a number of critical newspaper editorials concerning his legislative actions during the special session. This editorial page criticism does not bother Mays because the bulk of the public feedback he has received has been positive.

    The editorial criticism is not as important as the news reporting. Kansans need to know that there was talk about trading votes for a constitutional amendment in exchange for state expansion of casino gambling. This is important information since we no longer have a judiciary that has usurped legislative budget authority. Kansas now has an oligarchy of appointed judges. The average Kansan needs to know about this deal was being discussed at the statehouse during 2005 special legislative session.

    #####

    Karl Peterjohn is the executive director of the Kansas Taxpayers Network and is a former news reporter and California Department of Finance budget analyst.

  • An enlightening encounter with The Wichita Eagle

    Writing from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

    I recently had an issue with an article published in The Wichita Eagle, and my encounter with this newspaper was quite revealing.

    In a story titled “Schools get shopping lists ready” in the June 20, 2005 Wichita Eagle, reporter Josh Funk wrote this: “Research shows that having 15 students per class gives teachers time to offer individual help and fosters academic success, especially among low-income kids, said Mary Ellen Isaac, the district’s chief academic officer.” I believe that the quoted person is misinformed, but aside from that, this is reporting. Someone said it, the reporter quoted the source, and also identified the source.

    What I have trouble with is the second sentence of the article, where Mr. Funk wrote, in a single paragraph all by itself: “Proven reforms, such as reducing the number of kids in a classroom, top the list of things Wichita area school districts plan to invest in.”

    This statement is presented as an indisputable fact, when there are many distinguished researchers who would disagree with it. I don’t think that anyone Mr. Funk quoted in this article would disagree with it, and that, perhaps, is the biggest problem with this story: its unbalanced coverage of this topic.

    There is definitely no consensus that small class sizes produce better educational outcomes. You don’t have to look very far to find reputable evidence of this. For example, consider research by Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University. His paper “Evidence, politics, and the class size debate” is available at this link: http://edpro.stanford.edu/eah/papers/EPI.class%20size.publication.pdf. This article provides reasoned criticism of the Tennessee STAR experiment, which may be the evidence that Mr. Funk relied upon for his story. (We don’t know the source of Mr. Funk’s evidence, of course, as he doesn’t tell us, but that experiment is evidence often relied on by the educational establishment.)

    Or, consider Harvard economist Caroline M. Hoxby’s research titled “The effects of class size on student achievement: New evidence from population variation”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 115:4 (2000), 1239-1285, which can be read here: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/effects.pdf. The conclusion to this paper states, in part: “Using both methods, I find that reductions in class size have no effect on student achievement. The estimates are sufficiently precise that, if a 10 percent reduction in class size improved achievement by just 2 to 4 percent of a standard deviation, I would have found statistically significant effects in math, reading, and writing. I find no evidence that class size reductions are more efficacious in schools that contain high concentrations of low income students or African-American students.”

    Failing to mention, even in passing, that spending huge sums to reduce class size may provide little or no benefit to schoolchildren makes this news article read like a press release authored by Winston Brooks, the superintendent of the Wichita public schools.

    I attempted to contact Mr. Funk about this article, as I wanted to learn the source of his statement about class size. I emailed twice and left voicemail messages twice. Finally, after the third email, Mr. Funk called me. He listened to what I had to say about the problems with the article, but he disagreed. I did not learn the source of the claim made in the second sentence of the article.

    What is revealing about this encounter is that the last email I sent to Mr. Funk was also sent to a Mr. Kevin McGrath, whom I thought might be Mr. Funk’s editor. (I hate to complain to someone’s boss, but I was getting no response from Mr. Funk.)

    Mr. McGrath forwarded my email, along with a few remarks of his own, to Mr. Funk, but he also, I presume by accident, sent it to me.

    The most revealing part of Mr. McGrath’s letter that I inadvertently received is how he implied that my criticism of Mr. Funk’s article would be based on my belief that he is a “no-good liberal elitist so-and-so.” I do not know Mr. Funk, and I know nothing about his political beliefs or elitist background, if in fact that is the type of personal history he has. Furthermore, if my criticism of Mr. Funk’s article was based on his personal characteristics or political beliefs, it wouldn’t be very compelling or valid criticism.

    My criticism, instead, is based on defects in his reporting and the editing of the newspaper he works for.

    It is also enlightening to note that The Eagle brushes off criticism of their reporting and editing by discounting the beliefs of their critics. As long as they believe this about their readers and critics, we will never have a newspaper that gives the public the information they really need.