"Wire" creator decries notion of easy answers

I know you're supposed to write what you know, and I'm writing about the series "The Wire" even though I've never seen it. (Well, I don't watch much TV, and we don't have cable.) Or rather, I'm writing about its creator.

The Columbia Journalism Review has a long profile of David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who created "The Wire." As a devoted consumer and frequent critic of urban journalism, I was attracted to the headline, "Secrets of the City: What The Wire Reveals about Urban Journalism" — and copy such as: "Why is a newspaperman-at-heart devoting the
final ten hours of one of the most acclaimed television dramas in history to the role of journalism in the decline of the American empire?"

Simon is seriously bitter about his experiences at the Sun and about how he sees the role of even a socially conscious newspaper that devotes plenty of space to the concerns of the urban poor. (He's so bitter that his ex-co-workers think he's nuts.) Simon's basic gripe is the oversimplified, narrow approach to covering deep social problems: "One story is small, self-contained, and has good guys and bad guys. The other one is about where we are and where we're going as an urban society and who's being left behind, and it's harder to report." He says his Sun editors resisted his approach to news coverage because it showed the nuances and complexities rather than black and white.

In my area of interest, I completely get what he's saying. I wonder whether those who focus on other issues of the urban poor would agree. These sections from the article are what make this on topic for an education blog.

At the Sun, [Simon's editors John Carroll and Bill Marimow] took on education, asking themselves what the real vital sign of a school system is. When they read that children rarely catch up if they don’t learn to read by third grade, they started a series called “Reading by 9.” “We’ll continue to try and cover everything,” Carroll said. “But let’s pick one thing and hammer the living hell out of it.” The spotlight was unrelenting: the paper regularly posted reading scores for every school in the city, and there were dozens of articles over several years.

... Will the thousands of additional children who learned to read in Baltimore after the “Reading by 9” series thrive into adulthood? The spotlight was on the schools, but much of what determines success in learning to read is learned at home before kindergarten. Once children get to school, well over half of the variance in their achievement scores is attributable to factors outside the schools. Perhaps 15 or 20 percent is attributable to teachers. And overall early gains by disadvantaged children often disappear by high school. (Coincidentally, in The Wire’s final season, this very fact will hamper a mayor’s effort to reform elementary schools.) Ought the spotlight shine on the extracurricular socioeconomic factors that interfere with learning?

It's a good question. One of my frequent beefs with news coverage and much of the current trend in "education reform" is just what Simon brings out: the notion that it's all small stories with clear resolutions — simple questions with easy answers.