Steve Rankin – via a kind reader’s email:
Dear Editor: In the article “Racial Divide,” you quote the Madison School District’s Kurt Kiefer as saying “We celebrate the high fliers” and state that Madison has 57 National Merit semifinalists this year.
But did we “celebrate” them? Two were named last week in the Wisconsin State Journal, and they were named because of their disabilities. I could not find reference to the other 55 on the school district’s website. (By searching madison.com archives, I did find a list of 62 from September, including private school students.) How many high school athletes did we celebrate this week, by posting their names, their accomplishments, and their pictures in the paper?
The State Journal names a male and female athlete of the week, and runs a feature story. When did we name a scholar of the week? A thespian? A musician? Do we cover the State Solo and Ensemble Competition as though it were newsworthy? How about math meets? Debate and forensics? Do we review high school plays with the same attention as weekly football games?
When academic and artistic pursuits are covered with even a quarter of the vigor with which we cover sports, when students of color are served by the district as gifted in fields other than athletics, when we let students know in a public way that we value them for those gifts and that hard work, then we can begin to talk about celebrating the high fliers, and then we can begin to scratch our heads about an achievement gap.
When we send the clear message to students, especially students of color, that they are of value to society for their entertainment value on an athletic field, we do not serve them or us.
Steve Rankin
Madison
Very nicely stated, Steve. It reminds me of when 2 Madison high school students achieved gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2002 and the WSJ published only a tiny 3-paragraph story about it buried in the middle of the paper.
Janet Mertz
The State Journal does a very nice year-end insert on top regional scholars. The Madison Times and Hues also do a good job of spotlighting minority scholars.
Years ago I wrote for a weekly paper in another state. Sports, especially team sports, sells papers. When the local daily was ignoring youth soccer, we vastly increased sales by focusing on the various youth soccer leagues–lots of pictures and team profiles for parents to buy multiple copies to send to relatives. We also found focusing on non-sport activities and scholars helped bump up readership. This was the early 1990s, and the newspaper business has changed a lot. For one, staffs at dailies aren’t large enough to cover local schools anymore.
Also, the Madison area market makes it tougher for a regional paper to justify concentrating on schools. In and around Rapid City, SD, the population is about a quarter or less of the population here, but the student population is about half or what it is here.
Madison has a wonderful selection of advertiser-supported periodicals that are distributed at various retail outlets (especially grocery stores). I wonder if any publisher has considered launching a similar periodical that spotlights student scholars, arts, sciences and non-sport activities. I bet it would have good readership, so I think it could draw advertising.