Online Smears Are Not Facts
A professional journalist teams with online trolls to take down the "Seattle Crew" at Saint Louis Public Schools
Detour into media criticism
I have been thinking about starting this blog for a long time. I will explain more in later posts, but the material I want to publish has been building for years. I did not start this blog to comment on the news. That said, this post is going to be about the news. I am a little worried that this post will unnecessarily muddy my message. However, I have already gotten sucked in, and I cannot resist a long-form write-up of my thoughts.
Who runs SLPS?
The superintendent of Saint Louis Public Schools is a woman named Keisha Scarlett. She worked previously for Seattle Public Schools and moved here with her close friend and colleague, Millicent Borishade, to take on the role last year. She made it through the year but was recently placed on leave pending an investigation. The reasons for her being placed on leave are complicated, and while I have thoughts, this post is not really about them.
The investigation is into hiring practices and spending, though other bad news, like a bus fiasco, probably did not help her. The leave and investigation stemmed from a board vote, not an ethics panel or an independent body. It is not clear what policies were violated, if any, but I will admit some things look bad. Again, this is not where I am going to lay out my thoughts, and I think more people should wait for an investigation before judging her.
After being placed on leave, Dr. Scarlett’s deputy and friend, Millicent Borishade, was voted into the interim superintendent role. Strangely, the same board members who voted to oust Scarlett voted to elevate Borishade. It is a complicated situation, and the exact motives and failures of those involved are still unclear. Good and nuanced reporting is needed.
I do not want to clear my throat too much, but I will only say that even though they are my bosses, I have no real experience with Scarlett or Borishade. I have seen both promising and worrying things come out of Scarlett's time as superintendent. Despite what some will say, this is not a "pro-Scarlett" post. I am reserving judgment and trying to keep an open mind.
This post is not about who is right or wrong or what should happen to SLPS leadership. This post is about how local reporting is not helping people understand this complex issue. It is also about how I got publicly insulted and blocked on a Facebook group.
The paper of record
Blythe Bernhard is the education reporter at the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch and the administrator of a Facebook group called "Chalk Talk." The group has over 3,000 members and bills itself as an official Post-Dispatch forum for discussing Saint Louis Education. I was a member and frequent commenter on Chalk Talk until Blythe recently suspended my ability to post to the account.
The reasons for this suspension are a big part of what I want to discuss, but this is not a revenge post. I tried to make a point and it went poorly. I will try to make the same point here.
The group is private, and I want to respect people's ability to express themselves freely. I am not planning on putting anyone (except Blythe) on the spot. However, considering this is an important local forum run by a reporter in the name of the local paper and I have been banned from communicating on it, I do not see why I should not share what led to my suspension and Blythe's quite public takedown of me.
The Post-Dispatch paywalls all its articles, and if you are not a paying subscriber, I cannot really recommend it. However, Blythe’s articles, all posted on Chalk Talk for comment, are a prime source of education news for Saint Louisans. If you read her last few articles, you will notice a clear narrative emerging: Drs. Scarlett and Borishade are corrupt.
Instead of wasting your time explaining how I got this from Blythe's reporting, I will just post this message she sent me in which she states that this is a fact.
I stand by my sigh. Believe what you want, but corruption by the administration is not a fact. It clearly is driving Berhard’s reporting, but it is an allegation at best. (I wrote this before a board member released a letter indicating that the lack of vetting was a board failure. Does this mean the board is corrupt?)
"Administration" is a vague term and could be a reference to the board or the whole administrative apparatus of SLPS ("801" is the central administrative building for SLPS and is shorthand for administrators who do not work in a school. They are sometimes also referred to as "central staff" or “the administration”). Read Blythe's reporting, though, and it is clear that "this administration" refers to Scarlett and Borishade. Some online commenters have been naming this the "Seattle crew.” Blythe has not used this term, but I bet some of her sources do.
Blocked and reported
The reason I was locked out of the Post Dispatch's forum was that I dared to criticize Blythe's reporting on SLPS in comments on her stories. I tried to be respectful and detailed, but I did not kid myself that she would enjoy the criticism. Admittedly, I privately made a jibe to her about ChatGPT that I probably could have withheld. Any guilt about that is gone now that she has publicly called me a mansplainer (details in a moment), so I will say it openly: If you defend an inaccurate article by saying you just wrote what the press release said, you deserve to be replaced by an AI.
That saucy take was not what got me kicked off Chalk Talk. Instead, it came after I took issue with a pattern of anonymously sourced smears that were (and are) appearing in her coverage. Again, the articles are paywalled, but here are a few excerpts from recent articles.
The issue I raised on Chalk Talk was with this pattern of anonymous sources being relied on as evidence against both Scarlett and Borishade (reminder that Borishade has not been openly accused of wrongdoing by anyone and was approved by the board to be interim superintendent). When I criticized this pattern, I was quickly straw manned into being anti-anonymity in all cases. I hope you, dear reader, can understand the difference between being anti-anonymity and having an issue with the collection of quotes I posted. I have been an anonymous source in Blythe’s stories in the past, and I am not unaware of the threat of retaliation that anonymity wards off.
I highlighted the social media line in the last quote to accentuate the extent to which the online world is invading Blythe's reporting. I assume the social media in question was Chalk Talk, though I know there are other online forums for angry anonymous administrators. I see in these articles and forums a blurring of online attacks and reporting that reminds me of the worst days of Twitter pile-ons. Here is a post from a different group showing an anonymous administrator (one of Blythe’s sources?) suggesting workers wear STL gear to professional development as an “act of resistance” to the “people from Seattle” (pretty sure that’s just Borishade at this point).
I think this sucks, and not because I am a big fan of Scarlett or Borishade. I think anonymous online smears should not typically be considered newsworthy. I do not like the conflation of smears and news, the rush to judgment, and the incuriosity about the motives of the players by professional reporters. I think the contributors to Blythe's Facebook group and her stated belief that the administration is corrupt are driving her to print things that she should not. With that in mind, I posted the following as a comment on one of her stories:
This response prompted a union rep and frequent online commentator to make a separate post defending Blythe. I responded directly to this person’s post, but Blythe deleted my original response before I could share it, and has since deleted the one I screenshotted below, so this is the best I can give of the exchange. Semi-importantly for my own reputation, when Blythe jumps in to accuse me of mansplaining, I have not actually been talking to her but responding to the original poster, who is a man.
You might take Blythe's side in this for any number of reasons. If you work with Scarlett and Borishade, you might not need stories to confirm your experience. You may also be a believer in advocacy-centered journalism and believe that my qualms with Blythe taking a side are outdated or wrongheaded. You may hate mansplainers like myself. That is all fine. I do not need everyone to agree with me, and I have a pretty thick skin if you want to tell me about how I suck in the comments.
Journalism is about verifying, not trusting
That said, I do have a problem with this post and Blythe’s response. The original poster responds to my criticism of anonymous smears by asserting that Blythe once helped him get buses for a field trip. That is great, but it is not journalism. It is also not relevant to my argument, which was not centered on Blythe being a bad person or not caring about SLPS. For the record, I am a teacher at SLPS and have worked in some tough places for years. I may not have got this guy buses for his field trip, but I wish someone would defend me by pointing out that I was a pretty decent teacher.
After standing up for Blythe’s character, he defends the use of "anonymous sources" with a simple assertion that Blythe is not making anything up. This was not something I accused her of. I have seen the swarms of anonymous claims online, and I do not think they are all Blythe herself. However, if you read the comments that made it into her writing, you should notice that they are too vague to be fact-checked. They are probably real quotes from staff, but they are non-fact-checkable by definition.
The anonymous posters are not sharing clips of Scarlett and Borishade insulting staff, just their own opinion that they do so. There is no way to fact-check a claim like "She does not support collaboration." I found this guy’s response weird, and in my own (now deleted by Blythe) response, I linked to this website and screenshotted this blurb:
I am a teacher and am used to being accused of being pedantic (it’s kind of my job) but I was not including this information to be a jerk (I also was not mansplaining). I believe this is a good guideline, and I support old-fashioned deference for the press so long as it is ethical and abides by values like curiosity, skepticism, and objectivity (controversial now, I know). I will not go into a long spiel here, but I do not think Blythe is abiding by the journalistic ethics I respect. It seems to me that she believes:
1. An anonymous administrator posting that their boss "doesn't value collaboration" = Good use of social media. Newsworthy.
2. A named teacher responding to an article by expressing discomfort with anonymous smears of their boss = Mansplaining. How dare you!
This, and Blythe’s insistence that she should not face criticism on a forum that she administers, makes her a crappy journalist. You should read her pieces very skeptically.
But who really runs SLPS?
I have a problem with brevity, and I have so much more to comment on that I should save for a different post. However, I want to make a final connection that I think is being missed in the coverage. The sources that Blythe is citing are almost all administrators, most of them from the central office. Much of what I started this blog to write about concerns about what goes on in 801, but much is already known.
Under the leadership of Superintendent Adams, which Blythe recently characterized as "a period of relative stability,” a counselor named Ron Spivey was fired. He sued and claimed he was harassed out of his job. Missouri has lousy worker protection laws, and Spivey had to prove the discrimination against him was based on being a member of a protected class (he is a black man, and his boss was an Asian woman). Despite the difficulty, the evidence was overwhelming, and he convinced a jury that he faced sex discrimination. It took six years for him to get his day in court. He was awarded 6.1 million dollars of tax-payer money, mostly in punitive damages. You can read about the details of the suit here, but there was a strangely small amount of coverage of this case in the news.
Blythe wrote only one article about Spivey’s suit. It is admirably objective and refrains from any opining on the justice of the ruling. It notes that SLPS totally rejects the ruling and plans to appeal. Dr. Scarlett was hired (in a surprise to many who expected Nicole Williams, Adam’s chief of staff and interim superintendent, to get the job) after this and she fired many people at 801 who would have been involved in harassing this guy.
Scarlett may have antagonized and fired some administrators, but it kind of seems like she was hired to do so. The judge awarded Spivey so much money because he found that the administration had acted with "reckless indifference to the rights of others." The impression was that this was systemic and common, not a case of one bad principal. Were any of Blythe’s sources around when this happened? What part did they play in helping a principal harass an employee out of a job? Since they are anonymous, we will never know and cannot reach out for comment.
(I reached out to Blythe Bernhard for comment before publishing and received no response)