Will the media play by the same rules as it expects the schools to? Very, very doubtful.

I read with interest the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board's reiteration of its Student Bill of Rights this morning, which is probably its third or fourth appearance this year. Basically, it's market-driven drivel, geared towards the schools-should-be-run-as-businesses mentality. Consolidate schools. Expand school choice. Use merit pay to dump those lousy teachers (presumably demonstrated through test scores). Ban strikes. Empower parents to shut down schools, because that's how you get parents involved (as opposed to, say, communicating with the educators or monitoring their kids' homework completion).

I must say, I'm impressed by the Editorial Board's completely tone-deaf approach to the problem. Even when their own newspaper reports on socioeconomic factors that almost certainly impact a child's learning and school performance (decades of disparate school funding, city violence, exposure to lead, immigration and domestic violence issues, city violence and its corresponding poverty, etc.), they manage to ignore most of it and retain their focus, laserlike, on the schools alone. It's a veritable one-note trumpet they're continually playing: Schools are to blame. No excuses. If kids aren't learning, that's on the teachers and the teachers alone. If a student gets pregnant, then that's a mark against the student's school (as Editorial Board member Kristen McQueary bizarrely argued in a podcast last week).

"You're playing the same note over and over again. You are now ready to write songs for the media about public education."

Meanwhile, the research consistently demonstrates family plays a much greater role in a child's educational success or failure than the school's, and the teaching profession, battered by years of scapegoating and demonizing, is seeing its ranks fall, while fewer college students are getting into the profession at all.

One wonders whether the Tribune would hold itself to its own standards.

One wonders if, in a world where we blame teachers for all aspects of student performance, we could apply the same standard to the newspaper writers doing the blaming.

One ponders the sheer idiocy of holding a newspaper reporter responsible for what even his or her own readers retain from the reporter's work, given the apparent inability of a large portion of this nation to do anything resembling rational thinking.

One might, in a fit of pique and with a head full of righteous indignation, cook up a missive in the same spirit as the Tribune's, and publish that missive in an effort to call out this kind of fallacious reasoning. And if one were to do so, one might come up with something like the following. 

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The Newspaper Reader's Bill of Rights

This country has watched its journalism decline into spectacles of reality TV and incessant navel-gazing. Newspaper defenders paint reporters and editors as scrappy little crusaders filled with derring-do, valiantly attempting to capture the attention of the American people with Stories That Matter. And yet they're still struggling because, doggone it, people aren't reading them.

Would you believe it: the public doesn't even trust them in the first place! Those ingrates! In a world where you can't trust a Fourth Estate made up of a handful of incredibly wealthy corporations, what can you trust?

But I think we all know the real reason for these travails: journalists, and especially newspapers, aren't doing enough to get people to read them. They can't maintain quality in journalism because they just don't have the subscribers, and they don't have subscribers because they totally suck. Don't you see?

The Chicago Tribune no longer has that excuse. I just paid for a month's subscription at ninety-nine cents, and because I am an ardent free market enthusiast, I, like a corporate sponsor, expect my money to produce the kind of reporting that I think it should. Never mind what the media elites say is good journalism.

You got the money, Tribune. No more excuses. Now here's my list of demands. You may need seven or ten for Illinois's schools, but I only need four or five for you. What's bedeviling your industry is really that simple to fix.

1. High-quality reporters for all stories. I'm talking Pulitzer Prize-winning, globe-trotting, Clark Kent-mixed-with-Edward R. Murrow figures. Why are you not hiring economist journalists to cover the economy? Why are you not hiring Joyce Carol Oates to write book reviews? Hire the best. And use incentives to keep them on their toes once they're working for you. If their reporting isn't read by thousands of people within hours of posting, show them the door. There is absolutely no reason why people wouldn't read riveting reporting, and any excuses given (short attention spans, too much competition, too much confusion over what news is real and what isn't) is just that: a bunch of excuses.

2. Comprehensive exams to make sure news readers remember and understand what they read. I mean, if a student in a class doesn't know when the Civil War was fought, or that Columbus was basically a genocidal land-thief, it's obviously because their good-for-nothing teachers never told them. So when we read that one out of five Americans think the sun goes around the earth, yeah, those lazy "educators" probably never got around to holding up a globe next to a lamp or something, but it's also because the news didn't tell them. So I call upon the Tribune to hold its staff to accountability. Do your readers know who the Rohingya are? You ran a story about them Sept 2, so if they don't, it's because you didn't explain it clearly enough, or you didn't have good enough photos to go with the story, or you didn't fold some cat videos around it on your webpage. Are your readers intimately familiar with the conflicting religions and ideologies fueling the conflict in Syria, Iraq and the surrounding areas? Can they identify the differences between Shia and Sunni Muslims? They can't? That's on you. Come on, guys. No excuses.

3. Show me the numbers. Newspapers should make better use of Big Data and internet tools to boost readership. Find out what your readers want to read about. They didn't want to read about financial shenanigans that led to the Great Recession, and you and your ilk quite rightly didn't report on them. Ditto investigations of the Bush administration's WMD claims. Good on you. So keep delivering the goods, regardless of how good those goods in reality are. As I type this up, I notice that Beyoncé and Cardi B are trending on Twitter, yet I see nothing about this on your page one. What's up with that, guys? Do you have such little faith in the wisdom of the American people? Are you so elitist as to assume we can't decide for ourselves what our needs for information on pop stars are? Insulting.

4. More competition. If competition improves quality, then two newspapers to compete with aren't enough. We want ten more papers. And you should be funding this competition yourself, much like the taxpayer is now funding private schools and charter schools with less accountability. So bleed some revenue out and get those newspapers well funded and running, and then compete with them. What are you, scared of competition? Just think how awesome you'll be, fighting over a finite number of readers with only so many hours to devote to reading the press. See? You're coming up with ideas already. I can see the desperation rising in your eyes.

5. I'm leaving numbers five through ten for the general public to fill in as they see fit. Possible items include more skin in the style section, no paywalls, fewer stories on places we can't pronounce so we don't feel stupid, and more gratuitous and shameless plugs for Game of Thrones since there's only been one this week.

Newspaper readers and news consumers' interests and tastes should never take a back seat to what the elitist "experts" claim is actually the news, and market forces rule all. Make all this happen in the next week or so, which seems a reasonable timeline, or else you're, you know, fired.

"This will now be the format for story pitches. Fifteen reporters enter. One (who dutifully parrots the right talking points) leaves, and gets a salary."