Robert Niles

to Robert Niles.

Robert Niles' work in online journalism has been called "pathbreaking" by noted columnist Dan Gillmor. Robert's "Accident Watch" feature on ThemeParkInsider.com won the 2001 Online Journalism Award for Service Journalism, presented by the Online News Association and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. It was the first example of a "crowdsourced" online report, built on reader-contributed content, to win a major journalism award.

Robert is a native of Los Angeles, and today lives in nearby Pasadena, California. He graduated from Northwestern University, where he majored in the school's program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, as well as in Political Science. He also holds a master's degree in journalism from Indiana University.

Along the way, Robert has worked as a Pirate of the Caribbean and Tom Sawyer Island raft driver (at Walt Disney World) as well as for the (Bloomington, Indiana) Herald-Times, the Omaha World-Herald, the Rocky Mountain News, the Los Angeles Times and the University of Southern California.

Today, Robert runs SensibleTalk.com, ThemeParkInsider.com and (with his wife, Laurie) Violinist.com.

Reader Robert M writes in to nominate reporter David Wren of The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina as a "Truth Vigilante."

Robert highlights David's work to track what's happening to the money raised by a one-cent local sales tax that's supposed to be funding tourism advertising but that's being administered by the local Chamber of Commerce - which is fighting attempts at oversight.

"The one-cent sales tax raises millions per year... and it's easy to imagine the kinds of self-dealing that are possible," Robert wrote. "Well, David has repeatedly asked for an accounting of how the tax money is spent, and apparently the official responses to his inquiries have become absolutely absurd."

Check out the story: Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce answers records request
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Let's give a "Truth Vigilante" shout-out to the Los Angeles Times' George Skelton, for his smack-down of popular talking points against state tax increases in California.

Not only does Skelton brings an arsenal of facts to battle, but he drops a few FCC-friendly expletives along the way, including a "baloney" and a "blarney."

Remember, vigilantes, the "L" word ("lie") is okay to use, too. But we understand if you feel like you need to warm up to it. Just remember, the Truth Vigilante posse's got your back.

H/T to Monica H. for the link. Have you seen a reporter calling out a source for lying? Send us the link and we'll name the writer a Truth Vigilante, too.
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We're now taking nominations for "Truth Vigilante" shout-outs. If you see a great news report where the writer calls out a source for lying (without waffling about it), send me the link and we'll name the writer a "Truth Vigilante" on the site.

Ideally, we're looking for the type of truth vigilante that Arthur Brisbane wrote about in his NYT piece: a reporter, confronted with a lie from a source, who calls out that source in the story.

Fact-check sidebars are great, as are blog posts calling out someone else's sources. And we'll consider those for Truth Vigilante shout-outs, too. But, ideally, we'd really like to honor reporters who show both the guts and the know-how to take on their own sources who lie to them. So, please, keep your eyes open and send in links when you find them.

Also, thanks to all those who've become fans of Truth Vigilante on Facebook. We now have an easy-to-remember URL shortcut for our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/truthvigilante. Please click and become a fan, if you haven't already.

Two more items:

1) Thanks to Eric Ulken for the font face suggestion for the new flag. He's also suggested "Truth Vigilante" T-shirts, which I think is a great idea. Anyone want to take a crack at designing one? (Free shirts and linkbacks in exchange.) Email if you're interested in either designing a shirt, or simply buying one. If there's enough interest, I'll put in an order. (By the way, I hate the quality of CafePress stuff. If we're gonna do shirts, we're gonna do 'em right.)

2) If anyone would like to help with curating the site by getting a log-in to post to the blog, email me. If I don't already know you in person, please include an introduction that convinces me you're not a spammer or a troll. Thanks.
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Truth vigilante?

Hell, yeah!

Of course, when I read that NYT column, I had to join the "Truth Vigilante" team, so I went ahead and registered truthvigilante.com.

So, welcome. Some of my online friends might notice that the site looks a lot like my SensibleTalk.com blog. And you'd be correct - I've just changed the name over to Truth Vigilante 'cause, well, it's an awesome name.

I'll be opening up the blog platform in the next few days to anyone who wants to join the Truth Vigilante team and start posting links or essays on the site. Someone writing something stupid? Getting suckered by liars? Call 'em out on Truth Vigilante.

Or maybe, we'll just print up a bunch of T-shirts and leave it at that. Hey, your call.

In the meantime, fan us on Facebook and spread the word. The Truth Vigilantes are getting ready to roll. :^)
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I don't usually disagree with Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics who writes for the New York Times. But this week, he blew it in his column about the unequal playing field facing Americans trying to pursue their dreams. Here, he tried to describe some of the obstacles that make advancement impossible for millions of Americans:

The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.

I won't dispute for a moment that poor children in the United States are getting a worse education than kids from affluent families - a quick look at test scores will show that even though test scores for poor children have been rising in the United States over the past decade, they still lag other students' scores, and the gap is growing.

But who's to blame for that? Krugman doesn't explicitly say it, but when Krugman writes that "affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools," it's not hard to imagine that the reader will take from that statement an assumption that the poor end up with the "bad" schools.

Here's the trouble with that hypothesis, though: If inadequate schools are the problem that prevent children in poverty from advancing, why are the middle-class children who attend those same schools succeeding?
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A lot of politicians - including President Obama and at least two of our local Pasadena school board members - think that charter schools are part of the answer to improving public education. But do charter schools really provide superior education quality over public schools? A study I cited in my last post suggested that they don't. I decided to take a closer look by examining recent test results for charter and public schools here in Pasadena.

There are five charter schools operating within Pasadena Unified School District boundaries - Aveson's School of Leaders (for grades K-5), Aveson's Global Leadership Academy (for grades 6-12), Odyssey, Rosebud and Learning Works. I found results from the most recent state STAR tests on the state of California's website. The state data also includes information about the demographics of these schools, as well as for the schools of the PUSD.

As far as demographics go, none of the five local charter schools look anything like the PUSD. Just 28% of students tested in PUSD last spring were what the state calls "non-socio-economically disadvantaged." That means that only about one in four students in PUSD comes from families with enough income to be able to afford to pay for their children's lunches each day. The rest - 72% of students in grades 2-12 in PUSD - are "socio-economically disadvantaged" and on the federal government's free lunch program. (STAR testing starts in second grade, so that's why I writing about students in grades 2-12.)

It's a different story at the charter schools. At four of the five charters, more than 62% of the students are not in the free lunch group. These charters are serving a much larger percentage of middle-class families than PUSD is. That's not unusual for charter schools. Studies by UCLA, Arizona State and the University of Colorado have shown that charter schools often effectively re-segregate their communities, typically serving students who are at one end or the other of the income scale.

Since higher family income is strongly correlated with higher test scores, it's fairest to compare students in the same income bracket when comparing charter and public schools. Otherwise, the charter schools would be at a huge advantage, given that for four of these five charter schools, they serve a much, much higher percentage of middle-class-income students than the local public schools.

And yet, when you look at STAR test scores by grade just for non-socio-economically disadvantaged students, you'll find that in almost every case, PUSD students in that demographic category outscored the charter school students taking the same test.
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My two children, ages 14 and 11, attend their local public schools, and have since kindergarten. Why do I send my children to public schools?

1. Public schools work. Every year, millions of American children graduate from public schools across the country, having completed the toughest curricula in our nation's history, surpassing standards that get tougher by the year. In our public schools, students can learn calculus, analyze complex themes by Nobel Prize-winning authors, study advanced chemistry, biology and physics, program computers, and perform music and dance in international competitions in front of crowds of thousands. Every year, public school students learn, graduate and go on to the world's best colleges and the world's most competitive jobs.

But what about all those news stories about bad test scores and failing schools? Aren't many kids falling behind?

It's true that we've got a huge gap between students in our country - one that grows with each grade level as kids advance from kindergarten into high school. But that's not because we have an education problem in America. It's because we have a large, and growing, child poverty problem in our country.
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