Why Did This Politico Story On Education Reform Disappear?

I put a Politico link on my blogroll after Stephanie Simon joined the media outlet to write about education issues.

I've never been a huge fan of the site, but Stephanie Simon's work at Reuters was excellent, so I decided if she was going to be writing education stories at Politico, a link to the site was warranted.

Last night at 10:52 PM, a story went up entitled "Do U.S. Schools Really Stink?" by Stephanie Simon that started out like this:

POLITICO Pro Report: A vocal group of contrarians is challenging the conventional wisdom…

That sounded like an interesting story to read, especially at a conventional Beltway media outlet like Politico, so I clicked on the story and got taken to -

Nowhere.

The story is gone.

Vanished into thin air.

Politico has an excerpt of it on its Pro Report page:

“The drumbeat is hard to miss: Our schools are failing. Public education is in crisis. Our students are falling further and further behind. The rhetoric comes from the left and right, from educators and politicians and lobbyists and CEOs and even Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The deep dysfunction of our public schools is said to threaten not only America’s economy but also its national security. But a vocal group of contrarians is challenging that conventional wisdom. The latest weapon in their arsenal: A new book is out this week by education historian Diane Ravitch, who argues that the biggest crisis facing public education is the relentless message that public education is in crisis. It’s a debate with broad power to shape the nation’s $600-billion-a-year investment in public education. Where’s the truth? That’s not always easy to discern.”

There's a "Read the full story" link after the excerpt, but that link also goes nowhere when you click on it.

Did anybody see the story before it disappeared from the Internet?

Does anybody know why it has disappeared?

Was it accidentally posted too early and taken down for a later posting or did Politico editors take it down for other "editorial" reasons?

I have to admit, when an education story starts out with the sentence "A vocal group of contrarians is challenging the conventional wisdom…" and focuses on Diane Ravitch's new book on the reform movement, I get a little suspicious when it disappears.

There are a lot of entrenched education reform interests these days feeling under the gun from Common Core opponents, anti-testing advocates, and other critics of corporate-style education reform and I wouldn't be surprised if one of those entrenched corporate education reform interests tried to have something they didn't like about the contrarians to education reform taken down.

Maybe nothing nefarious happened here, maybe the story simply was pulled because it was posted too early (as supposedly happened with an Anthony Weiner story posted by the NY Times during the Democratic primary campaign.)

Still, let us hope the story returns.

I would like to read it and I bet a lot of other people would too.