Grumman won a 2005 Casey Medal (editorial/commentary) for this story.

Several years ago, the Tribune and other papers around the country were running glowing reports about a new program in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) that everybody was hailing as a near-miracle. Under an initiative called "Cradle to Classroom," thousands of pregnant or parenting teens were taking classes, staying in high school until graduation, learning parenting skills, getting prenatal care, finding quality child care for their kids -- and not getting pregnant again.

Then a source tipped me off to the fact that "Cradle to Classroom" had been quietly killed by top CPS administrators. I figured this would be an easy, two-day editorial. As with so many news stories, it turned out to be more complicated than that, requiring two weeks of interviews with nearly three dozen people, and nearly 50 typed pages of notes. We broke the story of its demise on the editorial page. By the end I had reporting whiplash for the number of times I changed my mind about whether this program was a laudable success or a corrupt mess.

It turned out that this innovative, cost-efficient program was destroyed by a whisper campaign. System officials had told me initially that cradle was beset by extravagant spending, patronage hiring, ineffectiveness and $90,000 cell phone bills. This information was used to vilify the director and to justify the decision to purge what had been the previous superintendent’s pet program. Problem was, all their “facts” turned out to be unsubstantiated rumors that they never bothered to verify.

In the course of reporting this piece, I hunted down the former director’s hairdresser and confirmed that he never, in fact, was hired to be her secretary – or anything else other than her hairdresser. Her uncle had never left his home in Nashville to become her bodyguard in Chicago. Her nephew never worked as her chauffeur; the 14-year-old wasn't even old enough to possess a driver’s license. The Lincoln Town Car that was supposed to be a Cradle-subsidized limousine? It was actually the car she received from her ex-husband in a divorce settlement.

It was also through sources that I learned the CPS had ordered up an independent audit in 2002 by the consulting group KPMG that underscored how effective “Cradle to Classroom” was. Yet two years later, top school officials were unaware this report existed until I asked to see it. Nor were they aware that the school system was being reimbursed by the state for 75 percent of the program’s costs. 

And I heard another tip, one that resulted in the editorial, “Playing Tricks on Preschoolers.” For nine months, Chicago school officials ignored the growls of child care advocates who charged that bureaucrats were playing a shell game with hard-won state money that was meant to fund preschool slots for the poor. In 2004, the school system was supposed to create roughly 3,000 new child care slots, but created only 100. Either leftover funds were misallocated, or some very lucky preschoolers should have been receiving Malibu-style child care for about $110,000 per child. Within a day of my inquiries, Chicago Public Schools officials promised the editorial board they would follow the legislature’s intentions and create 5,100 new child care spaces by July 2006.

There’s no reason editorial writers shouldn’t break news on opinion pages. Of course editorial writers should strive to make compelling arguments. But like reporters, they also should always try to tell readers something they don’t already know – but should.