A4


From Page One schorr from A1 ment in my career.”


But not the most important, in his own judgment. That came in 1975, when he had a scoop on the “CBS Evening News” that said the CIA, under several administra- tions, had tried to assassinate Fi- del Castro and other Third World leaders. That story set off a Senate investigation that concluded the CIA had not actually killed any- one, “albeit not for want of trying,” Mr. Schorr said.


A major scoop


While reporting on FBI and CIA scandals in 1976, he alone ac- quired a secret investigative re- port by the House Permanent Se- lect Committee on Intelligence. Leaks from the report were mak- ing headlines, but when CBS would not agree to publish the full document in print, as it had done in other instances, Mr. Schorr gave it to the Village Voice newspaper. The national press did not hail him as a hero, which surprised Mr. Schorr. That


ambivalence


stemmed from reports that he ac- cepted money for the leak and that he allowed others to falsely believe that reporter Lesley Stahl had taken the report from his desk and given it to the paper. The House Ethics Committee, seeking his source, threatened him with contempt of Congress, and CBS suspended him. In public testimony, Mr. Schorr mounted an eloquent defense. “To betray a source would be to betray myself, my career and my life,” he de- clared. “I cannot do it.” The House panel voted not to


prosecute, but Mr. Schorr’s sub- sequent appearance on the CBS news program “60 Minutes” didn’t turn out as well. Under grilling by interviewer Mike Wal- lace, the depth of resentment


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SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010 Daniel Schorr, broadcast reporter and news analyst, dies at 93


toward Mr. Schorr at CBS became evident.


Some network executives were still fuming over Mr. Schorr’s re- marks to Duke University stu- dents the previous year that im- plied that CBS had pressured Wal- ter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid and Dan Rather to go easy on Nixon the night he announced his resig- nation — a charge all three denied. Mr. Schorr resigned, feeling forced out of his job. His book on the incident, “Clearing the Air” (1977), didn’t settle the matter. In a review of the book, Woodward criticized the “arrogant and com- bative” broadcaster for “self-ag- grandizement” in telling his ca- reer’s tales. He had many to tell, and they brought him such fame that he ended up as a crossword puzzle clue in both the New York Times and The Post. Once a purist about keeping a distance between tele- vised reality and entertainment, he later appeared as himself in several movies. Scott Simon, host of NPR’s


Weekend Edition Saturday, who worked with Mr. Schorr as recent- ly as his last on-air commentary July 10, considered him a father figure.


“I am just glad that, after being known for so many years as a tough and uncompromising jour- nalist, NPR listeners also got to know the Dan Schorr that was playful, funny and kind,” Simon wrote in a eulogy on the NPR Web site. “In a business that’s known for burning out people, Dan Schorr shined for nearly a centu- ry.”


First news story at 12 Daniel Louis Schorr was born


on Aug. 31, 1916, to poor Jewish immigrants in New York. His first news story came at age 12, when he learned that a woman had


to spend time at one of Adolf Hit- ler’s retreats. Returning to the United States, he married for the first time, at age 50, to Lisbeth Bamberger. Be- sides his wife, of Washington, sur- vivors include two children, Jona- than Schorr of Oakland, Calif., and Lisa Schorr of Boston; a brother; and one granddaughter.


Tension at CNN


After leaving CBS in 1976, Mr. Schorr spent three years lecturing, writing and teaching until he was asked by Turner to join the nas- cent all-news cable network, CNN, as its first news anchor. His relationship with Turner


BOB DAUGHERTY/ASSOCIATED PRESS


The hard-hitting style of reporter Daniel Schorr, shown here in 1957, earned him a spot on President Nixon’s “enemies list” in the 1970s.


jumped or fallen from his family’s apartment building in the Bronx. He called the police, then sold the news tip to a local newspaper for $5.


He graduated in 1939 from City


College of New York and worked as a stringer for several New York newspapers. He served in Army intelligence during World War II, based in the United States, but at war’s end lit out for Europe to be- come a foreign correspondent. His dream of working for the Times was quashed when Murrow called him about joining CBS. Mr. Schorr first checked with Times managing editor Turner Catledge, who turned him away. Mr. Schorr said he learned years later that Catledge had ordered a freeze on hiring more Jewish reporters. Mr. Schorr, among the last of


the active reporters who had worked with Murrow, was often more like a print reporter than a TV personality — he considered makeup silly, hated waiting for camera angles and did not seek to ingratiate himself with sources.


Expelled from the USSR He learned to use a camera and reopened CBS’s Moscow bureau, where he had the Khrushchev scoop in 1957. His defiance of cen- sorship landed him in hot water with the KGB, and by year’s end he was expelled from the country. He became a roving diplomatic correspondent and provoked the ire of President Dwight D. Eisen- hower in 1959 by reporting the im- pending resignation of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. President John F. Kennedy was no more congenial. He asked CBS to transfer Mr. Schorr from his West German post because Ken- nedy thought his reports were too pro-German. East German leader Walter Ulbricht in 1962 became so incensed during a Schorr inter- view that he began yelling and stalked off the set. Amid the 1964 election, Mr. Schorr enraged Republican presi- dential nominee Barry Goldwater when he reported that Goldwater had formed an alliance with some right-wing Germans and planned


started out so well that the billion- aire entrepreneur, upon learning that cable TV was unavailable in Washington in 1980, sent a satel- lite dish to be installed in the front yard of Mr. Schorr’s Woodley Park home. Promised editorial freedom for his commentaries, Mr. Schorr ap- peared less and less often on the network, particularly after he publicly objected to Turner’s edi- torial calling for a crackdown on violent movies. CNN did not renew his contract in 1985, and Mr. Schorr then wrote an attack on Turner’s ethics for the Los Angeles Times opinion pages. Turner replied in kind. A CNN workman unsuccessfully attempt- ed to reclaim the satellite dish. In contrast, his 25 years at NPR went far more smoothly. As a com- mentator there, his deep experi- ence covering the world gave him the gravitas to offer opinions on everything from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 2000 presi- dential race (“A judicial coup” by “the Gang of Five, philosophically led by archconservative Antonin Scalia”) to placing the first decade of the 2000s in historical context. In addition to the 1972, 1973 and


More than 700 teachers get one year to improve their performance teachers from A1


fective teacher is in every class- room. Today’s action puts us one step closer to that goal.”


Although the teachers dis- missed for poor performance rep- resent only about 4 percent of the city’s 4,000-member corps, Rhee also announced Friday that 737 other instructors were rated “minimally effective.” Under IM- PACT, they have one year to im- prove their performance or face dismissal. Rhee declined to spec- ulate on how many might be sacked next year. But she said that over the next two years, “a not-insignificant number of folks will be moved out of the system for poor performance.”


‘Too far, too fast’


The dismissals also represent the second game-changing devel- opment this year in Rhee’s efforts to assert more control over how D.C. teachers are managed, com- pensated and removed from their jobs. They also place the school system at the head of a national movement — fostered in part by the Obama administration’s


$4.3 billion “Race to the Top” grant competition — to more rig- orously assess teachers’ effective- ness. Last month, union members and the D.C. Council approved a contract that raises educators’ salaries by 21.6 percent but di- minishes traditional seniority protections in favor of personnel decisions based on results in the classroom. The accord also pro- vides for a “performance pay” sys- tem with bonuses of $20,000 to $30,000 annually for teachers who meet certain benchmarks, including growth in test scores. IMPACT is the major instrument officials will use each year to de- termine teachers’ effectiveness. Rhee has invested $4 million, some of it from private founda- tions, to increase the rigor of the system. The Washington Teachers’


Union has bitterly objected to IM- PACT, which was devised in col- laboration with a private consul- tant, Mathematica Policy Re- search. Although school officials convened teacher focus groups to discuss the plan, it was not sub- ject to collective bargaining.


Some teachers call it overly com- plex and dependent on an unreli- able statistical methodology for linking test scores to individual teachers. WTU President George Parker said the program is de- signed to weed out teachers rath- er than help them improve. “It’s punishment-heavy and


support-light,” he said, adding that it should have first been tried on a small pilot basis. “They’ve gone too far, too fast.” Parker said the union will pur- sue the two appeals processes le- gally available: One will involve directly petitioning Rhee; the other will result in a hearing be- fore an independent arbitrator. Parker also said that the union probably will collectively file an unfair labor practice complaint with the District. But poor evaluations are gener- ally not subject to appeal unless the union can demonstrate some procedural error in the appraisal process.


Grading the teachers


Summer months always bring turnover in D.C schools — and other school systems — through


retirements, resignations and dis- missals of teachers who did not survive their probationary pe- riod. Seventy-six of the teachers fired Friday were dismissed for not having proper licensing, as re- quired by the federal No Child Left Behind law. But few tenured educators


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have faced dismissal for poor per- formance. Rhee said that accord- ing to her staff’s research, no teachers were fired for lack of ef- fectiveness in 2006, the year be- fore she was named chancellor. Officials said the previous evalua- tion process was cumbersome and time-consuming, with re- sponsibility for assessments fall- ing to school principals already stretched by other responsibili- ties. The great majority of teachers routinely received evaluations showing that they met or exceed- ed expectations. At the same time, the District compiled one of the weakest academic records of any urban school system in the United States. Rhee, and like-minded leaders in other school districts, contends that the best way to overhaul schools is to intensively monitor the performance of every adult, including janitors, and measure it by multiple yardsticks. For teach- ers, that includes evidence that their students meet or exceed pre- dicted rates of growth on stan- dardized tests, a metric known as “value-added.” School districts have experimented with value- added for many years but gener- ally employ it as a diagnostic tool to assess weaknesses or deter-


mine bonuses. Rhee’s use of the method to make high-stakes per- sonnel decisions breaks new ground, and other school systems are expected to look at the system as a possible model. She has an- nounced plans to significantly ex- pand the use of standardized tests so that value-added data will be available in some form at all grade levels. This year, only about 20 per- cent of the District’s classroom teachers — reading and math in- structors in grades 4 through 8 — were evaluated on test-score growth. That’s because those were the only grades and subjects for which there is annual test- score data from the District of Co- lumbia Comprehensive Assess- ment System, or DC CAS. Value- added constitutes 50 percent of their evaluation. Twenty-six of the 165 dismissed teachers fell into this category.


‘Caught up in this web’


Under IMPACT, teachers were supposed to receive five 30-min- ute classroom observations dur- ing the school year, three by a school administrator and two by an outside “master educator” with a background in the instruc- tor’s subject. The instructors were scored against an elaborate “teaching and learning framework” with 22 measures in nine categories. Among the criteria are classroom presence, time management, clar- ity in presenting the objectives of a lesson and ensuring that stu- dents across all levels of learning ability understand the material.


1974 Emmys, he received multiple journalism awards, including the 1996 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Golden Baton for his lifetime work. In 2002, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


Only in December did he switch from using a typewriter to a com- puter, he said, according to his NPR Twitter feed. And he sang at least twice on the air. During a spur-of-the-moment collaboration with musician Frank Zappa at a get-out-the-vote event in Wash- ington, he sang two Gershwin songs, “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and “Summertime.”


And, in the depths of the eco- nomic downturn of 2008, he re- flected on his boyhood in the De- pression and sang a few bars of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.” “I have found a satisfying home for the evening of my career,” he said in 2003. “I no longer pursue scoops, but concentrate on the context and the meaning of things. I interact with journalists a third to half my age, who seem to regard me as a walking history book.


“If asked, I tell them what les- sons I have learned over the past 60-odd years. And since there are today more pressures than ever to conform, to avoid rocking the boat, I’m prone to advise: At least once in your lifetime take a risk for a principle you believe in, even if it brings you up against your bosses.”


sullivanp@washpost.com


on washingtonpost.com Career highlights


See a photo gallery and videos on Daniel Schorr at


washingtonpost.com/obituaries.


At the end of the school year, the teachers’ overall performance was converted to a 100-to-400- point scale. Teachers with scores below 175 are subject to dismissal. Teachers scoring between 175 and 249 are judged under the system to be “minimally effective.” Scores between 250 and 400 are consid- ered “effective” or “highly effec- tive.”


Some teachers said Friday that the system has not worked as planned. Elizabeth Davis, a computer concepts teacher at Phelps Archi- tecture, Construction and Engi- neering High School in North- east, said teachers were at a dis- advantage because they were being evaluated on a new set of criteria — the teaching frame- work — that they were still trying to learn. “A lot of good teachers have been caught up in this web,” said Davis, a veteran teacher and a candidate for president of the Washington Teachers’ Union. She said she received a “highly effec- tive” rating, although she did not meet with her master educator until the final week of classes. Other teachers said IMPACT brings a badly needed clarity to what is expected of teachers in the District. Mathew Nagy, a sec- ond-year special education teach- er at Ron Brown Middle School in Northeast, said the system pro- vides “a very consistent language for what good teaching looks like.” Although he said the new teaching expectations were ini- tially confusing, “once I dug deep, I found it to be very manageable. I felt I had a lot of control over what I was going to be evaluated on.”


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