In Boston, a non-traditional podcast covers school board meetings and attracts national attention. It’s not the only one!
By Colleen Connolly
School board coverage often falls into two camps: abundant coverage — often with viral images of screaming parents — or little to no coverage at all.
However, in many cities, a lack of coverage has become more common. Gone are the days of education beat reporters from multiple outlets dutifully attending every meeting and reporting on what happened.
But in Boston, something curious has happened to fill in this gap.
A foundation-run podcast called “Last Night at School Committee” has emerged as a comprehensive, yet digestible, source of what is happening at each and every Boston Public Schools (BPS) school committee meeting.
The Boston effort is mirrored in a handful of other places. In Seattle, two parents have launched the podcast Seattle Hall Pass.
The Boston effort is mirrored in a handful of other places.
At a time when school board coverage is limited, “Last Night” brings the public back to the basics of what their public officials are doing and the policy decisions they’re making.
This contribution has not gone unnoticed among journalists, locally or nationally.
Nieman Lab described it as a “model worth understanding” for other journalists.
“This is a public service,” tweeted former “All Things Considered” co-host Audie Cornish last year.
Even the Boston Globe — which could be considered a competitor, with its team of five education journalists — has twice profiled the podcast.
The Boston Globe has twice profiled the podcast.
In Boston, the school board is called a committee, and despite relatively large numbers of education reporters covering Boston schools, their frequent meetings get only sporadic coverage.
In each episode, “Last Night” podcast hosts — Jill Shah and Ross Wilson of the Boston-based Shah Family Foundation — essentially offer recaps of what happened at the previous meeting, with sound bites from committee members, district officials, and public commenters.
They analyze what’s been said — or often more importantly, not said. And they ask important follow-up questions.
By and large, these are bite-sized recaps rather than long, detailed summaries.
Recent episodes run as short as 15 minutes and as long as 45.
Recent episodes run as short as 15 minutes and as long as 45.
Shah and Wilson have been hosting “Last Night at School Committee” since early 2020. Shah is the president and Wilson the executive director at the Shah Family Foundation, which funds “innovative and transformative work in education, healthcare, and the community.”
They did not start out imagining that hosting a podcast was something that they would do. As regular attendees of the BPS school committee meetings, they realized that the public — journalists included — were missing out on a lot that happened.
“We would be sitting there until the very end of a school committee meeting and recognizing that most people already left the room,” Wilson said in an interview with The Grade.
“Then (the committee members) would throw up this really important agenda item at the end of the meeting at midnight. … We’d be like, ‘Wait a minute.’ Some of the most important decisions are being made when no one’s in the room.”
Shah and Wilson did not start out imagining that hosting a podcast was something that they would do.
Like most districts, Boston publishes board meeting minutes and votes on key decisions online. Since the pandemic, BPS has livestreamed the meetings so that people could watch from home. But the district paperwork can be hard to decipher and the meetings can be tiresome and seem obscure.
Listening to “Last Night,” the role the podcast plays is clear.
In a recent episode, the pair discusses what was said about the newly announced expansion of a local charter school specializing in getting students on track for careers in health, thanks to a $38 million gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Where will the students come from to meet the goal of doubling the student population? Shah and Wilson asked. Which schools may need to close to shift students to this school? Will they need to build a new building to accommodate them on campus? And will $38 million be enough?
“These are all our questions,” Shah said on the podcast. “None of these were asked by school committee members. This was just a bullet point in the update by the superintendent.”
“These are all our questions,” Shah said on the podcast. “None of these were asked by school committee members.”
One advantage that a foundation-funded podcast may have over traditional media is that it isn’t competing for clicks or racing against other outlets to publish the story first.
Perhaps most notable is the podcast’s tone and style. It’s analytical, measured, and mostly chronological, not worried about pulling readers in with a lead anecdote or surprising statistic.
With Wilson’s past experience working in BPS — in roles ranging from a teacher of students with disabilities to chief of staff — the hosts are able to provide off-the-cuff context mixed in with commentary.
According to the Nieman writeup, the segments offer a combination of “explanation, summary, commentary, and emphasis on why dense procedural discussions matter.”
These qualities can be detriments, too.
Listenership is relatively low — between 1,000 and 2,000 downloads per episode — compared with the readership of legacy outlets. And while the podcast regularly raises important questions, it seldom does the reporting to try to answer them.
But, given the general lack of measured school board coverage today, “Last Night at School Committee” still offers among the steadiest institutional coverage out there.
The podcast has its admirers in education and media watchers, too. Reporters and policymakers alike listen to it to find out what happened at last night’s meeting.
“Having some kind of accountability for the school committee I think is really good and interesting in and of itself,” Will Austin, CEO of the nonprofit Boston Schools Fund, said in an interview with The Grade. “There’s a lot of important stuff that gets decided at (school committee) and not everyone has time to watch the meetings and digest all of it and understand what’s important and what’s not.”
“I feel like there should be a market for that in every city,” Austin added.
“I feel like there should be a market for that in every city,” Austin added.
Shah and Wilson aim to reach administrators, teachers, and parents with their podcast. One way they do this is by joining with traditional media.
WBUR Boston publishes the show (listed as Sponsored Content), and Shah and Wilson regularly talk with reporters who reach out for more on what happened at the meetings.
But, like education journalists everywhere, Shah and Wilson share a common problem: how to provide news coverage that parents actually want and need.
“People don’t just want education policy stories,” noted Loretta Chao, head of the Startup Studio and local news innovation at the American Journalism Project, in an analysis last year of their survey of 5,000 local news consumers. “They want to know, step by step, how they’re supposed to choose programs for their children and get them in. … People want to know about decisions before they’re made, and they want decision makers to be accountable for outcomes.”
Recaps of school committee meetings fall more into the category of education policy stories — useful and important but limited in what they offer everyday parents.
Shah acknowledges this.
“A lot of what we’re reporting on right now, unfortunately, is infuriating to kind of the listener who doesn’t feel like they have much power in the conversation,” Shah admits. “And so we have tried to orient around that a bit more.”
Wilson tells us that they are doing this by polling BPS families every quarter to find out what they are most interested in knowing — including more information about the budget, a better understanding of the school selection process, and more transparency on placement decisions. They also encourage listeners to submit feedback on their episodes.
Above: Shah (left) and Wilson (right) in a 2021 column from the Boston Globe
The straightforward recapping of each meeting gives the episodes an inside-baseball feeling. Parents might not be interested in the dynamics among school committee members — something that fascinates people like Shah and Wilson and other advocates or policy people.
Yet, “Last Night at School Committee” offers Bostonians a rare gift these days: a close eye on what’s happening at the meetings that decide how kids get educated. It’s not alarmist, and it holds school officials accountable.
“I think there are lots of stories that just aren’t getting reported (in traditional media),” said local journalist Scott Van Voorhis, who writes the Contrarian Boston newsletter.
“The level of accountability goes down for school administrators and the educational system when things aren’t getting reported or talked about publicly.”
Colleen Connolly is a freelance journalist who’s been published in The Imprint News, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Guardian. Some of her pieces for The Grade include What education reporters should know about covering students in foster care and Scrappy local outlet shows how to excel at in-school reporting. Find out more about her here. Follow her at @ColleenMConn.
Previously from The Grade
5 key elements of community-driven education coverage
What parents really want
Bright spots and black holes in New England education coverage
30 stories in 7 days: a close look at Boston-area education coverage
