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In this week’s newsletter: This year’s FAFSA fiasco leads to a less-than-impressive College Decision Day. Reporters document striking disparities in one district’s D- and F-graded schools. A former student journalist recalls past missteps from national reporters. Non-traditional podcasts cover school board meetings in Boston and other places. Oprah Winfrey takes on the teen mental health crisis. And an education reporter who left the business to become a diplomat returns to journalism.
DECISION DAY DISASTER
The big story of the week
College Decision Day came and went this week, and FAFSA is still a mess. The big education story of the week is how the botched federal rollout is impacting millions of students who can’t commit to a school until they know their financial aid offers — and how sparse the coverage has been given the importance of the situation. Many are still struggling to submit their forms.
FAFSA completion rates are significantly down compared to last year, and students are scrambling to figure out what their options are — including skipping college altogether next year (AP, WPR, NBC News, USA Today, NPR, National Review). Some states have pushed back deadlines for their own financial aid programs amid the chaos, declared a state of emergency, or rolled out efforts to encourage more students to apply (Boston Herald, NPR, LAist). The negative effects hit colleges already facing declining enrollment especially hard (AP).
There’ve been some excellent deep dives on what went wrong with FAFSA in recent months (see these March pieces from Inside Higher Ed and the New York Times). But I’d love to see the coverage grow in depth and breadth. The FAFSA fiasco affects large numbers of students at a critical moment in their lives.
Check out daily links from @thegrade_for other big education stories of the week, including campus protest coverage, district budget cuts, and lessons learned from a middle school cell phone ban in Norway.
INSIDE A FAILING SCHOOL
The best education journalism of the week
The best education journalism of the week is Inside Hillsborough’s D and F schools: Turnover, shortages, calls for help by the Tampa Bay Times’ Marlene Sokol and Ian Hodgson.
In the tradition of deep investigative journalism long associated with Tampa-area newspapers, Sokol and Hodgson tap hundreds of pages of state and federal datasets, district records, and school surveys and interview more than 20 educators and experts. They also visit an F-graded Tampa school to have a look around, providing some in-school reporting you don’t often see these days.
What they find is alarming: In Hillsborough County, 18,000 students — “enough to fill a small city” — attend class in 33 struggling schools, and those kids are predominantly from low-income families. At the “F” school they visit, they find that three teachers left the district last year — in the same grade.
At more than 4,000 words, Sokol and Hodgson’s probe is a detailed, wide-ranging look at within-district disparities that are widely known but infrequently depicted. The kids who need the most from their schools are the most likely “to be greeted in class by a substitute teacher, or one with far less experience than those at higher-performing schools.” They’ll witness more fights and see more turnover in the principal’s office. And their schools are more likely to be disproportionately challenged and highly segregated.
It’s a compelling, readable deep dive into a problem that’s widespread and longstanding — largely untouched by debates over book bans, bathrooms, and school board takeovers. If you’re reminded of 2015’s Failure Factories, you’re not alone.
Other great education stories we liked this week: How a Connecticut middle school won the battle against cellphones (Washington Post), skepticism over the science of reading in California (EdSource), declining spending on adult literacy (Christian Science Monitor), and how Denver is supporting Black students’ academic success (Chalkbeat).
STUDENT PROTESTERS, STUDENT JOURNALISTS
Our latest columns and commentary
Thanks to The Atavist’s Seyward Darby for her vivid recollections about how how “lazy, sloppy, and exploitative” national reporters behaved during the Duke lacrosse team scandal when she was a student journalist — and her hopes that campus conflicts will receive better coverage this time around.
National journalists “came looking for a salacious, black-and-white story,” she recalls about the 2006 scandal, describing how they gravitated toward “sources willing to give incendiary quotes or speculate provocatively” and regurgitated official sources’ statements as if they were gospel.
Darby’s commentary couldn’t be more timely, given the enormous attention on students covering campus protests (CNN, NBC, New York Mag, Politico, Mother Jones, Washington Post, Hechinger Report). However, Darby’s not seeing much improvement in the coverage of the protests. “Too much of the coverage and commentary about the campus protests dismisses them as impetuous, immature, or unrealistic,” writes Darby.
Indeed, this week also produced a ton of criticism of the protest coverage — some of it from fellow journalists (Chris Hayes, Nate Silver, Josie Duffy Rice, Lawrence O’Donnell). A few education journalists also weighed in: “Never a focus on the substance or aim of the protest,” lamented Chicago Sun-Times education reporter Nader Issa about protest coverage from CNN and other outlets, “only on the strife or confrontation it causes.”
ICYMI: We also published a deep dive looking into a Boston schools-focused podcast that’s filling in a role traditionally occupied by professional media: What happens when a non-traditional podcast fills in to cover school board meetings? Lots to learn for education journalists and ed teams.
Above: In the interest of sharing positive news, The 74 reported that enrollment in teacher prep programs increased or stabilized in 40 states during the pandemic, though the growth doesn’t yet match hiring demand.
PEOPLE, JOBS, & EVENTS
Who’s going where and what’s happening
📰 New outlet (to us): CT Latino News, headed by Belén Dumont, is producing a steady stream of local education news for Latino audiences, including this recent piece on bilingual teacher recruitment programs. The outlet is part of the Latino News Network, founded in 2012 by veteran journalist and former NAHJ president Diane Alverio. Who else should be on our radar?
📰 Appearances, podcasts, & segments: In an hour-long live event with “Anxious Generation” author Jonathan Haidt, Oprah Winfrey discussed the teen mental health crisis and phone-obsessed culture. Haidt was also on BBC Newsnight talking about the same issue. In the latest episode of the Hechinger Report and GBH’s podcast “College Uncovered,” the hosts look at what happens when a college closes. WBUR “Here and Now” examined how some states are excelling at offering quality preschool and reducing inequality. And WBUR “On Point” rebroadcast a segment from last year on the forgotten story of desegregation in Clinton, Tennessee.
📰 Awards: Among this year’s National Headliner Award winners are Sarah Carr for her Hechinger Report story on the racism and classism behind learning disability diagnoses and the AP’s Bianca Vázquez Toness and Sharon Lurye for their series on the pandemic’s “missing children.” Former New York Times education columnist (and godfather of many book-writing Spencer Education Journalism fellows) Samuel Freedman won the 2024 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism for his book on Hubert Humphrey. In case you missed it, Amy Silverman, who has written several pieces for The Grade about covering students with disabilities, was the winner of the 2024 National DS Congress National Media Award. And among the winners of the Solutions Journalism Network’s inaugural awards is KUNC’s Leigh Paterson for a story about the youth mental health crisis. Audrey Carleton received an honorable mention for her Pennsylvania Capital-Star story on solar-powered schools.
📰 Impact: The publishing company Heinemann blamed its 75% drop in sales on the success of “Sold a Story,” according to an update from APM Reports. In Massachusetts, a judge who ordered an autistic student to change schools reversed her decision, no doubt partly in response to Mandy McLaren’s reporting in the Boston Globe. And student journalists at Laney College in Oakland are responsible for derailing multi-million-dollar security contracts on campus after looking into the qualifications of the companies that applied.
📰 Resources: Covering Poverty, a project out of the Journalism Writing Lab, has a guide for education reporters that includes lists of datasets and databases, studies, relevant conferences, and more. For a lesson in how to diversify your sources, take a leaf out of the San Antonio Report’s source tracking project, detailed in an American Press Institute report. And lastly, the Education Commission of the States released its 2024 analysis of State of the State addresses identifying key education policy trends.
THE KICKER
“When you return to journalism and start filing #Foias again,” tweeted Jenny Abamu, the former WAMU education reporter who left journalism five years ago and became a diplomat.
