The reopening debate is loud and confusing, with competing demands from parents, teachers, and administrators. Focusing on the pros and cons for students will help deepen your coverage and inform your readers.

By Alexander Russo

The debate among parents, teachers, administrators, and politicians about how and when to reopen schools is loud and contentious. And it’s likely to stay that way until the traditional start of school in two months. The landscape is fast-moving and confusing. The plans and proposals that have been released have varied widely and could change several times between now and September. Many people are angry and confused. So it’s no surprise that there’s been a lot of muddled, vague, and inconclusive coverage of the reopening debate.

As much as possible, however, your goal as an education reporter should be to bypass the overheated talking points for or against the safety of the reopening plans and provide coverage that’s strong and specific. One good way to do so is to pay attention to how exactly the planned setup would affect vulnerable kids, whose needs I’d argue are all too often left out of the debate and sometimes the coverage.

In essence that means two main things: In the broadest sense, it means focusing your coverage on whether kids’ needs and priorities are at the forefront, which may or may not align with parent, teacher, and district priorities. In a more specific sense, it means finding out exactly what level of learning would be offered under the plans being proposed. What, exactly, are kids going to be offered when they return?

Kids make up not just the largest but also the most vulnerable stakeholder group in the reopening debate. Their lives and futures are at stake. If you center your coverage on them, you’re more likely to write high-impact stories about things that matter most.

Kids make up not just the largest but also the most vulnerable stakeholder group in the reopening debate. Their lives and futures are at stake. If you center your coverage on them, you’re more likely to write high-impact stories about things that matter most.

There’s no shortage of loud voices and competing priorities when it comes to the reopening debate.

Generally speaking, political leaders have been pushing for reopening schools so that the economy can get back to normal. Yesterday’s White House event is the most recent illustration of this perspective.

For their part, many teachers have wanted to ensure that schools will be safe, and have criticized plans that some believe play fast and loose with health concerns. Some teachers unions and districts are at odds over reopening plans and live instruction requirements. The pushback against the recent reopening recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has been strong.

Meanwhile, school system leaders are fretting about how to meet safety guidelines, whether they’ll have enough funding to get the job done, and how to meet contradictory demands from parents and staff. And parents are concerned about both their kids’ safety and learning loss as well as their own ability to do their jobs while managing home learning.

But where are the kids’ concerns in all this?  It might sound strange to be reminded about keeping kids foremost. Most education journalists think they’re doing that every day. But not enough actually are. Kids don’t have the advocates that teachers, school boards, and some parents do. Child advocacy organizations like the Children’s Defense Fund aren’t as prominent or aggressive as they used to be. Students aren’t plentiful on social media platforms that most adult education reporters rely on.

All too often, students’ needs get left out of the story — especially when there are loud and competing arguments going on among adults.

Related commentary: 8 ways to make education journalism more student-centered

All too often, students’ needs get left out of the story — especially when there are loud and competing arguments going on among adults. 

There are two main ways to ensure that students are at the center of your reopening coverage:

FEATURE THE BENEFITS (AND RISKS) FOR KIDS

As reopening plans continue to be rolled out and debated, a central focus of your coverage should be describing the likely effects on kids, based on past research, projections made by researchers, and expert testimony.

The effects of the spring remote learning debacle are not yet entirely known, but the projected effects have been reported widely (NYT, Chalkbeat, WSJ, etc.).

If schools are not reopened in the fall, or are reopened in a way that closely resembles the distance learning of the spring, what are the likely impacts of further delaying school-based or hybrid instruction?

To get that broad perspective, talk to public health experts, pediatricians’ groups, and others who are focused on kids’ interests specifically. Ferret out what IS known about how kids have been already affected.  It’s essential to keep them front and center.

GET SPECIFIC EARLY

Reporters also should avoid presenting school plans and proposals without getting at their specific implications for kids.

As you may recall, it took far too long last spring to find out just how little instructional time some kids were receiving, the wide variations from school to school and district to district, and the lack of minimal requirements for live instruction in many places. In some places, the disengagement of so many kids and the inability of districts to get devices and access to kids who need them weren’t made clear until months later.

This is where details become especially important. How much learning time will be provided under your district’s reopening plan? How much live instruction? How frequently? What metrics will be used to measure participation? What efforts will be made to engage and support students who aren’t participating?

Whatever you do, be sure to review see the district-teacher agreements that are being developed. They turned out to be enormously important to the remote learning experience.

And take a look at what comparable districts are proposing to do, via CRPE and other sources, to get a sense of whether your district is doing the same, more, or less than others. You and your readers may be surprised.

MORE HOT TIPS

Other suggestions for high-quality reopening debate coverage you may want to try:

*To make safety concerns more concrete, find out how many outbreaks there have been in your state’s open child care centers and whether the transmissions involved kids.

*Child advocacy groups are still out there, if not in the numbers they used to be. At the national level, there’s the Education Trust. There are sure to be local groups you can contact.

*It might be particularly helpful to compare side by side what’s being proposed to what was provided during the spring remote learning session. What will students get that they did not get during remote learning?

*Work your sources. Find out what is going on behind the scenes that may not be apparent to the general public. Press releases are one thing, but behind-closed-doors discussions reveal the real issues underlying the debate.

*Request records. As Chalkbeat and others reported, not all demographically similar schools produced the same engagement rates during the spring, and certainly not all districts provided the same level of services. Memoranda between districts and unions are key here.

*It might be interesting and useful to examine the notion that teachers are against reopening and, if that seems to be the case, to explore the circumstances behind these fears. What kinds of experiences with transmission have they had in places that have reopened or stayed open? Are teachers’ safety concerns warranted, given the health information that we have?

*If district plans seem vague or optimistic, get specific with officials about implementation. Have them show you how physical education will work and where kids will eat lunch or how many students will use the same school computers. Where are the resources coming from, and when? When are the supplies being purchased, and from whom?

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BUILD OFF RECENT COVERAGE

There has been some important progress in terms of centering the coverage on kids’ needs recently, which may help guide your efforts going forward.

The AAP stepped forward with recommendations a couple of weeks ago, and several outlets including NPR, US News, and NYT covered them. The Atlantic recently published a piece describing the need to consider the argument for reopening more carefully than we may have in the past. Articles, essays, and opinion pieces have made increasingly clear that the spring remote learning effort was a disaster for vulnerable kids.

One way or another, this cohort of students will have a vastly different learning and socialization experience than any we’ve seen in our lifetime and those differences are likely to reverberate for many years. It’s our job to focus on them and get their stories right.

Related posts:

Remote learning provides meager offerings for low-income kids

Four hours a day; how teacher contracts are shaping remote learning

Five ways to make COVID coverage more inclusive

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Russo

Alexander Russo

Alexander Russo is founder and editor of The Grade, an award-winning effort to help improve media coverage of education issues. He’s also a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship winner and a book author. You can reach him at @alexanderrusso.

Visit their website at: https://the-grade.org/