November was a hectic month for education journalists, like everyone else. There was lots of news — a new President-elect and his EdSec nominee, and a new Congress, among other things. There was some good news. After a long stint covering Bridgegate, Kate Zernike is back reporting on national education for the NYT. And there was some tragedy, too, in the form of the premature passing of the PBS NewsHour’s Gwen Ifill.
BEST
Two of the best pieces of the month were Greg Toppo and Rebecca Klein’s looks at teachers who voted for Trump. In USA Today, Toppo dug out the numbers, which nobody else had reported. At the Huffington Post, Klein interviewed three teachers and let them explain how and why they voted the way they did.
But that’s not all. EdWeek’s Daarel Burnette wrote up an extremely interesting and helpful overview of teachers union spending on Campaign 2016 — noting that wins in Massachusetts and Georgia were the outliers in what was an expensive and unsuccessful cycle. Politico’s Kimberly Hefling and colleagues profiled incoming Education Committee head Virginia Foxx, who wants to limit the federal role in education.
Honorable mentions: Dana Goldstein had a fascinating interview with Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz in The New Yorker. BuzzFeed went with a hilariously NSFW subhed to a story about Trump’s consideration of Rhee as EdSec.
Among local outlets, the Baltimore Sun’s Erica Green revealed that Baltimore City schools were actually suspending more students this year, even as districts around the nation try to find more constructive alternatives, and Chicago Public Radio’s Sarah Karp reported how a group of local community leaders who want to start a new charter school are being caught in the politics over charter schools in Chicago.
Other good news in education journalism includes that Chalkbeat Detroit has already hired a Detroit Free Press veteran Julie Topping to edit Detroit and Indiana (and will be making the Detroit bureau permanent). There’s also a newish education page at the Christian Science Monitor which you should check out.
WORST
This has not been a good month overall for education journalism at the national level. Coverage of the “Trump effect” on bullying and assaults in schools has seemed overheated and lacking in context. Ditto for coverage of the DeVos nomination.
There’s simply too much speculation being treated as reporting — much of it unlikely and most of it focused on perceived downsides. We don’t need you to frighten us for pageviews, or confirm our fears (or your own). Leave that for advocates and social media. We need smart, reliable information — and lots of context — from professional journalists.
Coverage of MA’s $41 million Question 2, which would have allowed more charter schools and was perhaps the biggest education debate of the year, was downright skimpy when it came to national outlets and abundant but insufficient when it came to local outlets. An early piece from the Globe’s Michael Levenson attempted to get to the bottom of the charter school funding issue but wasn’t followed up with more digging in the following months. A fascinating post-election writeup by Jim Vaznis about charter opponents’ impressive ground game would have been all the more useful if it had been published during the campaign.
What else? The PBS NewsHour mystifyingly aired a segment about TEACH NOW, a low-cost, for-profit online teacher preparation program, without addressing any quality and effectiveness issues.
And it’s been an extremely awkward last few weeks for some of the top folks at The Seventy Four, the education news site that’s been connected with EdSec nominee Betsy DeVos — though editors and reporters there are assigning and reporting strong pieces like this one about DeVos’ support for poorly-performing virtual charter schools.
Onward and upward — here’s to a great December.
Previous posts:
Best & Worst Education Journalism: October 2016
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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/
