Complacency and inertia

Inadequate media coverage contributes to lack of urgency in school recovery efforts, says ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis.

By Alexander Russo

Over the past three years, ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis has emerged as a standout voice among journalists covering the impact of the pandemic response on students.

In 2020, he wrote a prescient piece about a Baltimore student whose remote school experience left him falling through the cracks.

The following year, he compared the starkly different experiences of New Mexico high school students attending remote school to those of Texas students who were already back in class.

And while he hasn’t gotten nearly the media attention and accolades his work deserves, MacGillis isn’t done.

His latest piece, focusing on the failure of school districts like Richmond, Va., to provide additional instructional days to students, came out last week.

It’s a searing story of inertia, complacency, and lack of urgency on the part of school systems. But it’s also a story about inadequate coverage from mainstream media, which allows districts like Richmond to decide against additional school days without much consequence.

In this new interview, MacGillis explains how he came to write so frequently about COVID, how he gets such memorable quotes, and why media outlets have devoted so little attention to the crisis relative to its importance and impact.

“It’s kind of incredible how little there is in the daily national education coverage about this subject,” says MacGillis. Lack of robust coverage is “one reason why there’s been such lack of aggressiveness and initiative on the policy side.”

The following interview has been edited and condensed.

Above: The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning, the 2020 piece that put MacGillis on the map.

How did you end up on the COVID schools beat?

AM: I had done some education reporting in the past. But I took on the COVID remote learning story just because I saw that it was going to be a huge deal and I was stunned that more people were not writing about the emerging catastrophe.

For me, it was also very personal. I saw this boy that I’ve been mentoring for a few years just kind of vanishing from the face of the earth during those first months of remote learning. I saw how completely disconnected he had become from the world. And I started thinking about all the other kids in situations like his.

I was stunned that more people were not writing about the emerging catastrophe.

What motivated you to do this latest story about Richmond?

AM: Again, it was the sense of being kind of amazed that there was not more being said and written about this huge crisis that we’re now facing. The numbers — test score results, emotional distress statistics, and chronic absenteeism rates — are absolutely stunning. And the lifelong impacts are going to be enormous.

It’s kind of incredible how little there is in the daily national education coverage about this subject. I mean, so much of the national education coverage these days has been focused on the culture war stuff. It’s really, really striking. And when you think about the scale of the two stories and the scale of their consequences, there’s just no comparison.

There’s been so little being done on the learning loss and that in turn is one reason why there’s been such lack of aggressiveness and initiative on the policy side. There’s just not been nearly the kind of public consciousness and political will that one would expect for a crisis of this proportion. And I think the media is part of that. There’s money being spent, but there’s just not the kind of concerted “all hands on deck” mobilization that one would expect for a crisis of the scale. And so I thought I would try to do my bit to draw attention to the complacency.

So much of the national education coverage these days has been focused on the culture war stuff.

Above: The latest from MacGillis, What Can We Do About Pandemic-Related Learning Loss?.

What were the things you found that were new or different in reporting this latest piece?

One new element that I ended up focusing on is the role of school boards as major institutional players in all this. We overlook them so much. We talk about teachers and principals and superintendents. School boards don’t get a lot of attention. I think it’s partly because, quite bluntly, we just sort of see them as boring and tedious. But school boards are a very important but overlooked element in K-12 education in our country, and a very unusual element. Other countries don’t have these elected citizen boards that play such an outsized role in making decisions about education.

Something else that came through my reporting this time around was just more insights into the teacher mindset right now in America and why teachers are feeling so, so beleaguered and overwhelmed and then, as a result, maybe not so inclined to want to do even more in terms of more instructional time or a longer school year, even for greater pay. This real resentment that I’ve heard articulated by quite a few teachers about their not having the new flexibility that other professionals have gained in the workplace with hybrid work. And they’ve seen so many of their professional peers, people they went to college with, their friends, getting to work partly at home and have that flexibility of just being at home. They don’t get to do that. They have to go to their building every day and it’s a building that is often a far from perfect work environment.

I thought I would try to do my bit to draw attention to the complacency.

How do you get people to talk with you, given that they know that they might not come out looking great?

AM: First of all, you just have to show up. I went to four school board meetings in Richmond, four different trips down on the train. The school board members saw me sitting there throughout them, paying attention. If you can just be as diligent and conscientious as you can in the way you’re doing it and actually putting in the time, then that makes a difference, I think.

Did you not get to talk to anyone you wanted to talk to?

AM: I really wanted to speak with teachers at the elementary school where the teachers immediately decided that they didn’t want to take part in the extended year pilot. I had an in-depth interview with a high school teacher whom the union delegated to speak with me, but would have liked more perspective from that elementary school. I hung out outside the school one day and spoke to some teachers there. But one of them was so wary that she actually reported me to the school. I tried very hard to get the teachers’ voice. I emailed them individually and that was not successful either.

Given more time, are there any other ways you might have convinced educators at the school to talk with you about their decision process?

AM: If I had had time for another trip to Richmond, I would have spent more time outside the two schools that opted against the 200-day pilot after having been selected as finalists, to speak with teachers and staff after dismissal. I emailed many of them, but it’s of course always better to try to engage people in person.

I tried very hard to get the teachers’ voice.

Above: So far, the only mainstream national broadcast outlets to pick up his piece have been the PBS NewsHour  and MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

What would it take for a magazine or major newspaper to produce an investigation along the lines of Caitlin Dickerson’s 2022 blockbuster, The Secret History of Family Separation? Is that even reasonable to ask?

AM: It would be great to see someone undertake a reckoning on that scale. There are a couple possible reasons why it has not happened yet. For one, as widespread and far-reaching as the consequences of pandemic learning loss are, the emotional force of it is not as wrenching or visually arresting as children being separated from their families and held in cages. Second, there’s a political aspect to this that can’t be overlooked: family separation was a policy of the Trump Administration, while remote learning was especially extensive in blue America, and was fueled, at least to some degree, by how the news media decided to cover the pandemic and the school reopening debate.

What’s the media response to this article been so far?
AM: I’ve not heard from national radio interview shows, but then I barely heard from anyone in 2020 when my first story came out. It was really actually quite striking at the time — maybe a sign of just how sensitive a subject this was. Other than one local radio show, I got zero invitations to discuss that piece, which, given how widely read it was, was pretty remarkable.

Other than one local radio show, I got zero invitations to discuss that piece.

 

What’s your best sense of what’s going on in journalism about covering this topic? What’s behind the sensitivity or aversion?

AM: The benign explanation for why there’s not more coverage is that this is one of those tough stories where it’s happening everywhere in a kind of incremental way and it’s hard to write about. It’s not the sexiest topic on its face. It doesn’t have all the political frisson that the culture war battles do. It’s pretty meat and potatoes.

The less benign explanation is that at some level, recognizing the extraordinary depth of the hole that we’ve fallen into and the extraordinary growth in the racial disparities that we’re now looking at means on some level revisiting the decisions that were made along the way to keep school buildings closed as long as they were. And it means some kind of implicit accountability for that. And to the extent that the media had a role in the length of the closures in a lot of cities, it’s an uncomfortable subject.

To the extent that the media had a role in the length of the closures in a lot of cities, it’s an uncomfortable subject.

Above: The December 2022 Associated Press piece that was instrumental in leading MacGillis to focus on Richmond.

What if any other efforts at covering the story have you seen out there that you admire or that could be possible models?

AM: Erica Green’s December 2021 piece on a high school in Bethlehem, Penn., was one of the first that captured the real depth of the social-emotional dislocation that students were exhibiting after their return to in-person learning. Perry Stein’s September 2022 piece about the link between federal funds and the needs of a single student at one Washington, D.C., school laid bare the logistical challenges facing districts. Bianca Vázquez Toness’ December 2022 piece contrasting Richmond’s struggle to switch to a year-round calendar with nearby Hopewell, Va.’s, successful transition was a good model of how to tell this story through different locations and provided me with helpful context. I recently added a link to that story in my article; it was an oversight not to have done so earlier.

What should education beat editors and reporters who want to follow up on your story be asking about their districts this summer and fall?

AM: Quite straightforward: how are they using their post-pandemic federal funds for learning recovery efforts, what are the main obstacles to making the most of these funds, and are they also considering a switch to a full-year calendar (i.e., shorter summer break and longer breaks during school year) to reduce summer slide and aid recovery?

How do you feel about having to go it alone, by and large, while so many other issues get so much more media attention? What does it make you feel about mainstream journalism right now?

AM: I find it quite bewildering how little coverage pandemic learning loss is getting, given the extent of the crisis, especially in comparison the coverage that the classroom culture wars are receiving. It’s generally nice to be doing work seen as singular or away-from-the-ball, but in this case, I’d greatly prefer more company because there is clearly so much more to be written on the subject.

Previously from The Grade

‘A gift’: John Woodrow Cox on covering school gun violence
Candor, urgency, & action: how to transform the education beat
‘I don’t think I did enough,’ says former PBS correspondent John Merrow.
The case for writing angry (2021)
How media coverage turned vulnerable kids into an invisible threat  (2020)
A year’s worth of memorable K-12 COVID schools coverage (2021)