Every week, The Grade publishes columns, commentary, personal essays, and interviews about education news coverage.
Out of all the pieces we published in 2023, here are the 10 best, based on my sense of their impact, importance, and overall value.
Most of them are written by education journalists and contributors. Maybe you missed some of them. Maybe I picked the wrong pieces. Yes, reading them counts as ‘work.’ Enjoy!
10: What makes Colo. public radio’s Jenny Brundin such a standout education reporter?
Some journalists do a great job on a big project or two. Others lean in for a few years before their efforts and results begin to fade. But year after year, Brundin’s education coverage is consistently high-quality. Long cuts, student voices, and unexpected story choices are among the key features of her work, notes contributor Will Callan.
Covering a teacher’s strike or any other kind of school shutdown is one of the most difficult things to do. Three local education reporters describe what it took to cover a prolonged and contentious teachers strike — and where they could have done better. (See also this appreciation for LAUSD strike coverage from last winter.)
8: Making education news more useful
Knowing the difference between what journalists are interested in and what readers are interested in is just one of the helpful insights from Alabama Education Lab editor Ruth Serven Smith. She’s not just creating a cookie-cutter education lab, that’s for sure.
7: ‘Harder than I thought possible’
It’s increasingly common to see journalists writing about their personal experiences as students or parents, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy thing to do. “They told me ‘you can back out at the last minute,’” explains the AP’s Heather Hollingsworth in this interview about her essay about her struggle to get literacy services for her child. “But it sat there so long, I kind of got used to it being in existence.”
In Boston and many other places, the school information parents want doesn’t match the education news traditional outlets are producing. In this piece by contributor Colleen Connolly, Boston parent advocate Vernée Wilkinson describes the habits of traditional education coverage as “a certain form of violence towards children.” This is something we’ll be exploring further in a series of 2024 pieces.
5: Why reporting on literacy is so hard — and tips for making it easier
Schools’ efforts to improve literacy instruction was one of the big topics of 2023. In this piece, the Boston Globe’s star reporter Mandy McLaren gets candid about how she reported and wrote the literacy story at the Courier Journal and the Globe. The series also included pieces from Emily Hanford and Alan Borsuk.
4: ‘Grapevine’; more than just another school culture wars clash?
We don’t publish very many reviews of individual pieces of journalism any more, but when the occasion warrants, we can make it happen. In this case, we were lucky enough to get Texas-based freelancer Bekah McNeel writing about NBC’s school culture wars podcast. She reminds us journalism should draw clear lines without exaggerating differences — and that conflicts like this one take place between conservative groups.
3: An expert journalist’s guide to covering book bans
“Covering education these days is a bit like juggling knives,” writes WFAE public radio’s Ann Doss Helms — especially when it comes to covering school culture wars debates like book challenges. Keeping calm and staying out of the fray are keys to producing coverage that’s “fair without being naïve,” she writes. We should all follow her advice.
2: The case against focusing on school gun violence
Five years after Parkland, it’s clear to me that school shooting coverage has become misleading and toxic — resulting in unnecessarily terrified students and parents, “hardened” schools that treat kids as threats, and billions in school resources misspent. School shootings account for less than 1% of the total gun deaths suffered by American children. There’s got to be a better way; the first step is to reconsider the current practice.
1: Tabloid-style education news is all the rage
Despite all the serious and widespread issues facing K-12 education right now, some of our biggest and most respected news outlets — the Washington Post and the New York Times in particular — have been focused on tabloid fodder like culture wars and school violence. I took a close look at six weeks of coverage to show the pattern.
Previously from The Grade
The Grade’s most popular pieces of 2022
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/
