An interview with reporter Yana Kunichoff about what she learned from covering education in an aggressively pro-choice state.
By Alexander Russo
If 2024 is anything like 2023, it’s going to be a big year for school choice.
And if anyone knows school choice, it’s Yana Kunichoff, who covered various forms of choice for Chalkbeat Chicago and then most recently as the K-12 education reporter at the Arizona Republic.
In this new interview, Kunichoff — who’s now reporting for AZ Luminaria — tells us why school choice is one of education’s central questions and highlights the importance of focusing on parents’ needs and experiences.
“I think choice is one of the biggest questions in public education,” Kunichoff told me in a recent phone interview.
How families engage in choice depends on what is — and isn’t — working for them at the schools they attend.
“I read every education article thinking, ‘Do families feel like they have agency in the system?’”
I read every education article thinking, ‘Do families feel like they have agency in the system?’
The following interview has been edited and condensed.
How long have you been covering school choice?
Yana Kunichoff: I’ve been a journalist for over a decade, and during that time school choice has been a steady thread in my coverage.
In Chicago, I wrote about who wins and loses in the magnet and selective enrollment school systems and how neighborhood schools find and retain students. I became more focused on school choice in my last year at the Arizona Republic when Arizona passed what was, at the time, the nation’s most expansive school voucher legislation. Covering the Empowerment Scholarship Account program has been really interesting because it has made me think about how government works and how information about new programs is shared, but also the way that any choice initiatives are tied in with how public schools are meeting the needs of students.
Say a little more about the question of “how public schools are meeting the needs of students?”
YK: If public schools are not meeting the needs of certain students or communities, or if people don’t understand the levers they have to get students’ needs met through a school system, I have seen that they are more likely to engage in school choice.
Arizona is an open enrollment state, so in theory, families can access any schools regardless of enrollment boundaries. In practice, that looks really different: busing, academic expectations, and the popularity of a specific school all impact how much parents can exercise their “choice.” And that’s on top of systemic barriers like language, class, and racial identity, which can impact access to resources.
Arizona’s school voucher expansion is interesting because for some families, it has helped fund private school education, while for others it has actually made it harder for them to access tutoring or therapies. Looking at both of those experiences highlights the barriers that are not always immediately visible in the school choice discussion.
As more students joined the program, special education families who needed approval for multiple programs were waiting longer and longer to have their funding requests processed and approved. A same-sex couple in the Phoenix area were told they weren’t welcome on the campus of their child’s private schools, even as that school said it would accept voucher dollars. It was unclear whether the anti-discrimination provisions that protect families enrolled in district and charter schools applied.
To me, choice is one of the biggest questions in public education right now in many ways. And local reporters are at the center of that. Their challenge is to bridge really big, ideological questions of school choice with coverage that helps explain to families the most important information about how a school system is functioning day to day.
To me, choice is one of the biggest questions in public education right now in many ways. And local reporters are at the center of that.
Is there anything you’d add to Cara Fitzpatrick’s recent observation that choice coverage can be ‘a little bit shallow’ and needs to give readers context and complexity?
YK: I can see that concern — and it mirrors some of the larger pressures that I worry about in journalism. Covering school choice from a top-down breaking news approach only offers a very surface-level understanding of how we got here, who has stakes in education changes being proposed, and how choice measures will affect education more broadly.
Readers deserve deeper coverage, including stories that show the history that got us there today. But that coverage takes time — and digging — to get past the public relations teams and national level lobbying but also to build trust and connection with families who can help give a nuanced understanding of how school choice options do, or don’t, work for them. To do that, beat reporters need newsroom leaders who are willing to invest the time and energy needed for complex and context-full coverage.
Are there any outlets, journalists, or specific stories about school choice that you’ve particularly admired — or been concerned about?
YK: Some of the approaches that I have bookmarked to help me in my work have been Erica Green’s coverage of LeBron James charter school in 2019, which really showed the day-to-day student experiences in school; Lily Altavena’s Detroit Free Press coverage on homeschooling which centered a student whose access to education was impacted; the Washington Post homeschooling coverage that told the stories of families who opted out and also explored the intellectual underpinning of the movement. In Chicago, Sarah Karp at WBEZ and Nader Issa at The Chicago Sun-Times have both covered the broader debate around selective enrollment really well. Yesenia Robles at Chalkbeat Colorado has covered how charter networks are moving in to open in closed small schools, which I’ve found a fascinating example of how charter networks grow amid moments of crisis for some public schools. Nationally, Politico, Hechinger Report, and Chalkbeat’s national team are all publications that I follow for school choice coverage, among other areas of reporting.
What’s missing, to me, is coverage that offers tools for readers to understand both education journalism and what are increasingly PR efforts by schools to attract students: an “urban dictionary” from publications that deconstructs how institutions use education terms could be a good first step. What does “public school” mean in Arizona coverage versus when used by reporters in Chicago? When a district says it has great special education resources, what questions should parents ask? I recently wrote a story like this geared towards parents and guardians of LGBTQ+ students in Arizona.
What outlets in Arizona besides the Republic have been covering education?
YK: Education is a highly political issue in Arizona, as elsewhere, so most outlets cover it in some way. When I started at The Arizona Republic there was just one K-12 reporter. Now there are two. The Arizona Capitol Times covers education politics well. But with both the Republic and Capitol Times, readers will hit a paywall if they aren’t subscribers. KJZZ, the local public radio station, regularly covers education stories. People should continue to follow Arizona schools coverage through the Republic’s current education team, Madeleine Parrish and Nick Sullivan.
Several new outlets have popped up in Arizona over the last several years, and they all cover education in one form or another. I’ve written for both Tucson-based AZ Luminaria and Phoenix-based LOOKOUT PHX, which cover education as part of their broader efforts to report for either identity- or place-based communities. The Arizona Agenda and the Tucson Agenda both aggregate and report on education.
Covering school choice from a top-down breaking news approach only offers a very surface-level understanding.
What are some of your biggest challenges and biggest successes covering choice?
YK: I’m proud of my coverage of Arizona’s Education Savings Account program. The program was hugely expanded in the summer of 2022 — any resident of Arizona with a school-aged child could apply for funding towards private school or tutoring. I did a story comparing Arizona’s law to 15 other laws around the country to highlight how little information the program shared publicly.
Much of my coverage was breaking news but I also tried to report on who was benefitting and who was not as the program expanded. There were a lot of special education families who were at the core of the original law’s passage who were missing out because the administration of the program was becoming so difficult. I was glad to report past the ideological question of “Should this exist or should this not exist?” to say “This is happening, the program is growing massively, but everyone’s experience isn’t equitable.”
What was a challenge for me in covering choice was how to prioritize different stories and what choice stories to go deeper into. As a reporter covering an entire state, I often did not have the time or the capacity to meet the broad breaking news responsibilities and to have the time to spend there to really understand, “What does this look like for these families?”
I really try to talk to and bring in families that I didn’t necessarily find through the institutions I’m reporting on.
Every year, new reporters come to the beat and veteran education reporters are asked to cover choice. I’m wondering what you would say about how to prioritize your choice coverage?
YK: Parents’ experience is really important through the entire process of choice. In many ways, the concept of “choice” works only as much as people are able, with the tools they have at hand, to navigate how to find the best school for their students. I would love to see more coverage of whom choice leaves out even at that point in the process. And I really try to talk to and bring in families that I didn’t necessarily find through the institutions I’m reporting on.
Beyond that, I would suggest journalists look at who is pushing the need for a choice option. Who drafted the legislation passed by lawmakers? What families are attending press conferences and legislative hearings? In Arizona, the conservative think tank the Goldwater Institute developed the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, so I tried to regularly quote them in my stories. Was the reform effort led by families who feel inadequately supported at their local school? If so, I would also try to report on whether they were connected to bigger organizing efforts, like the network of families that speak publicly with the American Federation for Children.
Can you say more about the specific challenges for education reporters covering school choice?
YK: Finding time to dig beyond breaking news coverage is a challenge. I dealt with this by supplementing my news stories with explainers to offer readers some broader history and context. I also struggled to decide which element of school choice to dig into. Arizona has so many charter networks, as well as private schools and homeschooling families.
What should education reporters try to do when covering the particularly loud, polarized voices in the choice debate?
YK: I would tell a reporter to talk to everybody they can: parents, legislators, education-related think tanks. Try to understand how they see what levers make change happen in education systems, what previous changes in the system that they were part of instituting, and if they are a lobbyist or organization, where their resources come from. I also try to be able to clearly say what the stakes are for every person I interview – for a family it is the education of their child, but what is the stake that the Goldwater Institute has in education in Arizona?
As much as you can, demystifying some of those levers of power is really, really important. Who are the loudest voices representing, and who is not represented in that debate? To me, those two questions can help guide your coverage.
Reporters themselves, who take in a ton of media and information, have good instincts about what feels new, what feels interesting, and what type of story they themselves would read. Follow, and hone, those instincts around choice coverage because what stories are covered and which aren’t are part of a much larger public relations battle in this space.
Reporting from the classroom, but also the legislature and teacher training spaces, feels like a step towards well-rounded coverage of school choice.
I was able to visit a number of classrooms as an education reporter, but I’ve also been glad to do things like interviewing the city of Chicago’s chief labor negotiator or sitting in a school discipline training led by the Arizona state department of education for principals and teachers to see what they were actually suggesting with regards to consequences and discipline tools beyond their strongly worded press statements for a return to “traditional discipline.”
Previously from The Grade
‘A little bit shallow’: Cara Fitzpatrick calls for context & immediacy
‘The backlash was the story’; an insider looks back at school culture wars coverage
A cautionary tale about linking school choice and segregation (Gail Cornwall)
Reconsidering the charter school segregation narrative (Jessica Lahitou)
