Rethinking K-12 education coverage for the post-pandemic era

The pandemic elevated education reporting, but the beat remains woefully under-resourced and the coverage is often inadequately compelling. What would it look like if we reimagined it completely? 

By Jenny Anderson

COVID-19 radically elevated U.S. education coverage among mainstream national publications. 

When more than 1.7 billion kids came home and parents became teachers overnight three things happened: Parents saw inside the black box of school; they saw how hard it is to teach, and they realized schools do a lot more than just teach math and science. 

Reporters took note, producing a surge of high-quality coverage. There were memorable stories about the kids left behind by remote learning, the despair of one group of Missouri teens, and federal food aid being stalled. 

However, this newfound attention to parents, learners, teachers and learning itself needs to stick post-COVID. We can’t afford  to re-relegate education coverage to a “soft” topic that’s covered by just a relative handful of full-time K-12 national education reporters and a revolving door of national education editors. The beat is too big and too important for that. 

“The big, important questions are not getting addressed,” said Betsy Corcoran, cofounder of EdSurge and a former science and technology reporter at outlets including the Washington Post and Forbes. “I see national media obsessed with the politics of education rather than how we educate.”

To invigorate national K-12 coverage, let’s rethink it as a beat about learning — and invest in covering it like we do health, climate change, or science. 

The current state of affairs 

For decades, mainstream education coverage in the U.S. has often been undervalued, under-resourced, and lacking in the creativity the vast world of educators, learners and parents deserve. 

At the national level, it has not been a beat reporters flock to in a newsroom, nor is it seen to be a “powerful” one. It is treated with the same sexism that dominates the care economy: written by women for women in charge of making sure the children are OK. 

Partly as a result, the intensity and experimentation major news outlets bring to health or science and the environment is often absent when it comes to education. 

Largely because it’s so under-resourced and relatively low in status, education coverage doesn’t regularly generate the kinds of stories that non-educators and non-parents feel that they have to read. 

But beat coverage is an investment choice by editors-in-chief who decide which desks get budgets to hire reporters. Surely we care as much about how humans learn as we do about how many steps we’ve clocked this week or how many hours of sleep we need to optimize productivity? 

Comparing education staffing levels to other beats

I spent eight years as a Wall Street reporter at the New York Times and we thought a lot about how to manage coverage of investment banks, commercial banks, hedge funds and private equity funds, and markets. We covered the politics of Wall Street as well as regulation, product innovation, scandals, trends, and deals.

We had columnists who fought for main street investors and those for market experts. We had pod editors — finance, tech, business — senior editors, and a cast of dedicated and talented backfield editors. We always wanted more people—there were so many stories! — but we had a lot of people.

The contrast is clear when you compare education to other beats. 

There are about 25 health journalists and at least 10 covering climate change at the New York Times. The section itself is divided into many fascinating subgroups from climate, space and cosmos, to health, trilobites (look it up—I had to), and of course Covid-19. 

Currently, the Times has no education editor. There’s no full-time education columnist or data journalist assigned to the beat.  A handful of women — and they are all women — are doing great work. But there are just not enough of them to cover the beat the way it warrants. The situation is much the same at the Washington Post and National Public Radio. 

“Education is as important as science,” said one veteran education reporter at a major news outlet who was not authorized to speak about coverage. “From an employment basis alone, it’s as important as health.” 

Reenvisioning education as a learning beat

Reimagined as a learning beat, coverage would be broader and better resourced.

It would delve into what kids should learn, how they should learn it, and what the role of technology can be. It would dig into learning science with the same vigor with which health reporters approach every new caffeine story. 

It would investigate the abysmal status of teachers and investigate why they don’t get high-quality training like health care workers (yes, lives depend on it). It would explore data showing dangerous levels of disengagement — according to Gallup, 75% of 5th graders report being engaged with school, a figure that drops to 32% of 11th graders. 

It would probe why 9 in 10 parents believe their child is at/above grade level in reading and math when national data from the U.S. Department of Education show that only about a third of students are performing at grade level. 

It would examine the roles schools and communities should play in helping kids figure out who they are and how they fit in the world—topics surely as worthy as another lemon tart recipe.

And it would not end at 18, or after college, because that’s not when we stop learning. If 85 million jobs are going to be disrupted by automation, how humans gain knowledge and skills matters, too (employers call it “reskilling” but also “learning and development,” a market estimated to be worth $240 billion). 

Generating the coverage we need 

To accomplish this, a learning desk at a major national news organization would look dramatically different from the current setup. On top of the current staffing levels, it would add: 

• One or two learning science reporters to dig into the deep well of research that exists and is growing, including educational psychology, psychometrics, curriculum design, technology and pedagogy, or the art and science of teaching.
• A race reporter to explore systemic inequities and their effects on  learning and development. 
• A data reporter to cover the vast troves of data the U.S. has. This reporter would dive deep into race, class, and inequality, a Raj Chetty-type who can cast an economic lens on a very worrying map. 
• An early childhood reporter to cover science and policy and also take up the critical role of child care. 
• A teaching reporter to delve into how teachers are trained, how pedagogy has been transformed, and the psychology of belonging and safety. 
• A tech reporter to look at the flood of venture funding pouring in ($16.2 billion in 2020, 32 times more than in 2010), the 25+ edtech unicorns (and three decacorns), most of which are in China and India.  
• A corporate learning reporter to look at the $240-billion corporate learning market and how billion-dollar companies like Guild are trying to make learning and upskilling attractive and accessible to a wider swathe of workers. 
• A reporter to cover students and parents. We talk to patients about medicine; we should talk to students and their caregivers about education. 
• A coordinating editor/producer to find and knit together local trends into national stories, the way NPR and USA Today education teams already do. 

Finally, coverage of course needs to focus on all that is broken, corrupt, and wrong, but also what is working. A dose of solutions journalism alongside the critical accountability major media offers is necessary. What do high-functioning teachers and classrooms and schools and districts do, and what can we learn from them? We obsess over everything Elon Musk does and Bill and Melinda Gates’ divorce but ignore the many education leaders innovating, educating, caring, and elevating young people. 

Following the path of climate coverage

This won’t be easy—or cheap. 

Education is a tough beat under any circumstances. Federalism, and more than 13,000 semi-independent local school districts, means it’s a very real challenge that what happens in Texas can have little to do with what happens in New Hampshire. Parents generally say in surveys that they like the education they think their kids are getting, even though they are mistaken about how they are actually performing. Some deem the “product cycle” too long because they say we have to wait until 18 to see if education  “worked.” (We don’t). 

But the investment could be well worth the cost, elevating the conversation about it. Deeper, more robust coverage will allow for better understanding of the depth and complexity of a beat that involves 56.4 million pre-K to 12 students, their parents and caregivers, 19.7 million college students, and 3.1 million teachers.  It will empower parents, educators, and leaders alike. 

“The problems of our education system are mirrored in the coverage,” says author and journalist Amanda Ripley, who tried to avoid becoming an education reporter for fear it would sideline her career (she did, and it didn’t). “Low rigor, low in imagination, and not attentive to the needs and input of students.”

Some beats have to be fought for. Climate reporters have rankled to build coverage and gained traction. Let’s add learning to that list. 

Related pieces from The Grade:

The lamentable rise of ‘conflict’ journalism

‘Complicating the narratives’ in education journalism

A new era for the New York Times’ national coverage

Progress — and challenges — at the Washington Post