Back to school (Part 1), teacher resilience in Chicago, & Hot Viz Summer: 🏆 Best Education Journalism of the Week 🏆 (8/5/2022)

🔊 CDC expected to ease Covid-19 recommendations, including for schools, as soon as this week (CNN)
🔊 New school year, no mask rules for most of U.S. (Chalkbeat)
🔊 Most US public schools plan to keep masks optional for start of classes (CNN)
🔊 Mask Mandates Return To Some School Districts Amid COVID Uptick (Huffington Post)
🔊 D.C. schools expand covid vaccine mandate, unlike most other districts (Washington Post)
🔊 Colleges Scale Back Covid Precautions for Fall, Saying Pandemic Phase Over (Wall Street Journal)
🔊 Alexandria schools will require coronavirus vaccine for staff (Washington Post)
🔊 For CA students, a normal-ish return to school (Mercury News)
🔊 L.A. schools drop aggressive COVID-19 rules: No more testing for all and masks stay optional (LA Times) See also LA Daily News, LAist
🔊 The pandemic isn’t over — but are schools over COVID protocols? (Michigan Advance)
🔊 MPS will require masks when COVID levels are high (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
🔊 CT announces new testing, masking policies for 2022-23 as school year approaches (Hartford Courant)
🔊 NYC plans to end school-based COVID testing program this fall, source says (Chalkbeat NY)

Cringe coverage of the week: kindergarten teachers being trained to carry guns and how school safety mandates turned Democratic parents into anti-vaxxers (New York Times), and ’catastrophics’ teacher shortage and looming mask mandate stories (Washington Post).

Other pessimism-busting stories of the week: Dallas parents are flocking to mixed-income schools, St. Louis voters passed a $160M school bond, a sleepy commuter college was transformed into a national hub for Black STEM students, Alex Jones has to pay millions to Sandy Hook families, and Miami’s school board reversed its previous rejection of health and sex education books.

🏆 RUNNER-UP: This week’s runner-up is California Has Taken A Slow Approach To Dyslexia. A Lot Of Families Have Lost Patience by Adriana Pera and Jill Replogle in LAist. It’s the first of a six-part series on dyslexia screening and mitigation across the state. In this first part, Pera and Replogle explain the science behind dyslexia and the prolonged debate around whether to address it through universal screening or changes in reading instruction (or both). While policymakers in California debate, 49% of the state’s low-income students are reading below a basic level. This story features quotes from community members throughout the piece explaining how dyslexia has impacted their or their children’s lives, as well as highlights the stumbles and delays that have kept the state from improving its approach. As massive of a problem as dyslexia is, it warrants deep coverage like this. I can’t wait to see the rest of the series — and ProPublica’s much-anticipated literacy investigation, too.

See also: Clergy Amp Up Urgency On Reading Crisis in the New Haven Independent.

BONUS STORIES:
🏆 Advocates reel as Manchin compromise abandons pre-K (The 74)
🏆 As fewer kids enroll, big cities face a small schools crisis (Chalkbeat/AP)
🏆 Dallas parents flocking to schools that pull students from both rich and poor parts of town (Hechinger Report)
🏆 Early data on ‘high-dosage’ tutoring shows schools are sometimes finding it tough to deliver even low doses (Hechinger Report)
🏆 School police officers say they’re a positive force. Some worry they do more harm than good. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
🏆 Vast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich and Poor (New York Times)
🏆 The Uvalde Massacre Should Have Been Stopped Long Before That Tragic Day (Mother Jones)
🏆 Why Is America Fractured? Blame College, a New Book Argues (New York Times)

Two of education journalism’s biggest challenges are figuring out what to focus on — the data can be overwhelming! — and engaging readers in challenging stories.

But Chalkbeat’s Kae Petrin explains that data visualization (aka “dataviz”) is a good way to address both those problems — even without a data reporting team or a ton of training.

In their new piece for The Grade, Petrin explains simple ways that education reporters can add dataviz to their coverage and gives examples, resources, and tips for anyone who wants to try.

It’s not too late for you and your colleagues to have a Hot Viz Summer.

Also: Big thanks to Richard Prince for including our recent newsroom diversity update in his excellent media newsletter, Journal-isms. If you don’t already read it, you should.

🔥 Career moves: The Dallas Morning News’ Emily Donaldson is headed to grad school to study education policy. In case you missed it (like we did), former WBEZ Chicago education reporter Becky Vevea has started her new role as bureau chief of Chalkbeat Chicago. You already knew that Debbie Truong had left WAMU public radio in Washington DC, but now she’s started her new gig as a higher ed reporter for the LA Times and she’s looking for some accounts to follow. And former Chalkbeat education reporter Nic Garcia has started his new role as a regional editor at the Texas Tribune. One of his new reporters is Pooja Salhotra, former intern for Chalkbeat and NPR’s education team.

🔥 Funding opportunity: ProPublica has opened its applications for its Local Reporting Network with a closing date of Aug. 22. Former Connecticut education reporter Jacqueline Rabe Thomas (now at CT Public Radio covering housing and inequality) used the LRN to launch into a new beat and encouraged all reporters (including education reporters!) to apply: “You too can do a dream project or start covering something new.”

🔥 Job openings: EWA is hiring an executive director to replace Caroline Hendrie. The Houston Chronicle’s Alejandro Serrano is moving to a new beat, and they are hiring an education reporter to replace him on the two-person team. WBEZ Chicago is hiring a higher education reporter. The Oregonian is hiring a K-12 reporter. The Indianapolis Star is hiring a K-12 reporter. Check previous versions of this newsletter to see any jobs that may still be open.

🔥 Perpetuating the hype cycle: In a recent CJR interview, Vox’s Rebecca Jennings describes how she tries to remember the role she and others play in shaping public narratives. “I try to be aware of the influence that journalists wield, creating that hype cycle,” said Jennings. “We’re supposed to be covering this stuff, and yet so often, we are the ones perpetuating it.”

⏰ Podcasts & more: WNYC’s All of It previewed a new documentary called “My Old School” about a student in Scotland who pretended to be a 16-year-old student. WBUR On Point featured a segment on early school start times and what happens when American teens get more sleep. APM Reports dropped a new 50-minute podcast episode about Native American students standing in two worlds. I’m still hoping to find a recording of her EWA award acceptance speech, but in the meantime Erica Green’s EWA22 interview with Joyce Abbott has now been posted.

⏰ New ventures: The AP has launched an education channel on its StoryShare platform — a unifying place for participating newsrooms to share stories on certain topics — as the new education team ramps up. If I understand correctly, the StoryShare platform will feature enterprise stories from participating outlets like Hechinger, Chalkbeat, and Open Campus, expanding their reach.

⏰ Collaboration success: Nieman Reports recently highlighted newsroom collaborations that worked, including one between Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier where they reported on major discrepancies in the state’s education spending. Kudos!

The (journalism) kids are alright.