A local nonprofit melds accountability reporting with parent-centered schools coverage. Maybe this is the direction education news needs to go next?
By Andrew Bauld
In 2017, the nonprofit news organization Voice of San Diego (“Voice”) published a statement of core principles adopted by its staff and trustees.
“Journalism is best when pursued with purpose,” stated the publication. “We want to tackle the San Diego region’s big problems.”
The statement reflected Voice editor-in-chief Scott Lewis’s commitment to bring the paper’s “underlying assumptions out into the open,” as Nieman Lab wrote at the time.
It was a bold move at a moment when most news organizations were doubling down on appearing objective.
But for Voice, which launched in 2005, it was simply about making its distinct mission — to bring investigative reporting to its local community — fully visible to readers.
Not surprisingly, Voice’s education coverage sets itself apart from other local and national outlets. Something of a hidden gem, it’s a model that outlets in other places might do well to consider emulating.
“I think they give local context to larger trends that might be happening in the state and the country,” says San Diego parent Amanda Bonds. “It really helps local readers like me see how these things that are in the news broadly are affecting real lives locally.”
Voice’s education coverage sets itself apart from other local and national outlets.
An ongoing conversation about local schools
While other local outlets like the Union-Tribune and KPBS cover the district at a macro level, Voice takes a more nuanced approach, using individual schools to reveal how national educational issues are playing out in San Diego.
“At Voice, we really try to push ourselves to do impactful work and not just cover the press conference about the school offering a healthier lunch menu,” says Voice education reporter Jakob McWhinney. “We’re taking big national issues and connecting them to local districts [in a way] that’s not just jumping on the bandwagon or covering something for clicks.”
While McWhinney comes to the job from an alternative background, he’s the latest in a long line of Voice education reporters who have used the beat to uncover sexual misconduct in schools, reimagine how to measure school performance, and make the process of choosing a school a lot clearer for San Diego parents.
One of the main ways that Voice’s education coverage sets itself apart from other outlets is the way its education reporters seem to be in conversation with one another. Topics covered from one generation to the next almost feel like the passing of the baton among teammates.
Topics covered from one generation to the next almost feel like the passing of the baton among teammates.
Sexual misconduct under the microscope
The power of this kind of continuity is most obvious with Voice’s years-long investigation into cases of sexual misconduct by teachers and other public school employees in San Diego County.
That project began with former Voice reporter Ashly McGlone’s first story in 2017 and has been carried on by subsequent reporters, including Kayla Jimenez, now a national correspondent at USA Today, and Will Huntsberry, the Voice’s senior investigative reporter.
McWhinney’s most recent story in that series came out this past February.
“McGlone…started it all and I think it was groundbreaking,” says Huntsberry. “She public record requested every public school in San Diego, and that project has had such a long life since Ashly. She wrote a bunch of stories for two years, I wrote stories, and Jakob has carried that on.”
Voice’s ongoing investigation into sexual misconduct in San Diego school’s has revealed example after example of how the school system has failed students. It has been praised by Business Insider’s Matt Drange, who has produced award-winning national coverage on the topic.
Their coverage so far has resulted in a lawsuit against one accused teacher and the creation of a new online tool by the San Diego district attorney to track suspected child abuse cases.
Above, clockwise from top left: Current and former Voice education reporters Ashly McGlone, Mario Koran, Will Huntsberry, and Jakob McWhinney.
Finding a new way to measure schools
The continuity of commitment to meaningful, impactful education reporting is evident in other areas of coverage too — no more so than the groundbreaking use of an income-to-test-score metric that has transformed how Voice evaluates school performance.
As anyone who covers education knows, poverty plays an oversized role in how students learn. “It’s always frustrating because you want to report objectively, but knowing there is this socio-economic factor that’s looming over everything makes it really difficult,” says McWhinney.
His predecessor Huntsberry faced that same challenge when he covered the education beat for Voice from 2018 to 2021. But unlike most other news outlets, Voice set out to do something about it.
Huntsberry was inspired to find a better measurement after profiling Edison Elementary in 2020. With nearly 100% of its students living near the poverty line, Edison should have been well below the state’s proficiency benchmark. Instead, it was 10 points higher.
Working with researchers at the Center for Research and Evaluation at UC San Diego Extension, Huntsberry and Voice colleagues developed a new measurement that controlled for poverty.
Applying the metric, they found that Edison wasn’t just overachieving — it was one of the top performing schools in the entire county.
The metric has continued to help Voice reporters identify schools that would normally go unnoticed when measured on test scores alone. Most recently, McWhinney has used the metric to highlight how badly San Diego’s virtual schools are failing students and has also returned to Edison to show how the school is still defying odds.
“I guarantee you there are schools like Edison in other parts of the state and the county that haven’t been recognized,” McWhinney says. “I think it’s really important for investigative reporters to use their skills to raise up as well as spur accountability.”
Recognizing that not every reader is an education expert
While Voice has investigated a wide range of issues facing education in San Diego, it never seems to forget its central audience — parents.
“[Education] is so filled with jargon and things that don’t make sense to the average person, even if their kids are experiencing them,” says McWhinney. “Figuring out ways to translate the gobbledygook into something that makes sense to any person is so vital.”
The most obvious example of this effort is the outlet’s “Parent’s Guide to San Diego Schools,” which comes out every year both online and in a free print magazine. The guide helps parents navigate the complexity of schools, from test scores to afterschool programs to enrollment deadlines.
“Being a parent is hard,” McWhinney told The Grade earlier this year. “So, we wanted to give families a way to learn more about schools without having to do the kind of digging we’re paid to do.”
“If I could marry that [guide], I would,” says Bonds, who relied on it to choose a school for her daughter. “I have so many friends in the education world in other states, and they say they don’t have anything like it.”
“If I could marry that [guide], I would,” says Bonds, who relied on it to choose a school for her daughter.
While the San Diego Union-Tribune recently decided to end its Spanish-language edition, Voice offers many of its stories in both English and Spanish and publishes its parent guide in both languages.
Cutting through complexity is also evident in Voice’s education newsletter, The Learning Curve, launched in 2015 by then-Voice education reporter Mario Koran.
“Education was a coverage area which we all sort of agreed was important, collectively, but one that a lot of readers often felt intimidated, bored or just put off by — maybe because it was often filled with jargon or traditionally geared toward teachers and parents already well steeped in education issues,” emailed Koran, now a member of the Local Investigations Fellowship at The New York Times.
Koran remembers tracking down answers and responding individually to parent questions about schools and school policies.
“It occurred to me that a lot of the answers I was providing might have value for general readers, so I thought of fashioning them into a newsletter, where I’d take a question each week and flesh it out in a column,” says Koran.
Today, McWhinney publishes The Learning Curve every two weeks. In it, he writes conversational stories, which often serve as companion pieces to his more thoroughly reported ones, like a recent mini-profile of three homeschooling parents, which branched from his coverage of the rise of homeschooling in San Diego County.
“I think once you get into the weeds like we do, it’s even more important to come out and translate these complex concepts into easy-to-understand stories,” McWhinney says.
“With The Learning Curve, I appreciate the extent they go to demystify things and I love that they will write a story and say, ‘As we reported in November…’ and link to the thing they are referencing,” says Bonds. “It’s obvious there’s a string you can pull, that it’s ongoing, and they commit to certain topics.”
For McWhinney, one of the big topics he’s planning to cover this year and for the foreseeable future is school and student recovery from the pandemic. As part of that effort, McWhinney recently launched a new feature called “The Progress Report” to find out if innovative school programs are producing results. So far, he’s looked at the use of home visits to combat chronic absenteeism and the implementation of research-backed literacy programs.
“I think it’s very important for all of us as reporters, even if it feels like we’re droning on about the thing, to continue to cover [the recovery from the pandemic], because in my opinion, it’s the most important story for a generation,” McWhinney says. “And it’s important to ensure all the money that funneled into districts is still being spent is spent on stuff that actually works.”
Voice’s education coverage and its education reporters have been mentioned regularly in our newsletter over the years, including a 2023 best story of the week nod for an absenteeism piece, a 2021 runner-up nod for a story about the Cindy Marten controversy, a 2018 blurb admiring former ed reporter Mario Koran, and a 2024 nod for its parents guide.
Andrew Bauld is a freelance education reporter based in Brooklyn, New York. His writing regularly appears in the School Library Journal, US News and World Report, and Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Ed. Magazine. You can find his latest work here. His previous piece for The Grade was Finding real parents — on deadline.
Previously from The Grade
Scrappy New Haven Independent shows how to excel at in-school reporting
What’s happening to national coverage of big-city school systems?
How Chicago public radio breaks free from the hamster wheel of daily education news
What makes Colo. Public Radio’s Jenny Brundin such a standout education reporter?
When good news goes missing
