Enrollment ups and downs, unearthing special ed secrets, & episode 2 of NPR’s new podcast: 🏆 Best Education Journalism of the Week 🏆 (5/20/2022)

📌 Welcome back! There was no newsletter last week, so today’s edition includes a handful of older items than usual. 📌

In this week’s newsletter: Public school enrollment numbers are down nationally, but some districts are seeing booms. An investigative education reporter details how she reported her blockbuster story on secrecy agreements in special education. Episode 2 of NPR’s School Colors podcast is out! And a quiz for all the education nerds out there on which fictional TV high school you should have gone to.

ENROLLMENT ROLLERCOASTER
The big story of the week, according to us:

Above: Burbio map showing states experiencing dramatic enrollment changes, along with its charts of cities and suburbs with big fluctuations.

The big story of the week continues to be enrollment shifts that are creating struggles for schools, districts, and students. We’ve heard before about large urban districts losing students. But in some other districts, enrollment is way up, and schools can hardly manage the influx of students. Both situations are challenging:

🔊 LAUSD expects enrollment to plummet by an ‘alarming’ 30% in the next decade (LA Times)
🔊 In the San Joaquin Valley, rapidly growing school districts endure overcrowding (EdSource)
🔊 St. Paul schools fight to keep families amid school closures, enrollment slide (Star Tribune)
🔊 Chronic absenteeism rose 80% in Connecticut during the pandemic (Hartford Courant)
🔊 NYC families struggle with school refusal (Chalkbeat New York)

This week’s best stories (below) are also enrollment-related. 

Two other big stories of the week: NYC’s decision to screen students for dyslexia and beef up phonics instruction (Gothamist, Chalkbeat NY, New York Times) and the smattering return of school mask mandate debates as COVID cases increase yet again (Gothamist, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, AP, District Administration).

PLUNGE & BOOM
The best education journalism of the week, according to us:

🏆 BEST: The best story of the week is Shawn Hubler’s With Plunging Enrollment, a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools in the New York Times. Hubler paints a dire picture for the country as a whole: public school enrollment nationwide has dropped by at least 1.2 million students since 2020. While declining birth rates and a slow down in immigration contribute to this, as Hubler reports, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Experts also say fed-up parents have switched to homeschooling or sent their kids to private schools during the COVID school shutdown. And much more worrisome, thousands of kids have vanished from any records and presumably dropped out. Hubler spoke with families about their individual decisions and the reasons behind them, bringing the striking statistics to life. This is an extremely helpful overview.

🏆 RUNNER-UP: This week’s runner-up is Population booms overwhelm schools in the West: ‘Someone’s gonna get left behind’ by Neal Morton in Hechinger Report and the Washington Post. While many districts are seeing enrollment dips, districts out west and in more rural areas  — including Bozeman, Montana; Cedar City, Utah; and Twin Falls, Idaho — are seeing booms. This story shows the other — often forgotten — side of the coin in enrollment stories. The extreme fluctuations can be negative on either side. Challenges include large class sizes, stretched budgets, crowded school buildings, and too few staff with needed cultural and language skills.

BONUS STORIES

🏆 School takeovers by the state haven’t worked, Globe analysis shows (Boston Globe)
🏆 This school takes kids from the most traumatized parts of Ukraine — and offers hope (NPR)
🏆 New Biden administration rules for charter schools spur bipartisan backlash  (New York Times)
🏆 This Philly student fell behind in school. Then he discovered a program and got himself into Penn. (Philly Inquirer)
🏆 Billions in School Covid-Relief Funds Remain Unspent (Wall Street Journal)
🏆 This state is enrolling fewer Latino and Black college students in remedial courses. It’s working. (NBC News)
🏆 English-only test frustrates efforts to find teachers (Iowa Public Radio)
🏆 A Minneapolis teacher weighs the cost of battling the white education hierarchy—and her own union. (Sahan Journal)

SECRET SPECIAL ED
New commentary from The Grade

The practice of requiring parents to sign Hollywood-style non-disclosure agreements in order to obtain SPED services for their children is not well known among educators and parents, and has been little-reported by journalists.

However, WFYI Indiana investigative reporter Lee V. Gaines found out about efforts to rein in the practice and explained how she went about uncovering the story in Secret agreements in special education, this week’s new essay from The Grade.

“I was shocked the first time I heard a parent say they were forbidden from talking about their special education settlement because of a non-disclosure agreement,” Gaines writes. “I knew I needed to report on this.”

Coming soon: Sharp media insights from Mother Jones’ Mark Follman, who’s written a new book about gun violence prevention programs, and Matt Drange, who penned this week’s much-discussed Insider story about a high school journalism teacher who was a sexual predator.

MEDIA TIDBITS
Thought-provoking commentary on the latest coverage.

Above: In HBO’s The Leftovers, 2% of the world’s population suddenly and mysteriously disappears — roughly the same percentage of students district schools have lost in the pandemic.

📰  FOCUS ON THE DISAPPEARED, NOT JUST THE LEFTOVERS: Anyone who read or watched HBO’s The Leftovers knows that the disappearance of even a small percentage of a community is going to create rippling and unanticipated problems. Nobody knows where the departed have gone, so the focus is understandably on those left behind. But in the real-world case of student enrollment declines at public schools, I’d caution against focusing narrowly on the districts and schools left behind. It’s tens of thousands of disengaged/abandoned kids and the communities they live in that are most in danger — and largely voiceless. These children have not just disappeared into thin air. You can find them. You have to find them.

📰  RIGHT-WING SCHOOL BOARD TAKEOVER? Reading the news over the past couple of months, you’d think that a right-wing effort to take over school boards was widespread — and likely to succeed. But is that really what’s happening? Not in some areas, at least. Take for example New York, where school board elections were held this week. Kathleen Moore reports in the Times Union in Albany that a majority of ‘parents rights’ candidates lose in Capital Region school elections. Other accounts I’ve seen paint a mixed picture. Dramatic anecdotes aside, we still don’t have much of a national overview to give us a sense of whether parents rights candidates are numerous and/or successful. Ballotpedia might be a good starting point for a national (and historical) perspective. Most races are nonpartisan, but among those that are partisan the organization reports 167 Democrats and 194 Republicans in the mix.

📰  THE BUFFALO SHOOTER AND SCHOOLS: I’m not so interested in stories like USA Today’s piece pursuing connections between the tragedy and hot-button topics like critical race theory and U.S. history education. I’m not even particularly interested in efforts to link the event to prolonged school shutdowns. However, I’d love to see more reporting about the Buffalo shooter’s high school experiences. Did he only make that one 2021 threat that was reported to the authorities, or were there more? Did the school have a threat assessment protocol? We don’t yet know. The local DA has said that the school did everything right following the student’s disturbing comments. But the school itself isn’t answering questions. There have been some good initial stories (AP, New York Times, and The 74), but major questions remain, including why the initial threat didn’t include a home visit or a social media check.

PEOPLE, JOBS, AWARDS
Who’s doing what, going where

Above: Let’s hear it for the Dallas Morning News Ed Lab team, featured in a Poynter article on the growth of ed labs. (Also, check out our own column from 2020 making the case for the ed lab.)

🔥 Comings and goings: WBEZ Chicago’s Becky Vevea is returning to the education beat and moving over to Chalkbeat Chicago, where she will be the new bureau chief. In more Chalkbeat news, Newark reporter Patrick Wall is heading over to the national team as a senior reporter, in part to cover for Matt Barnum during his Spencer fellowship. Aaricka Washington, most recently with Chalkbeat Indiana before freelancing, will be an associate editor at KPCC and LAist. Claire McInerny announced she’s leaving KUT Austin to rest and recover, and then freelance. (Keep an eye out for a posting for her old job soon.) And Aallyah Wright, a member of the EWA advisory board who used to cover education at Mississippi Today, has started her new role at Capital B covering rural issues.

🔥 Awards: Congrats to all the EWA award finalists, including Hechinger Report’s Neal Morton, the Dallas Morning News’ Talia Richman, the New York Times’ Erica Green, and many, many more. “Feeling lucky,” Richman tweeted, “that one of my entries is about the school district I graduated from and its work to be more equitable.” Belated congrats to the New York Times’ Andrea Elliott, who won a Pulitzer for her book “Invisible Child,” which scrutinizes the institutions that failed a young girl named Dasani coming of age amid New York City’s homelessness crisis. And congrats to Deadline Club winners Jessica Schulberg for her HuffPost story profiling an Oregon school shooter decades later and NBC News’ Antonia Hylton, Frannie Kelley, and Mike Hixenbaugh for their “Southlake” podcast.

🔥 Jobs: USA Today is still looking for an education editor to replace Chrissie Thompson. They’re also still hiring a K-12 enterprise reporter to replace Erin Richards. Chalkbeat is looking for a Newark reporter. US News and World Report is hiring an education reporter. The Hechinger report is hiring a data reporter. The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, is hiring an education reporter. The Baltimore Banner is still looking for two more education reporters, one focused on K-12 and another on higher ed. Politico is hiring an education newsletter writer and K-12 reporter. The Dallas Morning News is hiring a reporter for their Education Lab. Check previous editions of the newsletter for other listings that may still be open.

EVENTS, APPEARANCES

Above: Listen to Episode 2 of NPR’s “School Colors” podcast, focusing on Southside of Queens, which is primarily Black.

⏰ Media segments: “School Colors” hosts Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman were on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show talking about their podcast, and they were also interviewed by Chalkbeat. WBUR’s On Point had an episode last week on the mental health crisis among children of color. And the Connecticut Mirror released Episode 2 of their “Untold” podcast about how the state’s students are recovering from the pandemic.

⏰ Brown vs. Board of Ed: To mark the anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case, check out the new book “The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City” by Christopher Bonastia. EdWeek and The 74 also marked the occasion with look backs on the decision, including how it decimated the Black educator pipeline and why schools today are still segregated.

⏰ Documentary: A new documentary about John Hope School 26 explores one of Indianapolis’ first public schools for Black students. Read all about it in WFYI.

⏰ Update: Police have arrested a 24-year-old man in connection to the murder of Virginian-Pilot education reporter Sierra Jenkins, who was killed earlier this year.

THE KICKER

Quiz time for the education nerds! Pick your after school special (and answer some other questions) and find out which fictional TV high school you should have gone to.

That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading!

Reply to this email to send us questions, comments or tips. Know someone else who should be reading Best of the Week? Send them this link to sign up.

Using Feedly or FlipBoard or any other kind of news reader? You can subscribe to The Grade’s “feed” by plugging in this web address: http://www.kappanonline.org/category/the-grade/feed/.

Read more about The Grade here. You can read all the back issues of The Grade’s newsletter, Best of the Week, here.

By Alexander Russo with additional writing from Colleen Connolly.