Best education journalism of the week (September 25)

🏆 BEST: The best story of the week is the Boston Globe’s How Rhode Island brought most students back for in-person learning — and Massachusetts did not, which draws sharp and illuminating contrasts between the two adjoining states. I’m not entirely persuaded that the divergent outcomes can be boiled down to different leadership styles, but I’m fascinated by the contrast between these similar states.

🏆 RUNNER-UP: Comparisons between states, districts, and schools are an excellent coverage strategy. This week’s runner-up — the Seattle Times’ Why Washington state’s guidelines to open schools are more cautious than others — takes a similar approach, exploring how Washington’s guidelines compare to other states, nearby and across the nation. The graphic showing how the state guidelines compare is worth the click alone. Steal this story idea!

🏆 BIG STORY: The big story of the week is COVID-19’s impact on attendance and enrollment. Those who covered the remote attendance story particularly well included NPR (With Students Attending School Virtually, Taking Roll Is Not So Simple), Chalkbeat (Thousands of students are missing from Chicago’s virtual classrooms and  Newark says nearly 100% of students attended daily remote learning) and the New York Times (As Schools Go Remote, Finding ‘Lost’ Students Gets Harder). Enrollment declines are another big topic, as several outlets including The 74 reported.

Earlier this week, the New York Times came out with a major new interactive focused on the hot-button issue of students and school staff who have been infected with COVID-19.

But the story (above) wrongly delves into the messy and incomplete raw case numbers that are available — without providing information about the overall number of students and staff that would make the numbers meaningful.The Times also focuses on alarming anecdotes, ignoring some of its own coverage.

In this new column, I analyze the Times story and subsequent stories from the Washington Post and NPR that illustrate a better way of reporting COVID-19 case data – and provide a substantially different narrative.

Being an education reporter may be tougher now than ever, with layoffs, furloughs, and all the COVID-related challenges. But it’s not all bad!

The return of education podcasts, expanded education teams, and the New York Times’ pop-up COVID schools newsletter are among the bright spots in education journalism so far this year. Featured are the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Kristen Graham, the New York Times’ Amelia Nierenberg and Adam Pasick, the Wall Street Journal’s Chastity Pratt, Fiasco’s Leon Neyfakh, the Miami Herald’s Colleen Wright, Casey Parks, and more.

Thanks, Serial, for the mention of last week’s Q&A with “nice white journalist” Chana Joffe-Walt, the genius behind this year’s big back-to-school podcast, “Nice White Parents.”

MEDIA TIDBITS

📰 CHALKBEAT AND GREATSCHOOLS: GreatSchools, the country’s most widely used school rating system, is changing its approach after a Chalkbeat investigation found that the system pushed families away from schools serving mostly Black, Hispanic, and low-income students. Congrats to everyone involved!

📰 TWO WAYS TO LOOK AT SCHOOL COVID DATA: On Wednesday, NPR and the Washington Post both wrote up the preliminary results from a new voluntary COVID case tracking survey. The Post’s interpretation of the results was that the infection levels reported by reopened schools are much lower than expected. NPR’s story presented the results in a much more neutral way, referencing color-coded guidances from the CDC and Harvard to contextualize results that it says would put schools in the orange or red zones.

📰 JOURNALISTS PUSH BACK ON UNION COVERAGE: In response to some recent finger-wagging from me about the seeming lack of adequate coverage about the role of teachers unions, some education journalists pushed back. The Tampa Bay Times’ Jeff Solochek noted that teachers unions are a regular focus of his coverage. And Chalkbeat’s Alex Zimmerman pointed to a section of a recent story that highlighted the union’s role. His colleague Christine Veiga had the temerity to ask if I’d actually read the Chalkbeat story I had posted. I remain concerned, but I appreciate the engagement.

📰 IN PRAISE OF LOCAL JOURNALISM: Bethesda Beat’s Caitlynn Peetz and the Arizona Republic’s Lily Altavena are calling out people like me (and newsletters like this one) for focusing too much on national news outlets and not enough on local ones. “We don’t often get the budget or time to do really splashy stuff, but we’re serving our communities in ways that matter,” Altavena tweeted last week. “Sometimes the best ed reporting is local reporting with context.” Earlier this week, Peetz tweeted, “The concept that local journalism is ‘less than’ national reporting is terribly misguided.” Good points! I appreciate the reminder and I will try to do better.

Missed some previous editions? You can see the archive of past newsletters here. 

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

Above: The new WW Higher Education Media fellows. Clockwise from top left: Kirk Carapezza, Kavitha Cardoza, Danielle Dreilinger, Ron French, Eileen Truax, Bianca Quilantan, Molly Osborne, and Rebecca Koenig.

🔥 The WW Higher Education Media Fellowship has named its second class of fellows: Kirk Carapezza (GBH), Kavitha Cardoza (freelance), Danielle Dreilinger (freelance), Ron French (Bridge Magazine), Rebecca Koenig (EdSurge), Molly Osborne (EdNC), Bianca Quilantan (Politico), and Eileen Truax (freelance). Applications are now open for the spring 2021 class.

🔥 The Seattle Times has a new engagement editor for its Education Lab! Jenn Smith, a community engagement editor at the Berkshire Eagle, announced her last day will be Oct. 2. Congrats, Jenn! Far as I know, they’re still looking for a permanent replacement for Neal Morton. These places are also hiring: El Paso Matters is hiring a higher ed reporter, PublicSource.org in Pittsburgh is hiring a higher ed reporter, the South Bend Tribune is hiring an education reporter, and USA Today is hiring a K-12 reporter.

🔥 USA Today national correspondent for higher education Lindsay Schnell is getting a new role focusing specifically on inequities. Congrats, Lindsay!

🔥 Former Voice of San Diego and The 74 and current Guardian education reporter Mario Koran got very personal in a recent piece in The Guardian, where he writes about his own experiences with alcoholism, crime, fatherhood, and writing. Check it out here, and find out what his newest project is going to be.

🔥 Kudos to EdWeek journalist Deborah Viadero for putting her own coverage under the microscope and sharing the results — though some of what she found wasn’t pretty. The self-reflection features analysis by scholars John B. Diamond, Kemi Anike Oyewole, and Brittany Fox-Williams.

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Above: On Tuesday, Boston’s public station GBH News launched a new yearlong multimedia initiative called COVID and the Classroom. A team of GBH journalists, including new K-12 education reporter Meg Woolhouse, will follow a handful of seniors from the first day of school through graduation day.

⏰ KPCC education reporter Carla Javier was on AirTalk to discuss her story about K-12 schools in Orange County welcoming back students for in-person classes. The Globe’s Dan McGowan was on Rhode Island PBS to talk about back to school. He was also mentioned in a Poynter article about the Globe’s expansion in Rhode Island. And the Boston Globe and GBH held a joint event on Wednesday about the state of race in education featuring Globe education reporter Bianca Vázquez Toness. You can watch it here.

⏰ Just released: The new coronavirus case tracker for schools spearheaded by Brown University economist Emily Oster launched this week. The data come from K-12 schools that voluntarily and anonymously share case numbers. According to another tracker, The Covid Monitor, the states that report K-12 COVID-19 case counts now include Arkansas, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. A new school opening tracker from Burbio estimates that more than 25 percent of K-12 students are now back in school — in person, full-time. Check the methodology carefully, but it’s an eye-opening number.

⏰ Next Wednesday, Sept. 30, journalist and education consultant Carla Murphy will discuss the results of a survey she conducted on “leavers.” Earlier this year, Carla surveyed 101 former journalists of color to understand when and why they left the industry. Register for the event here. This is a big issue for education journalism. Last year, I wrote about the brain drain in education journalism. More recently, I looked at the lack of diversity on many education journalism teams.

There’s no shortage of heroes these days, and for readers, we can add college journalists to the list. Here’s the Washington Post’s shout-out on the great work these students are doing in covering the pandemic.