Best education journalism of the week — September 11

🏆 The best of the week is Samantha Shapiro’s The Children in the Shadows: New York City’s Homeless Students in the New York Times Magazine. Shapiro really gets to the heart of a mother and child constantly on the move for better education and somewhere to rest their heads. It’s well-written, focused on an important topic, and features both amazing access to families and a compassionate take on how looks can be deceiving. It’s also welcome to have a story that isn’t solely about COVID.

🏆 Remember the lunch ladies: Our runner-up is The Silent Suffering of Cafeteria Workers, Giulia Heyward’s Atlantic magazine story, for its focus on a large group of unsung school workers and the job insecurity and health risks they face to help feed children. School staff has too often been overlooked in the past six months, even though many never stopped going to work.

🏆 The big story of the week was the first day/back-to-school experience: Hispanic and Black students more likely than white students to start the year online (Chalkbeat), Millions of Students Head Back to School for a Year Like No Other (Wall Street Journal), Website Crashes and Cyberattacks Welcome Students Back to School (New York Times), Glitches, busy signals punctuated the first day of virtual school for Dallas ISD (Dallas Morning News), The first week of virtual schooling is done. How did D.C. do? (Washington Post), Back-To-School Begins With Website Crash For Houston Students and Teachers (Houston Public Media), Hartford Postpones First Day of School After Ransomware Attack (New York Times), Gradual reopening of San Antonio schools begins in earnest (San Antonio Express).

Above: Eleven education reporters with school-age children told us about the difficult choices they made for their own children’s education this year.

Earlier this week, we published responses from education reporters who are parents of school-age children. They face many of the same difficult choices as everyone else about what to do about schooling this year. Some of them chose remote. Some chose hybrid. Many felt that they didn’t have any choice at all.

MEDIA TIDBITS

📰 THE TENTATIVE SUCCESS OF IN-PERSON INSTRUCTION: Given recent media coverage, parents and teachers could be forgiven for thinking that this year’s reopening of schools was primarily made up of two things: remote instruction and COVID outbreaks. But there is another story, in many ways more intriguing and useful, that isn’t being told, about what’s going on in schools that have now been open in person for weeks — without generating a massive uptick in cases. In this week’s “bonus” column, I argue that the tentative success of in-person learning deserves much more coverage than it has received.

📰 SCHOOL HUNGER: Education journalists may all want to write about remote learning and COVID cases, but one major aspect of schools that shouldn’t be left out is their function as food distribution hubs. NPR’s ‘Children Are Going Hungry’: Why Schools Are Struggling To Feed Students gets right at this topic. So does the New York Times’ America at Hunger’s Edge, albeit less directly. In it, you’ll meet a cafeteria worker handing out bags of food to people in cars, and travel along with one extended family on an elaborate journey to secure enough food. “At each station a coach or a teacher or even the principal loaded up the trunk with milk, or fresh produce from local farms … How much food one got depended on how many children were in the car.”

📰 CARELESS COVERAGE OF TEACHER COVID DEATHS: Kudos to NPR’s Anya Kamenetz for calling out some of the problems with recent coverage focused on the COVID-related deaths of four teachers since the start of the school year. “There are 3.2 million teachers in America. More than 1,000 people die every day of this disease,” she tweeted in response to the Daily Beast version of the story. “None of the 4 teachers in this story are documented to have caught it at school,” she wrote. Elsewhere on Twitter, Kamenetz noted that school-based testing in NYC is likely to turn up more cases: “We have to be careful of reporting a ‘cluster’ or ‘spike.’”

📰 MEDIA ROLE IN POPULARIZING ACTIVE SHOOTER DRILLS: Active shooter drills in schools have become a $2.7-billion industry, and new research shows they have almost no value in keeping kids safe and are responsible for an increase in mental health problems for kids, especially younger ones, according to this Miami Herald story: ‘We were not okay.’ Active shooter drills may do more harm than good, study shows. (See also NBC News). The problem with stories about school shootings has been a lack of context that makes readers think they are much more common than they really are, thanks in part to sloppy reporting. They’re horrible events, but much less common than people think, due to relentless and disproportionate media coverage.

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

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

🔥 The Alabama Media Group (AL.com) is kicking off its Education Lab by hiring an audience editor. Education reporter Trisha Powell Crain, who worked as a child advocate before becoming a journalist, said the new lab is “a personal dream come true” for her.

🔥 More jobs: USA Today’s southern region is hiring a reporter for a new beat called “The Children’s Beat,” described as an “investigative/ explanatory/ solutions and accountability beat (that) begins with K-12 education but is much broader and should be thought of in a fundamentally different way than traditional education coverage.” The Detroit Free Press is hiring an educational equity reporter who will cover the whole state. The Dallas Morning News Education Lab is still hiring an audience engagement producer and reporting fellow. The Washington Post education editor job is no longer posted, but nobody’s been named yet (that I know of).

🔥 Former Austin American-Statesman education reporter Aaricka Washington had a memorable week! She got her first New York Times byline with an opinion piece on Zoom school suspensions. She also started her new job as a reporter at Chalkbeat Indiana. It’s a sort of homecoming for Aaricka as she spent most of her childhood in Indiana and graduated from Wayne Township schools. Congrats, Aaricka!

🔥 The first week of remote learning went very badly for Miami-Dade schools, and the Miami Herald’s Colleen Wright was all over it. Check out her many stories here. Read her amazing Twitter bio here.

🔥 A year ago, star education reporter Jenny Abamu announced that she was leaving WAMU and journalism for a new career as a diplomat. In this still-memorable exit interview, she explained why.

🔥 Did you see? There was a nice mention for The 74 in the NYT’s Coronavirus Schools Briefing the other day. Bekah McNeel’s story about the person running tech support for the San Antonio schools caught the newsletter’s eye. Congrats!

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Above: Colorado Public Radio’s Jenny Brundin got an inside look at in-person classes, complete with “zombies.”

⏰ Add Colorado Public Radio’s Jenny Brundin to the VERY short list of education reporters who’ve taken us inside a school that’s attempting a return to some form of in-person instruction. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.

⏰ Great news! The Wall Street Journal has a new education page and is launching a newsletter, too, according to editor Chastity Pratt, who’s going to pen the newsletter.

⏰ Media appearances: Chalkbeat national reporter Kalyn Belsha and Chalkbeat Indiana’s Aaricka Washington talked about school discipline, COVID-19, and the new school year on WNYC’s The Takeaway.

⏰ Conferences: You can still sign up for SPJ’s annual conference, which will be held virtually this weekend. Nikole Hannah-Jones will be among the speakers. An event on pandemic stories that went untold and the ones that should be told next looks interesting for education reporters. And don’t forget to sign up for IRE’s annual conference September 21-25, featuring an education panel with Kim Clark of EWA, Tawnell Hobbs of the Wall Street Journal, and Krista Torralva of the San Antonio Express-News. It’s also virtual.

⏰ ICYMI: The Boston Globe held an event Thursday about minimizing harm in reopening schools. Also on Thursday, Chalkbeat Tennessee and The Education Trust in Tennessee hosted a roundtable with middle and high school students about their hopes and fears for the new semester and their recommendations for educators and policy makers.

Featuring a private school in Connecticut and pricey gear for kids doing outdoor education, this is a VERY New York Times article.