| Above: This LA Times graphic illustrates a better way to report on COVID cases in schools, including the in-school transmission number and a denominator along with the number of active cases. Thanks, LAT education team! On the other hand, a lot of LAT stories lately have headlines that lack this context.
📰 CASES, QUARANTINES, & SCHOOL CLOSURES: Local journalism is essential — and often a starting point for national coverage that follows. But national stories seem to get picked up more often, even when the story isn’t particularly well-reported or written. The latest example? A recent Wall Street Journal school story describing COVID cases, quarantines, and school closures in early-opening states fails to provide enough context, appears to confuse correlation with causation, and then presumes a negative outcome. But it tells a dramatic tale and so it gets turned into a misleading MSNBC segment. Argh. Enough, already.
What’s a better way to report on COVID cases and schools? The LA Times graphic at the top of this section is one. Riffing off a recent U.S. News piece, Poynter gives readers the percentage of schools that have been closed due to COVID so far: 1.4%. It’s an imperfect statistic, given that we don’t know exactly how many schools are actually open at this point, but it’s far better than giving readers raw numbers without any attempt at a denominator. USA Today’s “looming crisis” headline is unfortunate, but it clarifies in the body that the school closure numbers “make up just a fraction of the 98,000 public schools across the country.”
📰 PARENTS PLEA FOR MORE USEFUL NEWS: Kudos to former journalist John Zhu and the Nieman Lab for publishing Zhu’s plea for more coverage that’s useful to parents — and to the local journalists who’ve responded (pro and con). Zhu tells us via email that he wrote the piece when he grew frustrated waiting and searching for information that was not being shared: “nitty-gritty, unglamorous, but important aspects” of the districts’ mitigation plans. Instead, the local news coverage “seemed mostly interested in anti-mask protests.”
Some readers have objected to his focus on one local outlet. “But as I told Eric Frederick at NC Local for his newsletter, given the way this resonated with people in other places, it seems that parents in many communities are dealing with similar information voids on this topic.” The News and Observer’s managing editor also responded in the NC Local newsletter, complaining that the paper hadn’t been contacted for a response before Zhu published his piece. (Please.)
Zhu isn’t the only parent complaining about local coverage focusing on controversies and cases: “Much recent schools coverage has focused on Covid cases and mitigation measures,” tweeted Ann Arbor parent Sara Talpos, who points out that millions of kids are not in school for the first time and that stories of success deserve attention along with all the rest. Agreed! The narrow focus on mitigation and case counts is not giving readers the full picture or serving parents’ information needs.
📰 WHAT’S THE HOLDUP COVERING VACCINATING TEACHERS?: A handful of states and districts mandated vaccination for school staff over the past month, but attention quickly swerved over to student vaccination mandates. That’s unfortunate, in my opinion. Vaccinating adults in schools seems like a no-brainer to me, far more important than masking or other forms of mitigation — and much less controversial than student vaccine mandates are likely to be. Substantial percentages of school staff appear to remain unvaccinated, despite early access to vaccines, a handful of state and local mandates, and now a federal mandate for federally funded education programs like Head Start.
It’s “absolutely irrational and inexplicable how little media coverage there is of the central issue here — tens of thousands of teachers and people who work in classrooms are refusing to get vaxxed,” tweeted NYC-focused Tim Positive Subway Tweets 💉 Smith. A few outlets like Chalkbeat NY and the San Francisco Chronicle have covered the staff vaccine story, but it deserves much more attention. A sentence at the very end of this New York Times article telling us that neither LAUSD nor UTLA have data on the percentage of staff members who have been vaccinated is appreciated, but it isn’t nearly enough.
📰 NPR VS. THE WSJ: Here’s a fascinating story about education policy, journalism, and accountability. In For 8 Years, A ‘Wall Street Journal’ Story Haunted His Career. Now He Wants It Fixed, NPR’s David Folkenflik digs into the story of how former Obama education official Bob Shireman was implicated in a short-selling scandal and has struggled to clear his name. I have to ask, though, would NPR have corrected the story if it was one of theirs? Would the NYT? There’s so much media resistance to corrections, so much hair-splitting and lawyering-up, even when problems are clear. |
