ProPublica's Eli Hager on covering choice in a new era

The Phoenix-based reporter highlights the importance of human-centered school choice coverage during the upcoming Trump administration.

By Alexander Russo

Once targeted at helping lower-income students, school choice programs that help pay for the costs of private education are now available in a growing number of states to a growing number of families of all backgrounds.

And if last week’s election is any indication, these programs are going to remain a growing topic of interest in the years to come. Former President Donald Trump won re-election in part on a promise to expand parental choice in education. At the same time, voters in three states rejected efforts to expand choice via state ballot initiatives.

That’s where Eli Hager comes in.

I first came across Hager’s work way back in 2018 when I read his impressive Marshall Project story about a New Orleans school and featured it in the Friday newsletter. Some of you may also remember that he was a 2022 Pulitzer finalist for his coverage of foster care.

Now at ProPublica, Hager has focused more and more on education and families. His most recent stories include Arizona’s Low-Income Families Aren’t Using School Vouchers, Arizona School Voucher Program Causes Budget Meltdown, and Despite Trump’s Win, Voters Widely Reject School Vouchers. From his home base in Phoenix, he is shaping up to be one of the most important journalists covering the spread of school choice and its impacts.

As you may have gleaned from past pieces on covering choice we’ve published, I don’t necessarily believe that private school choice warrants as much national attention as it receives, represents the existential threat that it’s often claimed to be, or exonerates the existing public school system. But it’s an important topic, I’m glad Hager is doing what he’s doing, and I learned a lot from reading his stories and talking with him.

In the following interview, Hager describes how he came to cover school choice, why it warrants the media attention it’s getting, and how he focuses on the logistical and financial obstacles for lower-income families in particular.

“We don’t want to do stories that are just ideologically critical,” says Hager. “We want to do stories that are data-informed accountability stories that convey the success or failure of the program in practical terms.”

“We don’t want to do stories that are just ideologically critical.”

Conducted by phone and electronically, the following interview has been edited. It is the most recent in The Grade’s ongoing series of conversations and commentary about choice with journalists and academics.

Alexander Russo: How did you end up covering education?

Eli Hager: I previously worked at the Marshall Project, and I did some education reporting there, but it was typically from a criminal justice or juvenile justice angle because that’s what the Marshall Project covers.

For example, I did a story with “This American Life” that was about 16- to 17-year-olds in the school within the New Orleans jail and how it’s possible (or not) for them to focus on trigonometry when they’re facing decades-long prison sentences.

I did some stories in the Mississippi Delta on the alternative schools that they have there and how they function almost exactly like jails. But there was always that connection with juvenile justice or the school-to-prison pipeline.

Then upon joining ProPublica, my beat was to cover issues affecting children and families in the Southwest U.S., which is obviously pretty broad. I moved to Arizona and over the past three years, I’ve mostly covered child welfare issues and foster care in this region.

But because the state where I live, Arizona, had the nation’s first ESA program and now the nation’s first universal ESA program, and all these other states are citing Arizona as a model for how they’re building their own universal or near universal ESA programs, ProPublica’s editors just thought it was really critical for me as the children and families reporter in Arizona to be covering this hugely important program and what lessons can be learned from it. And so that’s what I’ve been diving into this year.

AR: How do education and juvenile justice beats compare in terms of reporting and writing challenges?

EH: Hmm. Well one thing that comes to mind is that obviously in both spheres, there are reporting challenges having to do with needing to be careful about naming or identifying children. Related to that are the issues around access to records and case files and so on, which are more available to reporters who report on adults.

But as I would sometimes say when I was covering juvenile justice and child welfare issues, even if children should usually be kept anonymous, the system shouldn’t get to be anonymous! I think that juvenile justice officials and also education officials sometimes rely on the knee-jerk idea of privacy for children as a way of avoiding accountability for themselves and the systems that they’re running. (This is even more true of private school accountability.)

One difference that I can think of between these two coverage areas is that in juvenile justice coverage, you’ll have readers who are very ready to blame the children. I would write a story about a 12-year-old getting in a fight or shoplifting and about how the system treated that child unjustly by sending them to jail for years, where they experienced brutal treatment at the hands of adults — and yet I’d still get a lot of responses saying essentially “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” “Kids these days…” That type of reaction. Without even engaging with my reporting and what it said about our collective humanity.

In education reporting, that would almost never happen, right? A kid who’s super behind in school — we look for solutions to that. What are the adults doing wrong? How can we hold the school more accountable?

In fact, on this school choice issue, there’s an abundance of apparent sympathy for students from poor neighborhoods and how the system should give them some way of having a better future. Or at least that’s how these voucher programs are marketed. But some of the same conservative politicians who push for vouchers are fine with things like trying juveniles as adults and a punitive school-to-prison pipeline that essentially ends kids’ chances at a positive life.

AR: ProPublica has regional and national reporters, many of them covering children and families. How do you organize the work?

EH: There’s always been sort of a children and families issues team of reporters who cover the same subject in other regional offices for ProPublica, like Aliyya Swaby in the South and Jodi Cohen in the Midwest and several others. There’s also folks in the national newsroom who cover these same issues. All of the regional editors work together on this, including my editor Michael Squires who was formerly the investigative editor for the Arizona Republic and now runs the Southwest bureau for ProPublica. He’s helped to lead our children and families coverage in team meetings.

This year specifically, we’ve had a particular focus on education. Several issues were just hugely important in this election year, affecting huge numbers of American families. Education, mental health, immigration, and threats to democracy were all areas that we as a news organization wanted to put special attention on.

“It was really critical for me to be covering this hugely important program.”

AR: What’s your sense of the challenges of covering school choice, and what are some things that you’ve learned to do that seem to work?

EH: For starters I wouldn’t say that it’s an under-covered topic, at least compared to some other education topics. I mean, there are good reporters around the country who are focused on these school choice efforts, and so task No. 1 is just finding choice stories that other folks aren’t doing and that are still important to tell.

And there is certainly a lot else about our education system that deserves scrutiny. This reminds me of something I think Emily Hanford told you for your newsletter recently. I’m not going to get the exact quote right, but I think she said that we have to focus on the actual “doing” of education, not the “doing to” of education.

I thought that was really interesting, and I totally get the point. But I think I respectfully disagree. Because I think the “doing to” — including this well-funded, intentional voucher movement across several states — is kind of the more systemic question. And I also think, you know, a powerful nationwide movement can change reality for more students, more quickly and dramatically, than important but smaller things that are changed at the classroom level.

So I think the trick is finding stories that can capture that systemic dynamic without losing track of individuals, whom I think Emily would certainly want to keep in the foreground (and I agree): students, parents, teachers.

AR: What are some of the other things that you’ve done or learned to do that you think have been successful? Do you feel like you’ve found some ways of telling choice-related stories that somebody else could try?

EH: We do have several stories that I think capture a systemic angle that hasn’t been covered enough, but still center individuals and local stories.

Our October story, for example, looked at the data of who’s actually using Arizona’s universal ESA program so far, and we found that it’s heavily correlated with income. This is perhaps unsurprising, but we had some dramatic findings: that certain zip codes in south and west Phoenix, which are the historically lower income areas and segregated areas of the city, have rates of less than 1 in 100 in terms of voucher use. In other words, for every 100 kids in these zip codes, only one voucher is being used, whereas in much wealthier zip codes, it’s 28 of 100 kids using ESA vouchers.

So there’s a really huge disparity by income, despite the fact that lower income families have for so long been touted as the ones who are going to use and benefit from school choice. And also despite the fact that many lower income parents themselves are genuinely interested in choice. In the abstract, they like the idea of getting some money to be able to send their children to possibly better and safer private schools. It’s not something that they’re reflexively against.

So we wanted to ask the “why?” question: why aren’t such parents choosing school choice? We talked to a lot of parents in South Phoenix, especially Hispanic parents, about why they’re not choosing to use this program. Some didn’t know about the program, due to information barriers, but a lot did know about it. And for them it’s really the logistical barriers.

Here’s what I mean. We mapped all 200+ private schools across Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, and you can see that they’re mostly located to the north and east of the city, which are the wealthier suburban areas. So transportation becomes a question. Is a lower income parent in South Phoenix supposed to send their kid in an Uber every day all the way to a private school in one of those more affluent areas or put them on multiple city buses? Would they drive them all that distance? How much would all that cost?

Also, ESAs don’t usually cover the whole tuition of a lot of these private schools. Meals aren’t provided the way that they are at public schools. And you have to buy uniforms with the branded logo for the private school. There are all these hidden costs for lower income families to using the school choice program.

AR: In addition to finding parents who decide not to participate, have you found parents who go to extraordinary lengths to make it work — or who tried going private but found it wasn’t worthwhile? Because I read that lots of parents who try private schools end up coming back to public.

EH: Yes, we’ve been looking at exactly this. We’ve been talking to parents who initially used the ESA program to homeschool their children, but, due in part to not having the expertise to teach their kids higher-level subjects, they’ve since sent them back to public school. And they’re now kind of grappling with how academically behind their kids are.

I’ve talked to multiple public school superintendents and principals here in the Phoenix area who are telling me that a decent number of kids are coming back to the public schools — after being homeschooled or at a private school for a few years using the ESA program — and are really behind both academically and socially. If they were at a private school, they might not have been taught up to state standards, and so now, back in the public school, they’re a few grade levels behind in reading and math. Or maybe they were in a small religious private school or micro school or home school, all of which are kind of bubbles, where you’re not as exposed to as many different types of kids and points of view as you are in public school. So it’s a big adjustment for kids socially, too, to come back.

We will see how this plays out. I’m sure that there are a ton of students going to private school using the ESA program and doing absolutely great. There are several very top-notch private schools in the Phoenix area.

But because private schools aren’t regulated, and don’t have to be accredited or meet any academic standards or even have licensed teachers, and because these tiny pop-up private schools and micro schools can close down at any time, there are going to be a lot of children using the ESA program who end up in bad situations and have to suddenly switch back to a public school. Or if not, some may arrive at age 18 very behind both academically and socially — without even knowing it.

“A powerful nationwide movement can change reality for more students, more quickly and dramatically, than important but smaller things that are changed at the classroom level.”

AR: Do you feel like there’s room to write a story at ProPublica about the need for choice or the partial positive effects of choice?

EH: That’s a good question. ProPublica specifically focuses on accountability journalism. That’s the frame for us. I think there’s a lot of value in “solutions journalism,” but that’s not something that ProPublica focuses on.

AR: OK but there’s a traditional school system that a lot of families want to or think they need to exit, right? So I guess it would be an accountability story about why parents are concluding that their children aren’t getting served.

EH: I think that really good education coverage for years has tried to hold the public school system accountable, actually. I mean, that’s what all other education coverage is about, right, if you think about it? Accountability for public schools, through No Child Left Behind and standardized testing and all that, was one of THE major education stories of the past two decades.

Part of why we’re now instead focused on trying to bring accountability to these new voucher programs is just how little transparency and accountability is built into an ESA type program. There are all of these accountability metrics for the public schools, but we can’t even request to see private school test scores or budgets, even now that public money is going to them. We can’t see their academic outcomes to see if this academic experiment is working. We can’t attend school board meetings. I think all of that’s why there’s a desire to try to create some accountability for the ESA model.

But yes, I do think reporters need to make sure to check themselves. A lot of ProPublica readers — a lot of readers generally — click on school choice stories because they have these strong existing ideologies. I think a lot of readers might disapprove generally of public funding going to private schools, especially religious schools. But I think it’s important for us to get into whether a program is really working for families or not — and not let the ideological debate be what drives our coverage.

The goal is getting beneath the ideologies and trying to tell a story about how this program is actually functioning for families. That’s what we’re trying to do. We don’t want to do stories that are just ideologically critical. We want to do stories that are data-informed accountability stories that convey the success or failure of the program in practical terms.

“We don’t want to do stories that are just ideologically critical.”

AR: What advice would you give other reporters, given the growing popularity of choice and last week’s mixed results?

EH: I think my advice might actually be to question what you’re calling “the growing popularity” of school choice. What is it exactly that’s growing — the popularity of voucher programs among the American people? Nope. Voucher programs have never won popular approval when they’re put on the ballot for people to actually vote on. Arizona’s universal ESA program lost at the voting booth 65-35, before Republican politicians went and enacted it anyway. The margin in Kentucky last week? Also 65-35, another huge majority in a red state against allowing public money to go to private schools. School choice also lost in Nebraska and Colorado.

Just because these programs are expanding, in other words, doesn’t mean that they have “growing popularity.” In Texas, the way that Gov. Abbott secured the votes that he will need to implement a sweeping new ESA program was actually by challenging incumbents in his own party who represented rural, conservative districts that don’t support school choice. (A lot of rural voters see their local public school as an important community institution, and also what good is a voucher if you’re in a rural area with no private schools around?)

My colleague Jeremy Schwartz reported on how these pro-school choice candidates whom Abbott supported who are going to make this policy possible in Texas actually avoided mentioning school choice very much, if at all, during their campaigns. It wasn’t in their campaign platforms or on their campaign websites; instead they ran on border security and culture war issues. They knew that it isn’t a super popular issue.

What’s really “growing” is the insistence of Republican governors — and the financial support that they have from billionaire-backed pro-school choice PACs — on getting these ESA programs enacted in spite of popular opinion on the issue. And so maybe my fairly obvious advice to other reporters would be to follow the power and money and show how these programs keep being expanded in a fundamentally undemocratic way.

Previously from The Grade

CHOICE
Three ways to improve coverage of private education choice (Ashley Jochim)
‘Agency in the system?’: How to cover school choice (Yana Kunichoff)
Covering school choice during the 2024 campaign season (Josh Cowen)
‘A little bit shallow’: Author calls for context & immediacy (Cara Fitzpatrick)