ICYMI: Republican flip-flop (on edfunding), Chalkbeat doubles down (on storytelling), & other great education reporting

THE BEST OF THE WEEK

The best education journalism produced this week is Michael Scherer’s Washington Post article about Republican lawmakers changing course and now supporting higher education spending: Why Republicans are now bragging about their investments in education. In it, the national politics reporter describes the dynamics (and tactics) behind what he calls “a major turnabout for a generation of conservative leaders.”

Not everyone may agree with the characterization. Ed reform chronicler Travis Pillow points out that Florida’s Rick Scott pushed billion-dollar increases for education in 2012 and 2013. But the Republican reversals have been underreported at the national level, and some of the key details — administrators taking teachers’ sides rather than opposing them as they often have — are fascinating and also under-reported. (For more about school board members and others helping teachers pressure for raises, check out this LA Times story.)

I’d also highly recommend Noam Scheiber’s recent piece exploring the connections between teacher strikes and journalists unionizing. They are both instances of professionals feeling their judgment is under assault, he notes. Read the full story here.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

MARCH FOR OUR LIVES🏆 NYT: Teenagers From Chicago’Sos uth Side Stand With Parkland Survivors
🏆 Washington Post: Emma González and the wordless act that moved a nation
🏆 NPR: A Mother And Son Talk About School Shootings [StoryCorps]
🏆 TAP: The kids who played host – and in the process became political activists

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE:
🏆 The Atlantic: The Push for Harsher School Discipline After Parkland
🏆 WSJ: Lawmakers Focus on Obama-Era Policies After Florida School Shooting
🏆 VOSD: ‘Restorative Justice’ Can Make Schools More Violent if Not Done Right
🏆 AP: Armed security officers are on the rise in US schools [see also EdWeek]
🏆 Texas Tribune: TX schools suspended thousands of younger students, report says

INEQUALITY
🏆 SF Chronicle: A SF high school senior failed every class in high school
🏆 The Chronicle: They Settled for Money. It’s About to Run Out
🏆 Miami Herald: Black Marjory Stoneman Douglas students feel overlooked[see also Vox]

EDTECH
🏆 Business Insider: Apple is fighting to win back a market it used to dominate
🏆 Hechinger: School districts’ uphill battle to get good deals on ed tech
🏆 Kotaku: Teens And Teachers Say Fortnite Mobile Is Destroying Some Schools

TEACHERS/STRIKE
🏆EdWeek: OK Passes ‘Historic’ Teacher Pay Raise. But What About the Walkout? 
🏆 The Nevada Independent: School librarians fear ‘quiet crisis’ endangering their place
🏆 WSJ: Why are states so strapped for cash? Medicaid and pensions

MISC.
🏆 EdWeek: Here’s How Changes to the U.S. Census Could Impact Education Funding
🏆 Chalkbeat: Teachers and students recall Martin Luther King’s assassination
🏆 NYT: In Sweden’s Preschools, Boys Learn to Dance and Girls Learn to Yell

CHALKBEAT DOUBLES DOWN ON STORYTELLING

On Monday, Chalkbeat announced a bunch of new hires as part of its expansion to Newark and Chicago (its sixth and seventh regional bureaus). “Believe it or not (and some days I can’t),” tweeted co-founder Elizabeth Green. “Chalkbeat is now one of the largest nonprofit news organizations in the country.”

As you can see from this week’s column, there are some great, experienced folks on the new hire list — Sara Mosle, Sharon Noguchi, etc. The news is mixed on the newsroom diversity front. Over all, 33 percent of its 30 plus reporters and editors are people of color — up slightly from 2017.

But the real story may be the network’s behind-the-scenes efforts to improve its storytelling and reach more non-education readers. The single-topic, local-first network clearly isn’t satisfied with just providing high-quality coverage of education news in regions where it’s needed.

The nonprofit has now hired an executive editor and several story editors to help its bureaus produce more engaging and compelling stories that could appeal to parents and community members who aren’t reading for professional purposes.

MEDIA TIDBITS

📰 COMPLICATING THE PARKLAND NARRATIVE: You need to read this NYT oped by an MSD senior who details what sounds like an ongoing failure by adults to protect students from the shooter. It’s an aspect of the tragedy that complicates the narrative and seems to get downplayed by many advocates and some journalists. Don’t go along with that.

📰 REMEMBERING (LINDA) BROWN: Some journalists like Dana Goldstein reflected on Linda Brown’s legacy by focusing on the ongoing inequalities of our education system that the Brown decision failed to resolve. Others like NPR’s Gene Demby used the occasion to send readers to Malcolm Gladwell’s controversial podcast segment about “what that case changed *for the worse*” in the form of mass firings of black teachers and closing of successful black schools. Gladwell’s podcast was also recommended by EdSurge’s Jenny Abamu.

📰 THE INEQUALITY MACHINE: After the success from last week’s story on the punishing reach of racism for black boys, the NYT made more charts comparing income mobility for girls, Asian Americans, and other groups. There’s also a tool here for you to make your own chart. “Pick the categories and watch what it means to grow up in America,” says the NYT’s Claire Cain Miller.

📰 TWO AFT MYSTERIES: We still don’t know much about the AFT (and NEA) position on the proposed repeal of the Obama school discipline guidance. Are they battling against the repeal, or sitting this one out? What do the locals have to say? Now that I think of it, we also don’t know the AFT and UFT positions on Cynthia Nixon’s challenge to NY Governor Cuomo. AFT head Randi Weingarten was pictured with Cuomo during a recent student protest. But some substantial percentage of her teachers are going to want to support Nixon.

📰 DAILY PODCASTS FEATURING EDUCATION: The Monday edition of the NYT’s “The Daily” was all about when gun violence is a daily threat. “Students on the South Side of Chicago joined protests spurred by the Florida school shooting, but they also felt frustration. Why hadn’t gun violence in their community earned the same outrage?” Friday’s edition also focused on education, this time on Linda Brown’s passing. Speaking of podcasts, Vox also has a daily news podcast, and it featured the West Virginia teachers strike way back at the start of March.

📰 SCHOOL SHOOTING CONTEXT: Key point to remember from John Woodrow Cox’s recent Washington Post story: “School shootings remain extremely rare, representing a tiny fraction of the gun violence epidemic that, on average, leaves a child bleeding or dead every hour in the United States.” However, the claim that 187,000 students have been “exposed to gun violence” is not as carefully done as it should have been. What does that even mean, really?

📰 MORE ON WEAK COVERAGE OF DC SCHOOLS: It was think tank fluffery as well as inadequate local media coverage that allowed the DCPS scandal to fester and grow, write AEI’s Rick Hess and Brendan Bell in their oped, DC graduation scandal shows how an uncritical gaze leads reformers astray. Thanks to them for mentioning The Grade’s critique of Washington Post local education news coverage. (Thanks also to DC reporter Jeffrey Anderson for his shout-out about The Grade’s deep dive into the Post’s inadequate DCPS coverage.)

📰 BAD MEMORIES: These “100 percent graduated/are going to college” stories regularly come up in my Facebook “On This Day” stream, a good reminder against lazy reporting. This example from NPR is from way back in 2010.

PEOPLE, JOBS, & AWARDS

🔥 Congrats to the newly-announced Spencer Education Reporting Fellows, Emmanuel Felton (Hechinger Report), Kalyn Belsha (Chicago Reporter), Eliza Shapiro (PoliticoNY), and Alexandra Fuenmayor Starr (freelance), pictured above. Here’s what they’ll be doing next year. Here’s the case against the program.

🔥 Check out Adam Harris’s last Chronicle story before he moves over to The Atlantic. It’s about black colleges in Mississippi who reluctantly agreed to a $500 million settlement that’s about to run out.

🔥 In case you hadn’t noticed, the WSJ’s Michelle Hackman is now reporting on national education news from the paper’s DC bureau. She’s got a story out today about (the problems that the latest federal budget increase create for Betsy DeVos) and her first dozen pieces can be found here.

🔥 Freelance education writer Rachel Cohen is starting a newsletter. You can get it for free or subscribe for a modest sum. Either way, you should sign up for it. I did.

🔥 “Don’t miss this must-listen from Radiolab about the time El Paso high school students stood up to border patrol,” freelance radio producer Mallory Falk writes about an episode titled Border Trilogy Part 1: Hole in the Fence. She helped out.

🔥 Watch the #SXSWEDU Policy Forum session, Black Education in America, with NBC News education correspondent Rehema Ellis moderating.

🔥 “This is devastating” tweeted current Spencer Fellow Cara Fitzpatrick about a photo showing newsroom downsizing at the Denver Post over the past five years, and indeed it’s pretty dramatic to see.

🔥 EdWeek’s Francisco Vara-Orta noted recently that his colleague Evie Blad “has been one of the best to follow regarding the movement around students mobilizing after Parkland shooting.” This is true.

🔥 Vox’s honorary education reporter Alvin Chang wrote a piece about how Asian Americans are being used (again) to make a case against affirmative action. Almost always worth reading his stuff, IMO.

EVENTS, DEADLINES, & ANNOUNCEMENTS

⏰ Thursday and Friday next week are the Yale SOM education conference, featuring former US News education reporter Thomas Toch (now head of FutureEd) and the Fordham Institute’s Robert Pondiscio (who’s working on a book about Success Academy).

⏰ What’s next for #MarchForOurLives activists? They are going to speak up at roughly 100 town hall meetings all over the country on April 7, reports Vox.

⏰ The Southern Poverty Law Center is hiring an investigative reporter with at least three years of experience.

⏰ ProPublica wants to give students money to attend the conferences of the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Native American Journalists Association, and the Association of LGBTQ Journalists. Roughly 20 scholarships of $700 each are being given out. Deadline is April 30.

⏰ Reveal is looking for its third cohort of diversity fellows, a 10-month program for up to five working journalists. Deadline is April 12.

⏰ EWA is looking for education reporters with less than 2 years of experience covering education to apply for its “new to the beat” training session in May.

KICKERS

On the Comedy Central show The Opposition, Baltimore teens speak out about underreported gun violence in their community.

ALSO: With help from the Southern Poverty Law Center volunteer counsel, a Texas high-school photojournalist is suing to clarify that he owns his photos, despite his school’s insistence that they hold the copyright in student-created work.

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