How to escape the school safety vortex

Five story ideas that beat writing more about school COVID safety

By Maureen Kelleher

For almost two years, education reporters have, understandably, spent vast amounts of time and energy covering COVID safety in schools.

In big, deep-blue urban districts like Chicago, where I write columns and parent a middle-schooler, debate continues over whether districts’ safety measures are sufficient and equitable.

Meanwhile, students all over the country, at both ends of their K-12 academic careers – kindergarten and high school graduation – are disappearing.

At the same time, a high-profile wave of refugee children from Afghanistan is arriving in schools.

In writing so much about never-ending COVID safety debates, are reporters losing sight of the bigger picture?

Truly performing our duty to seek news and report it now requires us to write no more than necessary about COVID safety and make room for the stories that could have longer-term impact on the readers we serve.

Make room for the stories that could have longer-term impact on the readers we serve.

Towards that end, here are five story ideas every education reporter in the country could be digging into – right now.

How are your district’s ninth-graders doing?

First semester grades should be coming out any minute now. Without tying those grades to particular students, that information is public. Research from Chicago shows that ninth-grade attendance and grades strongly predict students’ chances of graduating.

If you’d like a preview of graduation rates four years from now, FOIA high school freshman grades this year.

WBEZ’s Sarah Karp has pioneered this line of reporting. Last spring, she wrote about the dilemmas high school teachers faced in grading students who had been trying to learn at home for most of the school year. More recently, she widened her scope to look at grading inequities across all of Chicago’s public schools.

Here’s how she asked Chicago Public Schools for that data, per her recent Twitter DM to me: “Please provide final fourth quarter grades by school by grade for school years 2018-19. 2019-20 and 2020-2021. Please provide the information by subject. For example, 50 Kenwood 9^th graders got As in English.”

The goal is to analyze course failures. If course failures first semester freshman year are substantially higher this year than in previous years, especially in the four core academic subjects, that’s a very bad sign, suggesting higher dropout rates are likely in future years. Parse the data by school and analyze it over multiple years to determine where the biggest grade drops are happening.

What happened to the classes of 2020 and 2021?

Many students in the high school classes of 2020 and 2021 encountered huge obstacles in their efforts to complete high school and move on to higher education or employment.

How many are fifth-year seniors?

How many dropped out, or were encouraged to leave?

Check your districts’ truancy and attendance policies to find out whether students are routinely dropped from the rolls after missing a certain number of school days.

That kind of policy opens the door for schools to push out struggling older students without making serious attempts to get them back in school.

Given unprecedented declines in college enrollment, especially in community colleges, how many of your local graduates planned to start college, but didn’t?

How many found a different way to get their educational needs met?

Put simply: Where are they now? What are they doing?

Are schools pushing out their discipline problems?

Reported problems with student behavior are on the rise. There’s lots of discussion about mental health and supporting kids dealing with trauma.

But this isn’t schools’ strength.

Historically, schools have relied on punitive discipline to maintain order. The hullabaloo over “trauma-informed teaching” and addressing behavior by attending to mental health shows these are new ideas in schools.

Many teachers are themselves traumatized and have even less bandwidth than usual to de-escalate classroom conflicts or recognize their own biases in spotting and responding to student behavior.

The Hechinger Report’s Tara García Mathewson’s recent story on suspensions is the first I’ve seen to sound the alarm that the “return to normal” may also include a return to high rates of suspensions that can push kids out of school altogether.

Now is a good time to start asking students and parents about their experiences. If your coverage area includes alternative schools, it’s worth asking them if they are seeing any uptick in new students – a strong signal districts are pushing kids out.

Many teachers are themselves traumatized and have even less bandwidth than usual to de-escalate classroom conflicts.

Whatever happened to tutoring?

Back in the summer, policy wonks were abuzz with excitement over the potential tutoring offers in boosting academic recovery. New research particularly supports the power of high-dose tutoring – one tutor to two students, meeting daily.

District like New York and Chicago promised tutors to students in highest need of academic support. In Chicago, district leaders pushed the high-dose model in particular. But is that what’s happening?

In December, The 74’s Linda Jacobson noted the irony that district are receiving billions of dollars to help students recover academically, but parents who want tutoring for their kids can’t get it.

More recently, the New York Times’ Dana Goldstein reported on the rise of virtual tutoring, some of which uses artificial intelligence rather than human tutors. What’s happening in your area? If tutoring is available, who is doing it?

If your district is offering tutoring, are tutors actually following best practices, like tutoring during the school day and focusing on reading in the early grades?  Or are volunteer tutors getting sucked into a more general teacher assistant role?

Find and interview tutors and school staff on the ground to learn what’s really going on, then work up to school and district leaders with questions informed by those on-the-ground experiences.

How well are schools supporting refugee and immigrant students?

The end of the war with Afghanistan and changes to federal immigration policy mean U.S. schools are seeing an influx of two different kinds of newcomers: Afghan refugee children from the U.S. military’s final evacuation and unaccompanied minors from our southern border.

Though Afghan refugees first came on to schools’ radar in the Washington, D.C., metro area, they are now making their way across the country.

When overwhelmed refugee resettlement agencies run into inflexible district enrollment policies, children can stay out of school for weeks or months. It’s worth finding local volunteer networks supporting Afghan refugee families to hear first-hand experiences.

Meanwhile, unaccompanied minors who have arrived in the U.S. through its southern border continue to face incredible challenges. Many are teens trying to balance overnight shift work and school, as Melissa Sanchez reported for ProPublica.

Though her story mostly exposed the illegal, dangerous work many unaccompanied minors perform to support their families and pay off debts, Sanchez did examine the young people’s school experiences, too. Just recently, The 74’s Beth Hawkins featured a New Orleans high school created specifically to support these young people.

Now’s the time to shift our thinking away from blow-by-blow coverage of every COVID blip.

Education reporters have been covering COVID safety for nearly two years. Even with changing guidance and variants, we pretty much know the drill.

Now’s the time to shift our thinking away from blow-by-blow coverage of every COVID blip.

Really providing public service demands we zoom out to see the pandemic’s full effect on young people. Reporters also must dig deeper into the challenges they are likely to face long after we’ve stopped arguing about masks in schools.

Previously from this author:
The limits of ‘threat assessment’

Related coverage and commentary from The Grade:
Reporters share advice on how to get out of the remote learning rut
Back to school coverage has been unnecessarily alarmist — again. But there’s still time to improve.