Reporting on school progress is a delicate balancing act.
By Holly Korbey
One of my favorite recent pieces of education journalism detailed how a Wisconsin elementary school overhauled writing instruction. Sarah Schwartz’s Education Week story, Young Writers Need Structure to Learn the Craft. How Much Is Enough?, described how the Vermont Writing Collaborative curriculum, based on the science of reading, helped students create a framework for a paragraph or an essay, then drill down and fill in the details.
Around the halfway mark, Schwartz does something magical: she adds another successful writing program adopted in places such as Louisiana, also based on the science of reading, that uses the exact opposite approach.
The Writing Revolution method starts children off writing sentences, not frameworks.Their method builds up and out, not down and detailed.
The story shows schools and classrooms trying to solve an educational problem; at the same time, it avoids oversimplification that would imply there is one great solution for all schools.
The story avoids oversimplification that would imply there is one great solution for all schools.
As Will Callan has written for The Grade, good solutions stories give readers hope and present opportunities for change while remaining realistic about those changes.
Solutions journalism is catching on, with attempts to inform the public about how government agencies, organizations, and individuals respond to society’s knottiest challenges. Groups such as the Solutions Journalism Network are expanding their reach and creating “solutions hubs” at journalism schools including Northwestern and Arizona State. And dedicated education solutions teams are popping up in “education labs” from the Dallas Morning News and the Boston Globe to nonprofit newsrooms in Alabama.
As former ed journalist Amanda Ripley has pointed out, unending news of system failure and citizen injustice often leaves readers feeling paralyzed and despairing. But stories showing where and why a particular solution is working are not only providing truth to readers, they offer something vital and human: hope and the power to change.
The problem is that education solutions stories also can give the impression that a problem has been solved — or would be if only all schools would get with the program. We education reporters have to be wary of overhyping positives and downplaying downsides.
Solutions stories can give the impression that a problem has been solved.
Here are some examples of coverage done right along with some ideas about how we education reporters can elevate our work.
A roadmap for improvement
When progress stories work well, they often take a solid example of a school or a district successfully bucking a negative trend, showing the reader what’s going right and why. Success stories can provide a roadmap for possible improvement in other places.
Rebecca Griesbach’s story Two Alabama community colleges are taking a new approach to advising, for AL.com’s Education Lab, tackles the complicated problem of high attrition rates at community colleges that serve low-income students.
Griesbach’s reporting looks at two programs that appear to be achieving some success at retaining students through close and careful advising.
What’s working is a new, fairly unusual program where advisors support students much more than the accepted norm, helping them not just with picking classes and financial aid but also with personal challenges such as chronic illness.
Both programs are fairly new, and it’s still unclear whether close advising can bridge the gap between obstacles and college completion for Alabama students (in one program’s first year, they moved the completion rate up by four percentage points).
Griesbach’s story, however, includes student voices highlighting precisely how they’ve been helped, such as the 20-year-old transfer student with a chronic illness who was flagged for extra academic support, or the single mother who had someone to turn to for help in appealing a financial aid decision.
Greisbach takes a hot topic in higher education and uses specific student details on how close advising looks in the real world, making it a roadmap.
Greisbach uses specific student details on how close advising looks in the real world, making it a roadmap.
Some insiders tell me they’d like to see more stories about a different kind of progress—plans that didn’t work out well.
Literacy expert Karen Vaites said few stories highlight a program or curriculum that failed.
Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story,” for example, highlights how balanced literacy failed many students — making way for a better method with more evidence behind it. “I don’t think we get enough straight talk about what doesn’t work,” Vaites said.
Vaites said she’d like to see more stories like the recent Education Week story on states’ rush to provide teachers with the popular science of reading LETRS training — another Schwartz story. It worked well, Vaites said, because it was a “cautionary tale” — an expensive, intense training that works well for some districts, but because of the expense and the time needed to complete the course, may not be right for all districts.
The story is positive but also includes caveats, and it’s not presented as a blanket solution.
The story is positive but also includes caveats, and it’s not presented as a blanket solution.
As Kate Rix wrote for The Grade, the imperfections in many of the solutions shouldn’t be a reason not to write about educators trying new approaches. At the same time, she said, she looks for evidence, not just quotes, that something is working.
While I’m excited to see more progress stories making education headlines, and I’m proud to be one of the journalists covering important “innovations” like the science of reading, I also want to be careful that I’m looking at solutions with clear eyes.
National stories making the rounds now, from the New York Times to The New Yorker to Time, are all reporting on the new reading reforms aimed at addressing why so many kids aren’t learning to read.
But it’s crucial that journalists follow up on schools and districts implementing reforms, and dig into whether they make a difference in student literacy. When I was reporting a story last year about Tennessee’s science of reading reforms, one activist for student equity asked me if I was OK reporting that 25% of kids in one county read on grade level as an achievement, and I’ve never forgotten it.
After reading Anya Kamenetz’s story on a New Jersey high school successfully training kids in Teen Mental Health First Aid, I reached out to her and asked whether she worried about overplaying solutions in literacy and mental health.
If anything, Kamenetz worries that newsrooms still hold “do-gooder” stories to tougher scrutiny than accountability stories.
“Certainly, there are pitfalls to solutionism, like mistaking a mere statistical anomaly for something that can ‘scale and replicate,’” she wrote in an email. “Sometimes small bright spots will never be more than small bright spots. But I still think we could all rebalance the ledger a bit more towards the positive.”
My other concern is that too much focus on bright spots, or incomplete progress stories, could do more damage than just give readers a less –accurate version of what’s really happening: we could also blow the opportunity to earn readers’ trust in journalism, something we desperately need at this moment.
I think about other so-called solutions to big education problems, like the Common Core or one-to-one digital devices, and how far some of the reporting was from what parents and students experienced on the ground.
I think about how far some of the reporting was from what parents and students experienced on the ground.
In the story I’m working on now about how New Zealand is reforming reading instruction by training teachers in the science of reading, I won’t shy away from key details such as researchers finding that the first round of training left teachers unsure how to execute the new curriculum, and students showed little to no improvement.
And as the science of reading rolls out to classrooms across the U.S. in the next few years, I’ll be more careful to include more voices like those of reading expert Tim Shanahan, who wants reporters, politicians and teachers to stay cautiously aware that replacing 3-cueing reading strategies with phonics alone will not solve the reading crisis.
Let’s be hopeful but not credulous.
Holly Korbey is a journalist and the author of Building Better Citizens. She’s a regular contributor on education for Edutopia and KQED’s MindShift, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and others. She lives in Nashville with her family. Follow her on Twitter: @HKorbey.
Previously on this topic:
Solutions stories that aren’t puff pieces (Kate Rix)
Drama, characters, & ambiguity: elements of high-quality school innovations coverage (Will Callan)
Previously from this author:
Cracking the code on reading instruction stories
Covering gifted education through an equity lens
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Holly Korbey
Holly Korbey is a journalist and the author of Building Better Citizens. She’s a regular contributor on education for Edutopia and KQED’s MindShift, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and others. She lives in Nashville with her family. Follow her on Twitter: @HKorbey.