Revisiting past success stories is an important (if humbling) job for solutions-oriented education journalists.
By Katherine Long, former Seattle Times education team editor
I had been a reporter for The Seattle Times for 23 years when, in 2013, we adopted the solutions journalism model for our education coverage.
We wanted to use our reporting skills to seek out programs and approaches that showed promise in solving some of society’s most intractable problems.
And few things have been more vexing in America than education inequity.
A quality education should be accessible to all, helping every child succeed, regardless of family circumstances.
We knew that Washington public schools weren’t always delivering on the promise, especially for low-income students and students of color.
Could we shed some light on education successes, rather than focusing on the failures?
With consistent support from a few private funders — most notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — we started and grew “Education Lab.”
I spent the next 10 years immersed in this kind of reporting. As Ed Lab matured and proved its worth, its approach and funding model became an example for other newsrooms around the country.
In June, I retired after 33 years at the Times, the last three-plus years as Ed Lab editor. And I’ve come to think there’s an important add-on that can help take solutions journalism to the next level.
But first, let me tell you a little about what we learned.
I’ve come to think there’s an important add-on that can help take solutions journalism to the next level.
Disclosure: The Grade has also received funding from the Gates Foundation. Read here for more information.
When our project started over a decade ago, I had been covering higher education for four years. In this state and elsewhere, state funding for public higher education was slashed after the Great Recession.
Schools responded with double-digit tuition increases; part of my job was documenting how these cuts were hurting students, especially those who could least afford to go to college.
After Ed Lab was launched, I continued to do higher ed beat reporting, but I also searched for programs and practices that helped kids — especially those who could barely afford college — turn a degree or credential into a stepladder to a promising career.
I wrote about a program that provided promising students — many of them women and minorities — an additional year of collegiate academic work to help them prepare for the rigors of an engineering major, explored a new initiative that helped Black male students feel like they belonged at the state’s biggest university, and visited a small town that helped its students understand how much brighter their futures would be if they got some college or postsecondary training under their belts after high school.
During my higher ed years, I paid particular attention to community college programs. I wrote about a community college approach that wove basic skills classes into career classes, which improved completion rates. And one of my favorite stories was about a high school dropout who used community college as a springboard to medical school.
While we originally expected to travel widely to show how other communities were solving educational challenges, we didn’t always see the payback from those trips. Unless those programs had a direct tie-in to something happening in Washington, our readers didn’t seem interested.
And, while I was enthusiastic about the solutions approach, it was not always easy to find successful programs with years of robust data to back up the claims. Sometimes we had to compromise, choosing to highlight new-ish programs that seemed to be moving kids in the right direction based on early results.
Usually, we could back up our reporting with a reference to some education research that suggested the solution had merit. But I often wondered about the long-term sustainability of these efforts. I’d been reporting on schools long enough to know that education fads come and go. Which of these solutions had staying power? What would the data say, years down the road?
Usually, we could back up our reporting… But I often wondered about long-term sustainability.
In July 2019, I briefly left the Times to try my hand at freelance reporting on the environment and climate change, looking to do something new at the tail end of my career. And then the pandemic hit.
I came back to Ed Lab because I wanted to be working in a newsroom again (virtually, anyway) during one of the biggest stories of my life, knowing that the pandemic’s effect on education would be profound and that I could use my experience to help tell that story. I jumped back in as a reporter, and in October 2020, I was asked to lead the team as its editor.
In 2023, as part of our 10th anniversary, we began re-reading some of Ed Lab’s greatest hits and re-reporting the stories to examine what happened to the programs and approaches that showed such promise when we first wrote about them. We had done some reporting to re-examine solutions in Ed Lab’s early years, as well. But now we had a much longer time frame to work with.
Some examples from that series called “Ed Lab Revisited” include Why Gildo Rey abandoned direct instruction, Seattle promised free college. How’s it working out?, and Could Seattle train, fund parent mentors in schools?
It was a good experience — and humbling at times.
In our work, we found a few projects and programs that stood the test of time. But over the years, many programs were whittled away to nothing, despite their early success.
Here are the common threads we saw:
Leadership is key. Almost all of our success stories involved a passionate leader who had either taken a great program from another place and made it their own, or developed their own smart approach.
Most successful programs build powerful relationships — between adults and students, adults and each other — because kids do best when educators believe in them.
And finally, money is important, although it’s not the only thing. Sometimes, a big infusion of cash made a significant difference. Sometimes it didn’t.
Revisiting old stories isn’t easy.
Revisiting old stories isn’t easy.
Sources don’t like to talk about failures.
Many reporters will find it uncomfortable to write critically about failed programs they once heralded as examples of progress.
And with the churn in newsrooms, today’s education reporters might not be familiar with stories from the past.
But reporters and editors immediately recognized the power of revisiting old stories. Those three “Ed Lab Revisited” pieces were well-received by readers and by the newsroom at large. We enjoyed going back to interview old sources, and I felt a deep sense of satisfaction when we could report that a few programs were really moving the needle. The failures were instructive, too, and I hope educators and readers were paying attention to what didn’t work.
I’ve come to believe that every education journalist should be examining past stories and writing about sustained success (or failures). We can learn a lot from approaches that stand the test of time, as well as those that didn’t last.
This kind of journalism can be just as powerful as the original reporting. It deepens our understanding of successful programs. It holds leaders to account — especially if they cut funds to a program that’s a proven success. And it helps readers distinguish between tried-and-true methods and education fads.
Katherine Long is retired from The Seattle Times, although she wouldn’t say no to a little freelance. Find her on LinkedIn.
Previously from The Grade
Confessions of a former accountability purist (Matthew Kauffman)
Solutions stories that aren’t puff pieces (Kate Rix)
Key elements of high-quality school innovations coverage (Will Callan)
The case for the Ed Lab model (Colleen Connolly)
When good news goes missing (Karin Chenoweth)
