MASK SHOWDOWN
The big story of the week, according to us.

The big story of the week is the showdown taking place nationwide over whether to make everyone wear masks in schools, even younger kids and people who have been vaccinated. The CDC suggests universal masking, and the Biden administration has ramped up the pressure on districts to comply, but several Republican governors are opposed. In a highly polarized environment, school districts are making a variety of decisions:

🔊 States facing the biggest fights over school mask mandates (19th News)
🔊 Defiant School Leaders Are Sticking With Mask Mandates (NPR)
🔊 Texas Supreme Court upholds mask mandates (Dallas Morning News)
🔊 Baker isn’t budging (Boston Globe)
🔊 Pushback against masks greets school opening (Chicago Tribune)
🔊 Unable to mandate, Des Moines schools plans to incentivize (Des Moines Register)
🔊 Indiana’s governor backing schools on face mask mandates (Post Tribune) 
🔊 Some parents plead for mask mandates (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

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A VACCINE MANDATE FOR STUDENTS?
Best education journalism of the week.
🏆 BEST: The best story of the week is Culver City Unified requires COVID-19 vaccine for students by Melissa Gomez in the LA Times. While many outlets are focusing on mask mandates, Gomez looks at what may be the first district in California to require COVID vaccines for all eligible students. California is one of a growing handful of states that already require vaccination or testing for school staff. The district estimates that only 1 in 20 parents in the district oppose the vaccine requirement.

Curious about vaccine mandates? See also Politico’s Inside the vaccination fight that’s dividing teachers unions and the NYT’s Massachusetts teachers’ union presses Republican governor for vaccine mandate.

🏆 RUNNER-UP: This week’s runner-up is Interest in homeschooling increases as uncertainty around new school year abounds by Emily Donaldson and Corbett Smith in the Dallas Morning News. There was a lot of attention last year on the rise in homeschooling, but the story fell off a bit as controversies over critical race theory and then masks took center stage. But as Donaldson and Smith point out, many families are making the change to homeschooling more than a temporary solution. The exact number of homeschoolers in Texas this year isn’t known, but estimates show it could be 350,000 students. Fewer than a dozen states closely track homeschooling enrollment.

Curious about homeschooling? See also Chalkbeat’s How many of Chicago’s ‘missing students’ are just homeschooling? It’s hard to tell. 

BONUS STORIES: 

🏆 Joy and nerves as students return (SF Chronicle)
🏆 Austin ISD Schools Buzz With Energy On The First Day Of Class (KUT)
🏆 Mass. leaders hope this school year will be back to normal (Boston Globe)
🏆 Inside LAUSD’s virus testing effort (LA Times)
🏆 A Montebello high school closed by rat invasion (LA Times)

BACK-TO-SCHOOL COVERAGE NEEDS IMPROVEMENT 
New from The Grade

Last year’s back-to-school coverage featured what one journalist called “needlessly alarmist” school reopening coverage. Can this year be different, please?

Of course, there’s been some strong back-to-school coverage this year, especially from local outlets. But too much of the coverage for the 2021-22 school year has been irresponsible and misleading, especially from national news outlets, amplifying fearful emotions and speculation, string together alarming anecdotes, and overlooking key contextual information (i.e., denominators). It’s not your job to make readers feel safe during such an uncertain time. But it’s not your job to scare them, either.

Thanks to John Bailey for mentioning this column in his helpful daily COVID-19 Policy Update newsletter! And a big thanks to Poynter’s Kristen Hare for adding Amber Walker’s recent story on the Cleveland Documenters to the Local Edition newsletter. 

MEDIA TIDBITS
Thought-provoking commentary on the latest coverage.
Above: CNN’s Jake Tapper asks a local teachers union official why there’s no push for vaccine mandates along with mask mandates, given that both masks and vaccines are recommended by the CDC. Watch the full segment here.📰 MISSING THE BIG PICTURE It’s easy to lose track of where things stand during this particularly hectic back-to-school season during which things seem to be changing quickly and media coverage focuses on conflict and danger. So here’s what I know: The vast majority of school districts are planning to reopen this year in person. The vast majority of parents say that they’re planning to send their kids back. And while an increasing number of districts are offering remote options and kids in parts of the country haven’t gone back yet, only a relative handful of districts have been experiencing outbreaks, shutting down school, or pushing back start dates. Tens of thousands more schools are open for in-person instruction than last year — and millions more kids are heading back to school in person. It’s a vast improvement over last year, and so far it’s going better than the coverage may lead you to believe.

📰  VACCINE MANDATES STILL UNDER-COVERED: There’s been so much attention focused on mask mandates, it’s easy to forget vaccine mandates are another CDC-recommended option for districts. Biden administration officials and leaders of national teachers unions are on record supporting a mandate for school staff, but some locals have expressed opposition or concern and it’s not clear that many more joined the vaccine mandate bandwagon this past week. California, Washington, and Hawaii are the only states I know that have mandated vaccines for staff. New Jersey is said to be joining the list later today. Meanwhile, there are only a handful of districts requiring staff to be vaccinated (or face frequent testing), including DC, Chicago, Denver, Montgomery County, San Antonio, Texas, and three small Massachusetts districts. And there’s just one district I know of that’s requiring students to get vaccinated (Culver City, California; see the best story of the week above). How do vaccine mandates compare to masks? Where are vaccine mandates being rolled out or rebuffed? What are the comparative benefits of mandating vaccinations versus testing? What are the percentages for school staff who’ve been vaccinated? There’s room for lots more reporting on this critical issue.

📰  CAREFUL WITH THAT QUARANTINE COVERAGE: Quarantines suck, but it’d be great if the coverage gave readers some context and didn’t presume that COVID cases were the result of in-school transmission or that keeping kids out of school was always necessary. This story from The 74 suggests that many schools are using a protocol that goes above and beyond what the CDC recommends, effectively removing more kids from classrooms than necessary: Buried’ CDC Guidance Says Properly Protected ‘Close Contacts’ Needn’t Quarantine.

📰  WHEN EDUCATION REPORTERS SHARE BEST PRACTICES: It’s great when current and former education reporters share best practices publicly, as happened several times this past week: “These teachers’ vaccine status should be really high up in the story,” noted Chalkbeat NY’s Reema Amin about a NPR story highlighting the deaths of three educators who were unvaccinated and hadn’t been back in schools. Also: “If you are reporting on the number of children quarantined in a given school district,” suggests the New York Times’ Eliza Shapiro, “please note how many students total attend that school district very high up in your story.” Last but not least, former ed reporter Jessica Huseman noted that “If 70 percent of the American public supports masking then the media should not be giving equal air time to those who loudly, obnoxiously, don’t.”

To get daily education headlines and hear about education journalism events, follow @thegrade_. To read media commentary and discuss coverage issues, follow @alexanderrusso. 

PEOPLE, JOBS, KUDOS
Who’s going where & doing what?
Above: Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker “signed into law an end to prone restraint in IL schools,” tweeted ProPublica reporter Jodi S. Cohen. Her investigative collaboration, “The Quiet Rooms,” with the Chicago Tribune’s Jennifer Smith Richards provided the spark.đŸ”„ Awards: Congrats to Vox Media’s Liz Scheltens and her colleagues for winning an Edward R. Murrow award from the Radio Television Digital News Association for “How US schools punish Black kids” in the Excellence in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion category. Also winning in that category, American Public Media’s “Black at Mizzou: Confronting race on campus.” See all the winners here.

đŸ”„ Jobs: WBUR is hiring a new education editor. The Ed Lab at the Post and Courier is looking for a reporter. Chalkbeat is hiring for several positions. EWA is hiring a program manager, a communications coordinator, and a program specialist. The News-Press and Naples Daily News in Florida are hiring an education reporter. Any new job opening out there that folks might want to know about? Let us know.

đŸ”„ Departures: Former WNYC education reporter Yasmeen Khan is leaving the public radio station after 11 years. She tweeted, “so much reporting I didn’t get to. But together with my incredible editors
 we did a lot.” We at The Grade appreciate the many standout education stories she produced and the insight she provided about her work.

EVENTS, RESOURCES
What just happened & what’s coming next?
Above: Clockwise from top left, Kenya Hunter, Emily Donaldson, Brayden Garcia, and Sara Gregory.⏰ Kudos to all the education reporters covering back-to-school school board meetings — some of them covering more than one. Among them are Richmond Times-Dispatch education reporter Kenya Hunter, who showed her commitment by being the last reporter at the Richmond school board meeting. The Dallas Morning News’ Emily Donaldson also tweeted about attending a meeting on masks, as did her colleague  Brayden Garcia. Some notable school board coverage: After hours of vitriol and misinformation, Virginia Beach School Board votes to make masks mandatory for students, staff from the Virginian-Pilot’s Sara Gregory.

⏰ Upcoming: The National Press Club Institute is hosting a virtual conversation today on how to diversify education stories and sources with the Dallas Morning News Education Lab editor Eva-Marie Ayala, the Boston Globe’s Bianca Vázquez Toness, Politico education editor Delece Smith-Barrow, and others. Chalkbeat is hosting a virtual event on Aug. 24 about student mental health and what schools are (or should be) doing this year. An Amanda Ripley-inspired documentary about international exchange students is going to be streaming on Disney+. Read the 74 Interview with her about the book and film.

⏰ Reporting resources: Lots of good info in this RAND survey about parents’ attitudes toward sending their kids back to school. Burbio’s School Reopening Trends blog offers a wealth of information for reporters, updated each week online and throughout the week on social. In this week’s blog, Burbio covers virtual options in the top 200 districts, quarantine rules regarding masking, and teacher vaccinations. Also check out the CDC’s COVID data tracker to see community transmission rates in your county.

⏰ ICYMI: Ed Trust writer-in-residence Karin Chenoweth discussed her book profiling five school districts that are “consistently improving to serve children of color & children from low-income backgrounds” in a conversation with Dr. Janice Jackson, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, moderated by USA Today’s Alia Wong. Watch the replay here. And last week, LA Times education reporter Howard Blume and science reporter Amina Khan answered questions about sending kids back to school as the Delta variant spreads.

THE KICKER

KPCC/LAist’s Kyle Stokes had his game day face on for the first day of school in LAUSD this week. Check out his Twitter thread covering how the day went. Be sure to share your back-to-school reporting selfies with us at @thegrade_.

That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading!

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By Alexander Russo with additional writing from Michele Jacques and Colleen Connolly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Russo

Alexander Russo

Alexander Russo is founder and editor of The Grade, an award-winning effort to help improve media coverage of education issues. He’s also a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship winner and a book author. You can reach him at @alexanderrusso.

Visit their website at: https://the-grade.org/