Moms fighting school racism, Weingarten’s publicity tour, & how to cover immigrant EL students: 🏆 Best education journalism of the week (5/21/21) 🏆

🏆 RUNNER-UP: This week’s runner-up is How America failed students with disabilities during the pandemic by Hannah Natanson, Valerie Strauss, and Katherine Frey in the Washington Post. Remote learning offerings have been insufficient and unworkable for a lot of students, but perhaps none more so than students with disabilities. The reporting trio spoke to different families about their harrowing experiences, including a child with autism and ADHD who began to hallucinate in the pandemic. His doctors and psychiatrists told his parents that months of remote learning away from his peers and the normal routine of school likely contributed to his deterioration — and recommended he return to school as soon as possible. “More than a year after the pandemic began, officials in school districts across the country concede they failed during the crisis to deliver the quality of education that students with disabilities are legally entitled to receive,” the reporters write. “The consequences of this failure are likely to linger for years, if not decades, advocates and experts warn.” Let that sink in.

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Launched last weekend and culminating with a visit to Providence, the big story of the week has been the highly effective American Federation of Teachers publicity campaign to rebrand union head Randi Weingarten as champion of reopening schools:

🔊 Nation’s 2nd-Largest Teachers Union Says It’s Time For In-Person Learning (NPR)🔊 Teachers union leader calls for ‘fully reopening’ schools this fall (Politico)

🔊 President of Key Teachers’ Union Shares Plea: ‘Schools Must Be Open’ in Fall (NYT)

🔊 Teachers union chief calls for full return to school this fall (Washington Post)

🔊 Randi Weingarten pushes to reopen schools safely in the fall (MSNBC)

🔊 C-SPAN callers grill Randi Weingarten on schools, sound off on ‘pathetic’ union influence (Fox News)

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To help reporters take on this important challenge, we interviewed Boston Globe reporters Bianca Vázquez Toness and Jenna Russell about their recent blockbuster story where they followed a group of immigrant students learning English for nine months.

“I think that these students often just aren’t thought about here,” Vázquez Toness said about why their story was so important for Boston. “This was a deliberate story for me.”

“It’s easy to generalize,” added Russell, “particularly about a group of students that come from afar and speak another language, and this was such a rare opportunity to really make them specific people.”

Read the rest of the Q&A here.

“Media coverage of Common Core followed an arc that mirrored the policy’s fate: perhaps too optimistic at the beginning,” Loveless writes. “But after a few years of documenting the standards’ choppy implementation, a more realistic view of the reform emerged.”

Check out his take on what went wrong with Common Core coverage — and how to avoid making the same mistakes again.

🔥 Jobs: The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is hiring a reporter to help them expand their education coverage. WHYY in Philadelphia is also hiring an education reporter. (Avi Wolfman-Arent will still be doing some education reporting for WHYY but is moving into a role where he’ll be doing more hosting and anchoring, he tells us.) KPCC is still looking for an education editor. And Chalkbeat is hiring for multiple positions.

🔥 California Journalism Awards: Congrats to the staff of EdSource, which won five California Journalism Awards in the digital category for in-depth reporting, coverage of the pandemic, and more. And congrats to the Sacramento Bee’s Sawsan Morrar and her colleague Phillip Reese for winning second place in youth and education coverage for their piece examining why inexperienced teachers are prevalent at low-income schools in Sacramento.

🔥 Kudos to Seattle Times Ed Lab engagement editor Jenn Smith, who “reached a pretty honorable milestone”: an honorary degree in journalism from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

🔥 Maria Polletta, the new education watchdog reporter for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, tells us she’s thrilled to step away from the politics beat and focus on education stories that expose systemic failures. The former Arizona Republic state government reporter plans to explore “the impact of everything from politics and policy-making, the criminal justice system and labor issues to transportation, housing quality and health care access on Arizona’s education system.” Give her a follow, if you haven’t already.

🔥 Following her big feature on the lives of sophomores in the pandemic, Susan Dominus wrote for the New York Times about how her reporting on these students helped her connect to her own struggles with her teens. “Because of the work I was doing on the phone with those young sophomores in Columbia,” she writes, “I think I failed my freshmen a little bit less than I otherwise would have — and of all the gifts my work has given me, that might be the one for which I am the most grateful.”

🔥 Sarah Carr penned her first byline since leaving the Boston Globe, where she was editor of The Great Divide. She wrote for The Hechinger Report and The Undefeated about two Massachusetts middle schoolers, one who stayed home and one who went back to school full-time, and tweeted that “it felt pretty surreal-and eye-opening being inside a middle school.”

⏰ Upcoming: The Dallas Morning News Ed Lab is hosting a panel today on how the state’s new laws will impact students. Jo Napolitano will talk to GBH education reporter Meg Woolhouse on May 24 about her book “The School I Deserve,” which follows six young refugees who fought for equal access to education. Register here.

⏰ ICYMI: Chalkbeat Newark co-hosted an event Wednesday on “what Newark students need now,” which gave high school students the opportunity to discuss mental health, academic recovery, college readiness, and student advocacy. WBUR’s Carrie Jung moderated a discussion Thursday on post-COVID learning. She also guest hosted the NEXT New England podcast this week. And PBS NewsHour co-hosted an event Tuesday on how COVID-19 disrupted education.

⏰ Professional development: Nieman Lab shares advice on how journalists can avoid amplifying misinformation. And if you’re looking to sharpen your narrative skills, Nieman Storyboard has a list of learning opportunities that might appeal.

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