Overview of The Grade

Since 2015, The Grade has published more than 50 pieces of commentary each year, along with a weekly newsletter.

Over the years, we’ve covered especially important and challenging coverage topics multiple times, and gathered them into “roundups” that you might find useful to browse:

TOPICAL COVERAGE

Covering school reading programs
Whether or not most kids learn to read is a critical aspect of academic success. However, coverage of district reading programs hasn’t always been as abundant and in-depth as it should be. Here are The Grade’s stories describing the importance of covering whether districts are teaching kids to read and the strategies that education reporters have used to cover the topic.

Covering the COVID-19 education crisis
Over nearly three years, The Grade has published a large number of pieces about media coverage of the COVID-19 crisis and schools.

Covering higher education
The Grade generally focuses on coverage of K-12 education, but here are some of The Grade’s most notable columns, reported pieces, and reflections focused on higher education.

Covering education technology
Covering technology-based education efforts is one of the biggest and most challenging aspects of being an education reporter. The issues are complex. The realities are not always entirely clear.

Covering teachers unions, strikes, and protests
In recent years, The Grade has published several pieces about the challenges of covering teachers unions, strikes, and protests.

JOURNALISTS, NEWSROOMS, & REPORTING STRATEGIES

Star reporters and standout stories
Featuring Anya Kamenetz, Erica Green, Bethany Barnes, Emily Hanford, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Casey Parks, Rachel Aviv.

Reporters reflect on covering education
First-person pieces by current and former education reporters including Claudio Sanchez, Patti Ghezzi, Dorie Turner Nolt, and John Merrow reflecting on how they do their job and what they wish they’d done differently.

Racial inequality in schools and newsrooms
How to cover inequality is a major theme for education journalists, and also a major challenge? Here is an expanded version for 2021, including pieces about covering racial inequality in schools, newsroom diversity and inequality, and the specific challenges of covering communities different from the one you come from.

Parent-focused education news
Long left at the margins of education news, parents and other caregivers deserve to be put front and center in coverage of school issues. Here are some of the many ways that The Grade has encouraged reporters and editors to explore this approach.

The case for covering promising innovations and preliminary successes
Too often, media coverage of schools focuses on setbacks, controversies, and unmet challenges, unintentionally creating the impression that improvements, innovations, and progress are unusual and/or impossible. But that’s hardly the case, and journalism that’s relentless focused on bad news is both misleading and demoralizing.

Media criticism and commentary we’ve republished from other outlets
The Grade occasionally comes across standout commentary and criticism about education journalism and reprints theses articles in their entirety — with permission — so that they receive as much attention as possible.