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Though they still remain small in number, vaccine mandates are quickly catching on in districts across the country, especially after the FDA gave full approval to the Pfizer vaccine on Monday. An AP/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that most Americans support vaccine mandates in schools, but politically it is still a point of contention in many places.
🔊 Majority of Americans Support School Mask and Vaccine Mandates, Poll Finds (AP)
🔊 FDA Approval Empowers School Systems to Tell Teachers, Staff: ‘Get Vaccinated – No Exceptions’ (US News)
🔊 Why America’s Largest Teachers’ Union Refuses to Support Vaccine Mandates (The Atlantic)
🔊 More schools requiring masks for all, vaccines for teachers (Chalkbeat)
🔊 Educators Will Be First N.Y.C. Workers to Face Full Vaccine Mandate (NYT — see also WSJ, Chalkbeat NY, New York Daily News)
🔊 Philly School Board Votes for Vaccine Mandate for Teachers and Staff (NBC 10 Philadelphia)
🔊 City Schools of Decatur plans to require COVID-19 vaccinations for students, staff (Decaturish)
🔊 Pritzker to order mandatory vaccine for educators from kindergarten to college (Chicago Sun-Times)
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HOW A LAW MEANT TO KEEP KIDS IN SCHOOL IS DOING THE OPPOSITE
Best education journalism of the week.
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| 🏆 BEST: The best story of the week is Quarantined: A new law is disrupting California school reopenings by Joe Hong in CalMatters. In an effort to address the shortcomings of distance learning, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law last month that forces quarantined students to enroll in independent study — the only alternative to in-person learning. The program, however, is meant for long-term study, not short-term quarantines. With thousands of students already learning in isolation due to COVID exposure, educators say the new law isn’t working. “Schools say they are unable to hire the teachers required to provide independent study for these quarantined students,” Hong writes. “As a result, they can languish in an educational limbo, while schools risk losing state funding for the days they are technically ‘absent.’” The story is a good look at the impacts of state policy, especially as Newsom faces a recall election.
🏆 RUNNER-UP: This week’s runner-up is A year after Westlake schools launched diversity initiative, community still split on how, if at all, to talk about race by Sarah Asch in the Austin American-Statesman. In it, she details the support, pushback, and controversy that followed a district’s attempt to address a racist video that circulated on campus. In the last year, opponents of the diversity initiative have conflated it with critical race theory while supporters have said the district needs to be open and honest about its history and demographics. Asch reports on what has changed in a year and what we can expect next. She wrote on Twitter that she spent six months reporting this story and said the community “is in many ways a microcosm of a national debate over the stories we tell about the past and how these inform our present.”
BONUS STORIES:
🏆 What Missouri schools learned the hard way about rapid Covid testing (NBC News/Kaiser Health News)
🏆 Educators nationwide completely reimagined summer school this summer. It could signal a new era (Washington Post)
🏆 A principal leaves his beloved school after an intense year (Hechinger Report)
🏆 International newcomer academies offer lessons on how to quickly catch up children learning English (Dallas Morning News)
🏆 COVID School Closures Could Loom Large in Newsom Recall (KQED)
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A PARENT’S GUIDE TO JOURNALISTS
New from The Grade |
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There’s been no shortage of ire-inducing controversies for education journalists to confront during the COVID pandemic — and a sharp rise in conflicts among desperate parents and overworked education journalists.
Freelancer (and parent) Amy Silverman details ways in which parents and reporters can work better together to cover the crucial stories that need to be told. “Parents and others have increasingly engaged in toxic treatment of journalists on social media this past year,” Silverman writes in her latest piece for The Grade, “tearing down the people they are relying on to report on what’s happening in our education system.”
She offers advice she’s gleaned from being a parent and a journalist, including, for starters, the golden rule. “A parent who is capable of both criticism and praise will get a lot further,” she writes.
Also by Amy Silverman for The Grade:
How to quote more students with disabilities in education news
Writing better stories about students with disabilities
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PEOPLE, JOBS, KUDOS
Who’s going where & doing what?
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| Above: NBC News has a new podcast series called “Southlake” by Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton, looking into a racist incident at a Texas school and the subsequent fallout. It “tells the story of how this idyllic city, and its local school board election, became the poster child for a new political strategy with national repercussions.”
🔥 Jobs: EdSource in California is hiring a managing editor and a web design manager. Bridge Michigan is hiring a statewide education reporter. 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. Any new job opening out there that folks might want to know about? Let us know.
🔥 Arizona Daily Star reporter Danyelle Khmara is leaving the ed beat to become the outlet’s border and immigration reporter. Sorry to see you go, but can’t wait to see what you do next.
🔥 Need some ideas for audience engagement? These weekly solutions-oriented stories from Betsy Ladyzhets are a road map for education reporters who want to share information with readers about how/where reopening might be working.
🔥 Kudos to The Atlantic’s Emma Green and anyone else involved in creating this interview in which NEA president Becky Pringle is pressed to clarify her answers at several points during the discussion. Last spring, I explained how too often journalists have seemed to give union heads a free pass, failing to follow up on key issues or track changes of position, and what can be done about it.
🔥 Getting personal: We have nothing but admiration for Detroit Free Press education reporter Lily Altavena, who wrote a first-person piece about her experience getting a booster shot: “I’ve not just lived the last year through the eyes of a reporter, but I’ve lived through the eyes of an immunocompromised person.”
Correction: Last week, the GIF we used in this section corresponded with “How US schools punish Black kids” by Vox Media’s Liz Scheltens and her colleagues, not ProPublica’s “The Quiet Rooms.” Apologies to all.
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EVENTS, RESOURCES
What just happened & what’s coming next?
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| Above: Check out Back to Class, a new eight-story series from the Solutions Journalism Network on how schools can rebound this year, featuring stories from six newsrooms: AL.com, the Dallas Morning News, the Fresno Bee, the Seattle Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Hechinger Report. Former education reporter Linda Shaw shares some of the background here. For more back-to-school coverage, the NPR ed team has launched its first #BackToSchool live blog for K-12 through higher ed. Check it out here.
⏰ Newsletters: The NYT Education Briefing newsletter is back after a few months off for the summer, detailing the partisan fights over mask and vaccine policies in schools. Last year, I wrote about what makes this newsletter so good. Let’s hope they continue the great work. And, speaking of education newsletters, the Tennessean has a new one out called School Zone.
⏰ Upcoming: EdSource is hosting a webinar on Aug. 31 with Larry Ferlazzo and other California teachers reflecting on how the pandemic has changed their perspective on teaching. Also on Aug. 31, EWA is hosting a webinar on covering teacher retirement systems.
⏰ ICYMI: LA Times higher ed reporter Teresa Watanabe led a webinar with experts Thursday about what to know about applying for college this year. Also Thursday, The 74’s Asher Lehrer-Small moderated an event on how to get kids back into learning. And EWA had an event Wednesday on what reporters need to know about online learning this fall.
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THE KICKER
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If you haven’t seen it already, Teen Vogue has a new “Lesson Plan” package with stories meant to fill in the gaps in U.S. education and facilitate learning inside and outside the classroom.
“A good education will prepare its students for the future outside their classroom. It will include curricula left out of outdated textbooks; provide an honest, unflinching account of the world we live in; and empower students to get involved with issues they care about and seek out more information on their own.” |
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That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading!
Using Feedly or FlipBoard or any other kind of news reader? You can subscribe to The Grade’s “feed” by plugging in this web address: http://www.kappanonline.org/category/the-grade/feed/.
Read more about The Grade here. You can read all the back issues of The Grade’s newsletter, Best of the Week, here.
By Alexander Russo with additional writing from Michele Jacques and Colleen Connolly. |
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