The Grade is looking for a part-time reporter/researcher and a part-time writer/columnist to help encourage more coverage of education innovations and preliminary successes.
It’s become increasingly clear that education coverage focuses too much on conflicts, controversies, fear-generating anecdotes, and how typical school systems serve students, rather than providing a balance of coverage that also includes innovations, successes, and areas of growing agreement. It’s important for education news to include both successes and setbacks, and to capture both the typic district offerings and promising innovations.
The Grade has published several columns addressing these concerns, along with possible alternative approaches:
Negative COVID coverage and prolonged school shutdowns
Over the next two years, The Grade is going to spend more time and energy encouraging news coverage of promising innovations and preliminary successes. We’re not letting anyone off the hook; we’re just calling for a stronger mix of coverage. To pull this off, we’re hoping to find great people to fill two part-time, remote positions in addition to the current team:
REPORTER/RESEARCHER: Each week, the reporter/researcher will gather examples of education journalism that features promising innovations and preliminary successes nationally and in three target regions of the country. They will contribute ideas during the weekly team meeting, provide items for the weekly newsletter, and produce a monthly innovations/success coverage summary. Weekly estimated hours: 3-5. We’re anticipating paying between $40-90 per hour, depending on the person’s background and experience.
COLUMNIST/WRITER: Over the course of each year, the columnist/writer will produce 6 standalone pieces about the importance of covering innovations and preliminary successes in education. They will explain how to report on innovative practices, analyze published stories that feature innovation and promising results, share resources for finding innovations and model stories about them, and compare how innovations and successes they are being covered by different outlets in different parts of the country. We expect to pay $600-$1,200 per published piece, depending on experience and the reporting effort required in each piece.
These gigs might be good for someone who’s freelancing but wants a steady part-time gig, or someone who’s deeply interested in how education journalism shapes public understanding of schools. It’d be great to work with people who know education journalism — a current or former education journalist — but beat experience and a journalism degree are not at all required. We’re open to anyone with great ideas and sharp research and writing skills.
An independent grant-funded effort to support high-quality education news coverage, The Grade produces a weekly column or essay about hot topics in education journalism plus a weekly newsletter featuring the best education journalism of the week. Read more about The Grade here. Send inquiries to Alexander Russo at Thegrade2015@gmail.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Grade
Launched in 2015, The Grade is a journalist-run effort to encourage high-quality coverage of K-12 education issues.
