BEST OF THE WEEK

There wasn’t anything that totally stopped me in my tracks this week – let me know if I missed anything? – but there was no shortage of recommendable journalism:

Some of DeVos’s hires aren’t as uniformly conservative as you might expect, reported the New York Times.

California students took Common Core-era tests and it went pretty smoothly according to EdSource.

Meanwhile, a handful of districts (under 50) have seceded from their neighbors, notes US News writing off an EdBuild report – not a large number, but a troubling trend.

EdWeek reported that the number of teachers with temporary credentials in California has doubled in just four years.

In a potential first in the nation, the Chicago Teachers Union is discussing a merger with Chicago’s relatively large charter schools union, Chi-ACTS, reports the Sun Times.

ProPublica tells us about Vermont’s voucher program, which serves rich as well as poor kids.

The NYT interviewed a handful of first-generation college students about their experiences compared to other students.

WNYC told us about how some schools are struggling to reconcile the demands of Ramadan and Prom.

The first of the 10 teams that won the $10 million XQ Super Schools award last fall has dropped its initial plans, reports the SF Gate.

According to The Guardian, Ethiopia turned off the internet nationwide during student exams.

#EWA17 AWARDS

The EWA education journalism awards were given out in Washington DC this week, and as you can see from the list of winners it was a big year for reporting about race and inequality and for smaller local outlets like WBEZ Chicago, the Sarasota Herald Tribune, the Hechinger Report, and Chalkbeat Detroit.

Sure, Slate published the award-winning series I still call Tomorrow’s Test, but it was produced by the Teacher Project. Of course, the Houston Chronicle won for Brian Rosenthal’s Access Denied series, EdWeek won for its deep look into virtual charters, and big outlets have done well in previous years.

It’s also worth noting that many of the year’s winners focused on structural problems with the existing legacy school system rather than promising innovations or problems with recent reform efforts.

Read AJC Maureen Downey’s take on EWA17 here and EW Mark Walsh’s take here.

I’m a big fan of the awards and the pieces that won. However, in future years I hope that highly regarded pieces missing from the final contenders from Reuters, the Boston Globe, Salt Lake Tribune, & the NYT can be among those considered.

FROM “THE GRADE”

This week’s column from Joseph Williams takes a hard look at coverage of the Betsy DeVos speech at Bethune-Cookman and finds that mainstream outlets tended to focus on the fireworks and controversy rather than the underlying motivations that led the HBCU to invite the Trump EdSec to speak in the first place. As Williams wrote:

“Bethune-Cookman graduates became an angry black mob, and DeVos was a hapless white cabinet official on a ham-fisted outreach mission.”

Last week’s column about the PBS-run series called School Inc. continued to generate debate. Cato’s Neal McCluskey takes on contributor Amy Shuffelton’s critique of the decision to run the series and the information it provided here.

One of the most-discussed Lightning Talks during EWA17 was this whirlwind introduction to #edgifs & data visualization. It’s pronounced GIF, not JIF, according to Broad City (and me).

PEOPLE, PLACES, & THINGS

Betsy DeVos takes questions! From reporters! 🙏🏼 https://t.co/jalvrAyA8f

— Joy (@Joy_Resmovits) June 2, 2017

Above, the LA Times’ Joy Resmovits livestreamed an interesting encounter between EdSec DeVos and a gaggle or reporters who showed up at a Friday school visit.

It was a big week for the Ida B. Wells Society, which is trying to diversify the ranks of investigative reporters. They got a big grant from the Knight Foundation. And on 6/13 there’s going to be a live event by IBWS honcho Nikole Hannah-Jones on “the State of Education and Race.”

Asked about concerns regarding Valerie Strauss’s The Answer Sheet, Washington Post editor Marty Baron told me he’s not concerned about her role and that readers like her. (He compared her site to Wonkblog.)

This week’s diversity-related events included an update on the progress of the EWA task force on diversity and inclusiveness, a new commitment to advocate for newsroom diversity in the EWA strategic plan, a “pop-up” meeting of EWA members and staff talking about racial and gender diversity in newsrooms and on the EWA executive council, and a Keith Woods talk about how overwhelmingly white and male NPR’s sources have been (and efforts to do better). #edJOC

Flush with admiration and new subscribers, the NYT fired its public editor and will not replace her. More here and here. Don’t get any ideas, though.

The NYC DOE is making it seem harder to get into a chosen high school than it really is, according to Samuel Abrams in a Chalkbeat writeup.

KICKERS

Teachers are using facial recognition to see if students are paying attention. Apparently those magic bracelets from a couple of years ago didn’t work out.

Delayed by the Cuomo/de Blasio clusterfuck known as the NYC subway system, a college student staged a mock graduation on the subway car he was stuck on when the real graduation was taking place.