How to cover New York City’s school reopening

Will the coming torrent of coverage of New York City’s reopening emphasize scary anecdotes and political infighting, or will it be grounded in school-based experiences and carefully contextualized data?

By Alexander Russo

For the next few days at least, all eyes are going to be on the New York City school system, which is slated to reopen on a hybrid, phased-in basis starting this coming Monday.

New York City’s anticipated rollout will be the biggest in-person reopening in the nation. By demonstrating whether a hybrid model can work even while the pandemic continues, the endeavor could affect other big districts like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami.

However, the complicated and contentious effort is also going to ask a tremendous amount of the news outlets that are going to be covering it.

The reopening of New York City schools is going to be one of the biggest challenges of the 2020-21 school year for education news outlets and reporters.

I’m hopeful that it will be covered in a way that is enterprising and fair, steeped in context and deep questioning, and that gives voice to those we have so far heard too little from in the school reopening debate.

But the media’s long-running habits of focusing on clickbait, inside politics, and false objectivity are powerful ones, especially in politically charged, life-and-death situations like this one.

So I’m not holding my breath.

Previous coverage: Smart ways to report on COVID cases detected in schools

Above: A small but growing handful of reporters from outlets including Chalkbeat, the Boston Globe, the Denver Post, and Colorado Public Radio have grounded their work with reporting from schools that are attempting a return to in-person instruction.

The situation in New York City is complicated and contentious, with some teachers and parents complaining loudly about various aspects of the plan, and lots of finger-pointing among the district, administrators, and teachers.

Some teachers have insisted on doing their pre-student arrival prep work outside their schools in the days leading up to the return to classes, claiming that the buildings aren’t yet safe to work in.

At last count, just over 40 percent of NYC parents have opted for remote instruction, rather than the district’s hybrid schedule. A recent report from the city showed that 56 of 17,000 school district staffers have tested positive for COVID.

On Tuesday night, the district responded to concerns about how the hybrid plan would be staffed by rolling back the amount of live instruction students will receive on days they are not coming to school. On Thursday, the district announced that the in-person element of the plan would be phased in over time.

Above: This gentle, light-hearted Boston Globe story is a welcome contrast to the fever-pitched, fear-and-calamity reopening stories that are commonplace in New York City and other places.

To cover the New York City effort fairly and effectively, media outlets will have to avoid some of the most persistent problems that have surfaced so far.

These issues have included downplaying the inadequacies of remote learning, overlooking disengaged students, producing unnecessarily alarmist coverage, and downplaying the tentative successes in-person learning has experienced in other parts of the country.

Other challenges that have emerged more recently include attributing infections and deaths of school personnel to schools, and seeming to focus on teachers’ safety over everyone else’s.

Previous coverage: How to avoid writing needlessly alarmist school reopening stories

Above: The New York Times’ Coronavirus Schools Briefing newsletter has recently featured some helpful context around the inevitable cases that are going to be detected when school systems ramp up testing and reporting of COVID cases.

What should parents, policy makers, and concerned readers look for as New York City students begin to return to school on Monday?

First and foremost, they should be looking for stories that avoid the temptation to use inflammatory and potentially misleading terms to describe what it means when schools report infections.

“We have to be careful of reporting a ‘cluster’ or ‘spike’,” NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz noted last week on Twitter.

Words like “outbreak” sound like they must involve transmission and infection of dozens of people but can, in reality, involve just two or three cases. If there are real outbreaks, we want to know. We just want them to be real.

But that’s only part of the puzzle.

Above: This Boston Globe story gives readers what they may most want to hear, which is what experts have to say.

Once schools open, the coverage will need to address several key components, first and foremost among them whether it is safe for kids and teachers to be in classrooms. That is, are folks who are entering schools no more likely to get sick than they would otherwise be, given the communities where they live and work?

As NPR’s Kamenetz put it recently, the question isn’t “can you open schools w/o cases” it’s “can you open schools without driving up community transmission.”

Readers will also need an assessment of how well or poorly the effort is going overall. Anecdotes are good to include in stories, but more important is what the data say. Not just in terms of infection counts and student participation, but whether students in the hybrid program have higher attendance rates and which groups are progressing better in their studies. Another interesting item to look at: Who is attending school on campus and who isn’t? How do the demographics differ?

And we need to know how things are going from the experiences of low-income Black and Latino parents, who make up the vast majority of district parents, and school staff, who play an essential role but are often left out of the coverage.

Firsthand accounts from inside classrooms will be essential, and follow-ups are going to be key. If some schools are doing a better job than others, readers will want to hear about that, too.

Previous coverage: In-person learning’s tentative successes deserve more attention

Above: Schools in New York City and many other places remained open throughout the pandemic to take care of essential workers’ children, a reality that was downplayed by some of the major outlets and often left out of reopening coverage.

I’m somewhat hopeful, having watched the coverage these past few weeks.

In August, thinly reported stories about outbreaks seemed to dominate the news – breathless, panic-inducing stories about infections detected on the first day of school, students being quarantined, and crowded hallways.

But as more schools across the country have reopened — and more reporters have gotten inside to see how things are really going — the coverage seems to have shifted a bit toward a more neutral stance, in which schools can be seen to be experiencing tentative success at in-person instruction in some places, along with some setbacks.

But five years of covering education news have taught me not to get my expectations up too high. Whether it’s school gun violence, lightning rod personalities like Betsy DeVos, or the COVID pandemic, high-pressure situations do not seem to be the situations in which education journalism tends to shine.

Buckle up. Cross your fingers. Read and watch the coverage with great care.

Previously from The Grade:

Covering NYC’s school shutdown and relaunch

The disengaged kids missing from the Times’ coverage

Smart ways to report on COVID cases detected in schools

How to avoid writing needlessly alarmist school reopening stories

In-person learning’s tentative successes deserve more coverage