School board blue wave, Portland teachers strike heats up, & an ed reporter in the White House: Best Education Journalism of the Week (11/10/23)

In this week’s newsletter: Democratic-leaning candidates swept Tuesday’s school board elections. How to find out if DEI teacher training programs work. A school district’s “student residency investigation” program is exposed. A slew of education investigations have led to concrete change, including at the city level. And an ed reporter gets a new beat covering the White House.

 

BLUE WAVE ELECTION

The big story of the week

The big education story of the week is Tuesday’s blue wave school board elections. Whether they were incumbents up for re-election or challengers opposed to conservative policies, Democratic-leaning candidates generally prevailed over candidates who favored restricting books, limiting trans student rights, and removing DEI.

The results — which appeared to surprise many observers — were unusually clear and generated a robust (some would say gleeful) response from news outlets (NYT, Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, NPR, USA Today, Ed Week, New Republic, Philadelphia Inquirer,  Minnesota Reformer, CT Mirror, Hartford Courant, WHYY Philadelphia, Ohio Dispatch, Cincinnatti.com).

Some caveats and context: High-conflict school board races are the exception. Most races are uncontested. Races often focus on more mundane issues like budgets and school mascots (AP). It’s not entirely clear if they’re consequential. Nobody can quite agree whether the results mean anything for next year’s presidential elections. Can we get back to teaching and learning now, please, asks the Christian Science Monitor?

 

Other big stories of the week:

📰 PORTLAND STRIKE: Now over a week old, the Portland teachers strike continues to attract both local and national coverage (OPB, Oregonian, KLCC, The Guardian, AP). Some of the coverage stands out for its nuance: Portland teens are worried about the impact of the strike on their academic and social lives (Oregonian). Some parents are concerned, angry, and in a childcare bind (Willamette Week, NPR). And teachers, parents, and school officials outside of Portland are looking back on the impacts and costs of their own recent walkouts (OPB).

📰 ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR: The U.S. Department of Education wrote a letter to schools urging them to protect Jewish and Muslim students amid an “alarming rise” in Islamophobic and antisemitic incidents at K-12 schools and on college campuses (Chalkbeat, K-12 Dive, EdWeek). It’s a narrative we haven’t seen too much, at least in K-12 schools, though stories about how a suburban Chicago Islamic school is coping and how teachers can help kids understand the news stand out (Sun-Times, NPR). 

 

AUDITING ‘EDUCATIONAL LARCENY’

The best education journalism of the week

The best education story of the week is St. Louis-area school district aggressively audits student housing, citing ‘educational larceny’ by Kate Grumke and Kavahn Mansouri for Midwest Newsroom and St. Louis Public Radio.

Focused on what are euphemistically called “student residency investigations,” the story describes the lengths to which one St. Louis, Mo., school district is going to ferret out students whose parents don’t live within the community.

District administrators defend it as a necessary evil. Advocates say it creates a “culture of suspicion” and results in educational losses for targeted students, some of whom are removed from school during the middle of the year. The district’s efforts — which include 4,500 investigations and 300 home visits over five years — are described as “inflexible and inscrutable.” The investigations are ramping up and exceed other districts’ efforts.

“We were first drawn to this story after seeing a pattern, in an unrelated records request, of homeless students missing days and weeks of school in this district,” Mansouri and Grumke told us via DM. “We started requesting other records, but the story really came together from just listening to a school board meeting.”

The dramatic increase in residency investigations over the last five years were a surprise that motivated the reporters to look deeper. “This story could be replicated in any region by requesting residency investigation logs and appeals and comparing your local school districts.”

Want to read more about this practice? Five years ago, former education reporter Avi Wolfman-Arent covered residency enforcement for WHYY Philadelphia. 

 

Other great education stories of the week:

👏 Lee V. Gaines’ months-long investigation dives into the challenges that families in the Porter County, Ind., public education system face getting their kids special education services — a heartbreaking deep dive into a process that experts say almost always works in the system’s, not parents’, favor. (WFYI)

👏 Planet Money reporter Sarah Gonzalez looks at the reasons school districts drop to four days a week — about 7% of districts are now down to four days. A counterintuitive piece that points out both the benefits  — it helps recruit teachers — and the costs, mostly to parents who are basically taxed twice to accommodate their kids’ needs one-fifth of the time. (NPR)

👏 The Boston Globe’s Christopher Huffaker offers an eye-opening look at how a new scoring system for admission to prestigious Boston exam schools resulted in low-income students missing out on a promised points boost, resulting in higher-income students receiving nearly half the boost. (Boston Globe)

👏 The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Kristen Taketa offers a helpful guide to school rating websites like GreatSchools and Niche, noting that they can reinforce misleading ideas about schools in lower-income neighborhoods and those that primarily serve students of color — an important reminder that these sites don’t always prioritize parents’ needs. (SDUT)

👏 The Seattle Times’ Jenn Smith offers advice on making the most of parent-teacher conferences, reminding parents that they can prepare for these events to make them more productive. She suggests, among other things, that families that need accommodations such as translation services should request them ahead of time. (Seattle Times)

👏 Along the same lines, Chalkbeat NY offers tips for navigating New York City’s byzantine high school admissions process, a great example of service journalism in a city that doesn’t always look out for families. (Chalkbeat NY)

 

DEI TRAINING UNDER THE MICROSCROPE

Our latest columns and commentary

While districts spend billions on teacher training each year — much of it focused on improving student achievement for historically marginalized students — there’s little transparency around who’s doing the training and whether it’s effective. On the heels of her USA Today investigation, journalist Katherine Reynolds Lewis details how to find out what your districts are doing — and offers to collaborate with other interested reporters.

Read more:

📰 In this week’s bonus column, Ballotpedia’s Leslie Graves suggests that school board election coverage often exaggerates the ubiquity of recalls, challenges, and board flips and ignores the questionable impact of most school board elections on student learning.

📰 School culture wars coverage — book bans, trans student rights, etc. — is generally superficial and sometimes downright misleading. But we’re starting to see some nuanced, relatively calm coverage of book challenges from outlets like WFAE  and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. We recently published columns about a Texas school librarian’s experience and a veteran reporter’s common-sense approach.

 

Above: “I know what it feels like to be a child in pain,” writes Hannah Dellinger in this poignant essay introducing herself to Chalkbeat Detroit readers. “I became a journalist in part to help protect the vulnerable — especially children — from systemic injustice.”

PEOPLE, JOBS

Who’s going where and doing what

🔥 Career moves: From the ed beat to the White House, the New York Times’ Erica Green has a new beat. Cristina Silva is slated to become the Boston Globe’s ME for local news, leaving USA Today where she oversaw some of the paper’s pandemic schools coverage. The Topeka Capital-Journal’s Rafael Garcia is moving on from the ed beat and journalism. And the Boston Globe’s Niki Griswold, Christopher Huffaker, and Deanna Pan have been helping out off the ed beat to cover the Lewiston, Maine, shooting and its aftermath.

🔥 Job openings & fellowships: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is hiring an education reporter. So is the Charlotte Observer. The deadline to apply for Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship is Dec. 1 for international journalists and Jan. 31 for U.S. candidates. And if you’re interested in applying for the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship, check out an info session at the end of the month with former fellow Jo Napolitano.

🔥 Advice: “It’s far too convenient to blame ESSER for fiscal challenges that are decades in the making,” tweeted Jess Gartner, founder of the ed tech finance company Allovue. “Conflating these narratives is problematic. We must have nuanced conversations about the real drivers of short, medium, and long-term school district budget woes.”

 

Above: In case you missed it, the New Yorker’s Emma Green weighed in on a fascinating teacher testing lawsuit.

APPEARANCES, EVENTS, & NEW RESOURCES

What’s happening and new research

⏰ Segments, podcasts, & appearances: “Morning Edition” aired education segments on universal pre-K in Colorado and schools’ safety responses to mass shootings. WNYC also ran a segment on migrant students facing uncertainties in school. The Washington Post’s Laura Meckler appeared on “The Tent” podcast to talk about her book, “Dream Town.” Washington Post enterprise reporter Peter Jamison appeared on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show” to discuss homeschooling. Chalkbeat New York’s Michael Elsen-Rooney was on WBUR’s “Here & Now” discussing how school counselors are adapting as more students lose interest in college. The Boston Globe’s Deanna Pan was on WBUR’s “The Common” talking about Boston Public Schools’ new English language learner inclusion plan.

⏰ Impact: Following a Tampa Bay Times investigation by Bethany Barnes, a Florida teacher who harassed and bullied students for years was finally reprimanded by school officials. The New York Times’ Eliza Shapiro and Brian Rosenthal’s reporting on Hasidic schools led to the city increasing oversight of funding for special education services for private school students. New York City has revised its mandatory reporter training to reduce unnecessary child welfare investigations, possibly in response to Asher Lehrer-Small’s reporting in The 74. Congrats to all!

⏰ Awards: Four months ago, EWA surveyed members about making changes to its much-debated awards program. This week, they tell us that the changes are going to be announced next week. Meantime, “Sold a Story” — left unrecognized by the EWA awards process — is a duPont-Columbia award finalist.

⏰ Resources: A new study from the National Council on Teacher Quality concludes that a majority of state elementary teacher reading licensing tests are not good enough. Check out their brief to see if your state is one of them.

 

THE KICKER

“S/O to anyone who ever told an education reporter that they were on a ‘starter’ or entry-level beat,” says new White House correspondent Erica Green.

 

That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading!

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By Alexander Russo with additional writing from Colleen Connolly, Will Callan, and Greg Toppo.