ICYMI: Striking teachers, scrutinizing The Atlantic’s education coverage, & media controversies

BEST OF THE WEEK

Let’s give praise to all the journalists who have been busting their asses this week covering the teacher activism in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and elsewhere.

Their work — see examples below — has been impressive, sustained, and extremely helpful to those of us trying to understand what’s going on in these states, and why.

A special shout-out goes to The Oklahoman’s Ben Felder, who’s in the challenging position of being the local education reporter covering a story that’s gone national. His Tuesday story, when things got pretty heated, is probably the highlight of the week. You can read all his recent stuff here.

Sick of strike coverage? I get that. See also ProPublica’s A Betrayal, the story of an immigrant high school student who tried to get out of the gang he felt trapped in but ended up detained by ICE and slated for deportation. Or read Jezebel’s Gun Fatalism Is Reasonable in a Terrifying Country which takes a look back at the January school shooting in Kentucky that everybody’s already forgotten.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

TEACHER STRIKES 2018
🏆 ABC: Teacher protests put Republicans on the spot in red states
🏆 WashPost: Low pay, big classes are the plight of Oklahoma teachers
🏆 NYT: Why Teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky Are Walking Out and What to Expect
🏆 The 74: Striking Teachers Want Better Classrooms, Newer Textbooks
🏆 NPR: Teachers Are Marching Ahead Of Their Unions In Oklahoma And Arizona
🏆 NYT: Teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky Walk Out: ‘It Really Is a Wildfire’

INEQUALITY
🏆 NY Daily News: Children from poor neighborhoods shut out of city’s elite high schools
🏆 NYT: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges
🏆 NPR: Food, Housing Insecurity May Be Keeping College Students From Graduating
🏆 WashPost: Many college students don’t have enough to eat
🏆 Vox: How America has changed since Martin Luther King Jr.’s death
🏆 The74: In 46 States, HS Requirements Aren’t Enough to Qualify for Nearby Universities
🏆 Chalkbeat: LA state superintendent John White raises concerns about online testing

GAO SCHOOL DISCIPLINE REPORT
🏆 NYT: Government Watchdog Finds Racial Bias in School Discipline
🏆 Vox: Black kids are way more likely to be punished in school than white kids, study finds

SCHOOL GUN VIOLENCE
🏆 WLRN: Shutting Down A Black Lives Matter Statement Days Before Parkland Shooting
🏆 NYT: Putting Out a Yearbook After the Parkland Shooting
🏆 NYT: After Gun Control Marches, ‘It’ll Go Away’ vs. ‘We Are Not Cynical Yet’
🏆 Huffington Post: 73 Teens Shot To Death In The 37 Days Since The Parkland Massacre

MISC
🏆 The Detroit News: Hard lessons for Betsy DeVos in D.C.
🏆 The Independent: Teacher who saved hundreds of young Jews during Holocaust dies, aged 107

EDUCATION COVERAGE AT THE “NEW” ATLANTIC

The latest column from The Grade focuses on The Atlantic’s education coverage under new ownership and the questions raised by such an arrangement.

The Atlantic has long been a major source of high-quality education journalism, both in the magazine and through its education page. And so the announcement nine months ago that billionaire education philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs was going to become a majority owner of The Atlantic through her LLC, the Emerson Collective, generated some understandable excitement and concern.

Would The Atlantic ramp up its coverage of education, given Powell Jobs’ long-standing interest in the issue? Would the outlet shift its coverage to accommodate her particular education agenda (focused on reinventing the current system)?

So far, at least, the answers to both those questions appear to be “no.” But there have been some changes and may be more coming down the line. (How is The Atlantic going to cover, for example, one of Powell Job’s favorite school reform strategies falling flat – as many do?)

MEDIA TIDBITS

📰 MEDIA FLIP-FLOP ON TEACHER STRIKES? The 2018 coverage is strikingly enthusiastic in terms of tone and volume. But Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, wants to know why didn’t the media (the liberal media in particular) support the Chicago teachers’ strike from a few years ago nearly as enthusiastically? I hadn’t remembered that liberal media outlets/pundits were critical. As I recall it, Chicago news coverage wasn’t particularly critical, either.

📰  BARNUM IN THE BULLSEYE: There were questions (again) about a Matt Barnum article in Chalkbeat. This one’s about teacher salaries. In it, Barnum reports that that teacher salaries have declined over the past 30 years. However, he fails to adjust for changes in teacher years of service, which have declined over time, and he doesn’t make that entirely clear to readers. (Also this week, Barnum won an AERA award for his reporting on education research. So obviously there are lots of people who think highly of his work.)

📰  PROGRESS: Chalkbeat and WBEZ’s education team recently added staff and reported upticks in newsroom diversity. Let’s hope more outlets follow suit. Stay tuned for The Grade’s annual newsroom diversity story in the coming weeks.

📰  MYSTERY IN LA: Speaking of diversity in education journalism, who’s going to keynote the EWA conference session titled “Diversity in the Journalism Workforce”? We don’t know yet. All the tentative agenda tells us that the session focuses on how “recent surveys show newsrooms lag in ethnic and gender diversity.” Hope it’s someone really good.

📰  DISCIPLINE DISCUSSION: There’s a disturbing video showing kids attacking a teacher that got published by Breitbart. I’m told that the incident got lots of local coverage but not much of any national attention. Why is that?

📰  YEAH, SOCIAL MEDIA DID IT: “Media loves the social media angle to any story,” noted Rachel Cohen. “’Social media ignited the Arab Spring! It fuels the teacher strikes!’ Often email is a much bigger thing at work but that’s old school.”

📰  WTF EDTECH PITCHES: “Raise your hand if you’re an education reporter absolutely overwhelmed by ed tech pitches,” tweeted Dana Goldstein. “These companies must be spending so much money on this!”

📰  NYT LAUNCHES SPECIAL SECTION: One of the pieces in the new NYT “Learning” section came under fire for how it describes No Child Left Behind Act and Common Core. “This is just factually wrong,” complained EdWeek’s Stephen Sawchuk. “Who wrote this? Are they correcting it?” No word on that yet. However, I’m being told that there will be four Learning sections this year, including this one. The others will publish in June, August, and November.

📰  MYSTERY TEACHER: “It was September, 2008, and Hannah, a middle-school teacher at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public school in Harlem, hadn’t shown up for the first day of school.” Great sentence from the New Yorker story How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity.

📰  DOES THIS SEEM RIGHT TO YOU? This Illinois NPR piece headlined Culture Shock: Teachers Call Noble Charters ‘Dehumanizing’ seems thinly sourced and fails to note the progress that’s been made in recent years. Perhaps that’s why it’s not getting picked up as widely as it otherwise might. You might better spend your time reading this Chicago Reporter piece: Inside Noble.

PEOPLE, JOBS, & AWARDS

🔥 Adriana Cardona and Kate McGee (pictured above) are joining the WBEZ Chicago public radio station’s powerhouse education team.

🔥 Congrats to all the IRE finalists and category winners but especially to WTVF Nashville (for “Toxic School Water”), WBEZ Chicago (for “Chicago Public Schools Secretly Overhauled Special Education at Students’ Expense”), and Oregon Public Broadcasting (for “Chemawa Indian School Investigation”).

🔥 Check out Dana Goldstein’s appearance on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes from a few nights ago, talking about the teacher strikes. Pedro Noguera is also on the segment.

🔥 In a recent story, longtime education reporter Claudio Sanchez recollects a 1996 visit to Topeka, where Brown v. Board of Education began.

🔥 The Spring 2018 City Bureau Reporting Fellows in Chicago will be reporting on education, criminal justice and policing this summer. The education team — Hannah Hayes, Emmanuel Camarillo, and F. Amanda Tugade — is going to look into schools with hyper-contentious local school council elections and others without many candidates at all — and what it means for the students enrolled there

🔥 “Carl was the only Detroit public schools teacher at a p.d. event I attended in Detroit,” wrote EdSurge’s Jenny Abamu. “ When I asked to visit his school, ranked one of the lowest performing in the state, he didn’t hesitate to let me in. No prep, no dog and pony show, just showed up.”

🔥 “I have a byline and a coffee mug, so I guess I officially work here now,” tweeted Adam Harris about his first week at The Atlantic.

EVENTS, DEADLINES, & ANNOUNCEMENTS

⏰ The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism is hosting a half-day conference today from 1-5:30 pm titled “Magazines and Politics, 2018” on topics such as “Russia, race, verticals, #MeToo, our dying democracy, and more.” Among the speakers are Jelani Cobb and Molly Fischer.

⏰ The deadline is April 10 for EWA’s new to the beat program. If you’re an education reporter with less than two years of experience covering education, apply for its “new to the beat” training session in May.

⏰ Reveal is looking for its third cohort of diversity fellows, a 10-month program for up to five working journalists. Deadline is April 12.

⏰ Due April 16, the EWA reporting fellowship is a great opportunity to do a project that might otherwise never get done.

⏰ ProPublica wants to give students money to attend the conferences of the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Native American Journalists Association, and the Association of LGBTQ Journalists. Roughly 20 scholarships of $700 each are being given out. Deadline is April 30.

⏰ Coming May 1 in DC, the fourth Atlantic education summit is being sponsored by Robert Wood Johnson, Gates, & Walton foundations plus media partner Hechinger Report

KICKER

A group of Iowa high school students helped report a statewide investigation into classroom science instruction that found that “nearly half of teachers surveyed by IowaWatch journalists teach climate change ‘as theory, informing students about the variety of thought that exists.’” There are other student-run journalism efforts around the country. Pretty exciting stuff.

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