The Great Resignation comes to the education beat

Frustrated and emboldened, established education journalists are leaving full-time staff jobs to work independently, find a better newsroom, and recover some semblance of work-life balance. Newsroom managers, take heed!

By Alexander Russo

When the pandemic hit two and a half years ago, many of us worried about a wave of education journalists getting laid off.

As it turned out, some did. Many others were furloughed. A few were bought out. And some jobs were left unfilled.

But massive layoffs never materialized.

Eventually, however, some beat reporters and editors began moving on their own.

And over the past year in particular, there seems to have been a surge in established reporters with permanent staff jobs making bold moves, leaving the beat, or going freelance — whether or not they have a new full-time job in hand. Indeed, there have been so many fulltime staffers going freelance that Poynter wrote a story about it last year.

The reasons vary, and we don’t know them all for sure. There’s always been a certain amount of churn on the beat. But covering education during the pandemic was a particularly thankless and exhausting task. Education journalists who are also parents of school-age children have been under singular pressure. Like workers in other industries, education journalists may well feel that they have endured as much as they can and are seeking the possibility of more fulfilling or well-compensated work.

“This is the kind of work I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” tweeted former Houston Public Media education reporter Laura Isensee, among a handful of local public radio journalists who have recently quit education jobs. After a year of working independently on several projects, Isensee took a job working for Adonde Media, “a company with leaders whose values match my own and show up in what we do. And where I feel valued as my whole self.”

“This is the kind of work I’ve wanted to do for a long time [with] a company with leaders whose values match my own and show up in what we do.”

Many of the recent job moves can be explained as the kinds of career-building changes that education reporters and other journalists have always made:

“Taking the position as a deputy education editor at The Washington Post has been a wonderful opportunity to cover one of the most important topics in the country right now,” the Post’s Janel Davis told me about her move from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The Post has been a leader in local and national education coverage and I am excited to be part of that.”

“I’d always aspired to be a ‘full-time’ investigative reporter,” the Wall Street Journal’s Tawnell Hobbs told me via email. She loved being an education reporter, but the chance “to do investigations all the time” was too good to pass up.

A few, like the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Chapman, changed jobs in part because of the focus on schools that the pandemic had generated. When a national job opened up, Chapman — who had moved to criminal justice after a long career covering education in New York City — could not resist a “once-in-a-lifetime story.”

“Taking the position as a deputy education editor at The Washington Post has been a wonderful opportunity to cover one of the most important topics in the country right now.” 

But in many cases, journalists appear to be looking for projects and newsrooms that suit them, rather than sticking around just because a job is safe or a newsroom is prestigious.

“The pandemic opened my eyes a little bit more to me as a mom and what I want,” says Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, a longtime Connecticut Mirror reporter who moved to WNPR Connecticut public radio last year and recently moved to Hearst CT. “It made me think if my priorities were straight.”

Rabe Thomas says she was struggling with the balancing act between in-depth investigations and short-term coverage that plagues so many small-newsroom journalists — and looking to “fine-tune what I wanted for myself as a reporter, what sort of stories I thought needed to be told, and which publications would allow for that.”

Former Seattle Times reporter Claudia Rowe left the paper four years ago — well before the pandemic — but her decision process mirrors what more recent job-changers report. She told us she wanted to write a second book, which required flexibility, and she was looking for challenges beyond “the constraints of my beat.”

“Happily, I’ve been able to meet both of those goals since leaving the newsroom in 2018,” says Rowe. “I am now at work on a book about foster care, and I’m an opinion columnist at the online news site Crosscut, which allows me the latitude to report – and comment – on what I see as overlapping beats: education, child welfare, and juvenile justice.”

At a certain point, experienced reporters develop strong views about what they should be covering or want to break out from the confines of traditional K-12 reporting, which sometimes creates tension with editors. And, while few freelancers want to talk about it, some of the job changes have been unrelated to the beat, including those who left to recover from toxic newsrooms, low pay and high stress, or to take care of small children in ways that traditional newsrooms don’t accommodate.

“The pandemic opened my eyes a little bit more to me as a mom and what I want.” 

Of course, this is all anecdotal and incomplete. We don’t know if there is a surge in job-changing going on right now, or whether the number of education news jobs is up or down. And we don’t know if there was more churn in this beat than others.

To be sure, there are other job changes that don’t seem to fit a pattern. Some journalists like Rachel Cohen are moving in the other direction, from freelance to staff. Cohen joined Vox after being a full-time freelancer for over four years. Others like WHYY’s Avi Wolfman-Arent changed roles within their newsroom motivated by the desire for a new challenge and a complicated mix of feelings about his listeners’ deeply critical impressions of a city school system that he viewed more sympathetically. “That part hurt me,” said Wolman-Arent, who is now a full-time on-air host at the station. “I was like, ‘are we giving people this impression?’”

As someone who watches job changes pretty closely, it has certainly looked to me as though there have been more job changes than usual — and not just the traditional job-hopping of the past.

On the whole, that’s probably a good thing. Journalists shouldn’t feel trapped in their jobs. Newsroom managers need to know that they can’t just insist veteran reporters do their jobs the way that they used to. These journalists feel limited by their newsroom roles and confident enough to leave them. My fingers are crossed that these changes work out well for everyone.

Previous staffing/job change stories from The Grade
A brain drain in education journalism (August 2019)
Furlough journal, day one; staring at the screen (April 2020)
The furlough effect: what forced breaks are doing to education coverage (June 2020)
Exit interview: Star reporter Jenny Abamu explains why she left journalism — and ways to fix education news (2019)