Schools are ‘hugely dynamic places,’ says the Washington Post’s Eli Saslow

The star journalist explains how he reported his new story about a short-staffed Arizona school and the just-arrived international teacher who’s pushed to the brink by her new students.

By Alexander Russo

Journalist Eli Saslow has no shortage of admirers.

So it was no surprise when the Washington Post reporter’s latest piece, An American education, started generating praise almost immediately after it was published.

“A master class in observation, simple and devastating,” wrote one New York Times journalist.

“I read every word that Eli Saslow writes, and have for years,” wrote another. “Start with this.”’

Detailing one international teacher’s excruciatingly difficult experience joining the staff at what Saslow describes as a failing public school, the piece is full of vivid details and observations.

A rural Arizona superintendent desperate for staff goes to the airport to pick up a Filipina teacher who seems to have little idea about what she’s getting into. Students who have experienced a revolving door of substitute teachers push the teacher to the brink of quitting.

Above: Saslow’s latest piece, about a struggling Arizona school and a just-arrived international teacher being tested by her students.

In a phone interview, Saslow describes how he finds, reports, and structures stories about people like those in this piece who are often going through particularly vulnerable moments — and produces stories that are necessarily uncomfortable without stereotyping his sources or their situations.

“Schools are hugely dynamic places,” says Saslow. “So the opportunities for observing scene and dialogue are huge.”

The following interview has been edited and condensed.

How are school-based stories different to report and write?

Saslow: My favorite kinds of journalism involve reporting in person to watch a story evolve, and access in schools can be challenging sometimes. But schools are also hugely dynamic places, so the opportunities for observing scene and dialogue are huge.

What drew you to tell this particular story?

Saslow: Like a lot of us, I’ve been reading a bunch of stories about teacher shortages around the country and had done some reporting before in Arizona about the struggles of recruiting there. I started zoning in on Arizona and honestly almost every superintendent there was leaning on international teachers — many of whom still hadn’t arrived because of visa issues and the slowness of that process.

How did you report this story?

Saslow: I made a couple of trips to Bullhead City. The first time, I went there around the time that Dr. Stewart was going to pick up some of these new arrivals at the airport in Las Vegas. I flew into Vegas, drove to Bullhead, spent a couple of days there, and then drove from Bullhead to Vegas with her as she picked up teachers and brought them back. And then I went back four or five days later as those teachers were beginning their first weeks in the classroom. And, like I do for really all the stories that I write, I just kind of embedded into to their lives for the week.

Schools are hugely dynamic places, so the opportunities for observing scene and dialogue are huge.

How did you get access to the school during such a vulnerable time?

Saslow: I’m unusually privileged in that I have a good bit of time to report my stories. And it always helps to win somebody’s trust over time. So that meant not just one conversation with the superintendent and sort of saying, ‘Can I sit in these classrooms for a week?’ It was first building rapport over the phone, over a few long conversations.

Then it’s going there and and doing a couple of long interviews in her office. Then it’s saying, ‘Hey, can I ride with you to Las Vegas?’ By then she knows me really well, and I know her really well. And we’ve built some amount of mutual trust. She knows that I’m there because I think something important is happening and want other people to know about it.

How did you decide to focus on one particular teacher?

Saslow: With Rose Jean, I think there was something about her … naivete isn’t the right word, but her hopefulness. She had devoted her professional life to being really good at her job and had become the top ranked teacher at her school in the Philippines. And her dream was to come to the U.S.

On that ride back from the airport, the way that she was talking with such hopefulness and certainty about what she would be able to do for the students in the U.S. and what she thought teaching the United States would be like — which of course is very different from how it turned out — I thought that she would make a really interesting person to follow.

How did you win her trust?

Saslow: In some ways it’s almost easiest to build trust with people when they’re at really high intensity moments in their life, right? She needed somebody to talk to and she was in such a crazy situation and also experiencing homesickness and loneliness and all these things. I think in some ways the fact that I was there at the beginning of her time in the U.S. [also] built trust more quickly.

The other thing again is just time. For literally four days in a row, I anchored myself in the back row of her classroom. I watched her teach 28 classes or whatever it was. And over that amount of time, she got more comfortable with me being in the room.

For literally four days in a row, I anchored myself in the back row of her classroom.

Can you tell us more about the kids?

Saslow: In fairness to those students, they’d had 15, 16 different teachers over the first few weeks of the school year. And so at that point, I think it becomes more and more natural to sort of have some ingrained distrust for the person standing in front of you and to test them more and more.

These are not bad kids. These are kids whose behavior was in some cases really challenging, and I would say borderline upsetting. But they also had all the typical hallmarks of almost funny prankish middle school behavior. And these are kids who’ve been attending failing schools for a long time in a place of high transiency and opioid addiction, a brutal pandemic, and they’re walking into the classroom from such a vulnerable place.

The fundamental inequities in our system and the civic unraveling that has left these kids in a school that is so ill equipped to help support them is what will stick with me from reporting this story.

What would a student-centered version of this story have looked like, and what would be the appeal of writing a story from that perspective?

Saslow: I might still write that story somewhere, sometime. I think the appeal is that so many of the challenges in these classrooms are a result of what students are dealing with in their complicated, post-pandemic lives at home.

These are not bad kids. These are kids whose behavior was in some cases really challenging, and I would say borderline upsetting.

How much of your approach is something that a beat reporter could hope to pull off?

Saslow: The most worthwhile time in doing every story for me is spending as much time as possible in conversation or ideally with the people that I’m writing about. The stories are only as good as the material that you can get.

There were times where I would settle for one conversation with somebody and then start to write, when really if I had had two conversations, or if I’d kept them on the phone for 45 minutes longer, then the material would have been so much better.

It’s not just that you have more of it, it’s that you’re figuring out the questions you want to ask, and you’re beginning to learn the thing that’s interesting to you. So I always am trying to shortchange my writing time by extending my reporting time. That’s true if I have a day to do a story, if I have a week, or if in this case I have six weeks.

For this story, the reporting material from the second trip is so much better and so much more real than the first trip, because on the first trip nobody’s really comfortable around me yet. The superintendent’s a little bit on guard. The principal thinks it’s weird that there’s a reporter kind of hanging out at school. And the teachers are a little bit put off or nervous that I’m in their classrooms. That’s better on the second day of that trip. It’s even better on the third day, but then like on the second trip, I come back and, and they’re less freaked. …They relax a little bit which just means that I get to see a slightly more real and true version of their lives.

Above: Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow, who speaks like he writes: in long, detailed, beautiful sentences. How important is access to your reporting? Saslow: I’ve done education stories before where access is an issue, and it becomes a major inhibitor for the kind of journalism that I do, which is really all based on scene and dialogue. I want to be in the places that I’m writing about, and I want to be watching things in real time. If there are places where I know I’m never going to be able to get in there and sit in a class, then that’s probably a place that I’m much less likely to write about. How important is it to you to get the numbers right? Saslow: The kind of stories that I write, the numbers aren’t central. But the stories hang on numbers, right? What I’m trying to do is illuminate the data. If somebody read that story and felt like, ‘Oh, this is only a story about this one school district in Arizona like, why do I need to care?’ that’s a problem. The stories need to feel bigger than that. If they do, it’s in part because I’m not only following the data to get to a story but including it in effective and correct way. What’s been the most interesting reaction so far? Saslow: I guess the most interesting reaction is from the people that I wrote about. I worried, as I often do. It’s a work of journalism, and I’m not writing it for the people that I’m writing about. But to write stories that are honest and true that means I’m writing some things that will hurt a little bit. I’m writing about people and I’m writing about a school district at its most vulnerable moments and that means that some of the things in the story I think are pretty necessarily raw. But the feedback from Bullhead City has been gratitude to be seen in some way. They know how dire the shortage is for them, and they know how close to the edge they are. The most relieving bit of feedback is hearing from them that it feels right. Previous journalist interviews from The Grade: From cheating scandals to broken schools, how New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv tells education stories How ProPublica reporter Hannah Dreier profiled a Long Island high school student trying to get out of MS-13 Why reading went under the radar for so long – and what APM Reports’ Emily Hanford is aiming to do about it ‘Be more curious than furious’ says TIME writer Belinda Luscombe about covering hot-button school issues Author Amanda Ripley on the lamentable rise of ‘conflict’ journalism ‘We could have been a lot louder,’ says NPR’s Anya Kamenetz ‘We wasted a lot of time:’ Veteran Providence Journal reporter Linda Borg reflects