Wildfire closures, a creative response to culture wars, & an education reporter goes Biblical: Best Education Journalism of the Week (6/9/23)

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In this week’s newsletter: Schools’ chaotic response to smoggy air. One superintendent’s surprisingly effective defense against school culture wars. The promise and peril of first-person reporter essays. An unintentionally revealing podcast from the New York Times. In the beginning, there was a smart-ass education reporter.

WILDFIRE CHAOS

The big story of the week

The big education story of the week is the somewhat chaotic school response to Canadian wildfire smog that enveloped the East Coast (Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post , USA Today, Chalkbeat NY, Chalkbeat PA, Chalkbeat Newark).

New York City schools were open Wednesday, the first day of intense smog, then closed for a previously scheduled local holiday on Thursday, and are closed (remote) today for high schoolers who were supposed to be in school. Philadelphia schools were open Wednesday and Thursday but are remote today. Baltimore City schools appear to have been open all week. As far as I can tell, DCPS schools are also open. Charter and Catholic schools are making their own decisions (Baltimore Sun, Inquirer).

Why did some systems close while others didn’t? What did West Coast schools do in similar situations? What are the guidelines that would help shape district decisions? Are kids necessarily safer at home than at school during bad air days? There’s got to be a better way for these decisions to be made — and for the coverage to give readers context.

Other big education stories of the week:

 CHARTER SCHOOL VICTORIES: An Oklahoma state school board approved the nation’s first taxpayer-funded Catholic charter school. Though a victory for Christian conservatives, it is expected to face a long series of legal challenges (New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Chalkbeat). Speaking of charter schools, the findings of a national study by Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes showed that charter schools often outperform traditional public schools (EdWeek, New York magazine). 

 BOOK BAN PUSHBACK: We hear a lot about book bans these days, but in a Connecticut district, weeks of debate ended with the resignation of two Republican school board members and a vote to keep the two books in question on shelves (AP). And a parent in Utah found a creative way to fight back against a state law there — by getting the Bible pulled from some shelves “because it’s pornographic by our new definition” (NBC News). While reviews are uncomfortable and occasionally contentious, “the process works,” Leander, Texas, district library coordinator Becky Calzada told The Grade contributor Colleen Connolly in February 2022. (For more about the process, check out Connolly’s story in School Library Journal.) Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center named Moms for Liberty, the group behind many of recent book challenges, an extremist group (USA Today). 

 POLICE IN SCHOOLS: After districts across the nation pulled police officers from schools in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, several are quietly reinstating them. The school board in Alexandria, Va., this week approved an agreement to keep police in schools after a long debate (Washington Post). This follows a decision last month in D.C. that backtracked on pulling police from schools (DCist). In Denver, the school board is considering whether to backtrack on its own 2020 policy barring police from campuses (Denver Post, Chalkbeat Colorado).

STILL HOMESCHOOLING

The best education journalism of the week

The best education journalism of the week is the Mercury News’ Thousands of California families are still homeschooling their children. What’s keeping them from the classroom?, which explores the numbers and motivations behind families that are keeping their kids out of traditional schools.

One thing that’s particularly welcome about this data-heavy piece from reporter Elissa Miolene is how it avoids telling a simplistic story. It notes that the 70% surge in homeschooling began before the pandemic, peaked in 2020-21, and has subsided since schools have reopened. It also reminds readers that homeschooled kids are a relatively small share of California’s total student population. If only every education story gave readers this much context.

One unusual angle that the story explores is parents who are homeschooling in order to give kids a more well-rounded childhood experience — a response to the increasingly academic focus of many Bay Area schools. There are also some helpful graphs comparing homeschooling numbers in different parts of the region over time. And I learned about something I’d never heard of before, called “home-based charter schools.”

Other great education news stories of the week:

Pan­demic Stim­u­lus Aid May Not Be Do­ing Enough to Help Schools (New York Times)

10 years after mass CPS school closings, enrollment is even worse. What can be done? (Sun Times)

For Memphis 3rd graders, threat of retention has hovered since kindergarten (Chalkbeat TN)

Federal Indian boarding schools still exist, but what’s inside may be surprising (NPR)

Some students with disabilities are being forced to graduate high school too early (KJZZ) 

The Class of 2023 lost everything to COVID. Then they fought back (USA Today)

The Class of 2023 has a few things to say (Los Angeles Daily News) 

Horror in Classroom 27: Sex abuse case results in $52M payout (Sacramento Bee)

New York Wants to Teach Kids About Gay History, While Other States Are Banning it (Wall Street Journal)

A suburban Minnesota district tried to close its most diverse elementary school—until parents fought back. And won. (Sahan Journal 06/01)

Above: AP reporter Heather Hollingsworth’s son Thomas, who has struggled with reading.

MAKING POLICY PERSONAL

Our latest columns and commentary

More and more news outlets and teams are experimenting with first-person essays including ones written by journalists. Chalkbeat and the Christian Science Monitor come to mind, though there are others.

One recent example was AP reporter Heather Hollingsworth’s moving first-person piece about her family’s struggles to figure out how to help their son Thomas learn to read — part of a series of stories the AP education team has been producing on the current reckoning over literacy instruction.

In this new interview, ‘Harder than I thought possible,’ Hollingsworth talks about how her initial reluctance to tell her own family’s story was eventually eclipsed by the benefits of deeply personalizing a big, messy policy story.

“We are really trying to take policies and trends and explain them at the individual level,” says Hollingsworth.

REDIRECTING THE CULTURE WARS

Coverage of promising school innovations & signs of progress

💡 The culture wars get an unusually nuanced treatment in this story about an Ohio superintendent who responds to increasingly contentious board meetings by partnering with local religious leaders and redirecting attention to students and their achievements (Christian Science Monitor).

💡 This data-rich and solutions-focused piece about rebounding graduation rates for Minnesota’s high schoolers focuses on a solution that worked especially well for the state’s Black and American Indian students — individualized guidance from “graduation coaches” — while also using graphics to show which student groups have yet to recover (Star Tribune).

💡 Parent input was a primary driver behind a new and growing approach to language services in Boulder schools that brings language specialists into the regular classroom to work with English learners (Chalkbeat Colorado).

💡 A magazine article about the pros and cons of limiting student cell phone use in schools presents a helpful range of options that schools can consider (The Atlantic).

💡 Student voices carry this light but lively radio story about a class of 5th graders puzzling through the problem of how to protect pollinators in their own backyard from succumbing to disease-carrying mites (Colorado Public Radio). Both the lesson and the storytelling approach are worth replicating.

Read more about the importance of covering promising innovations and preliminary successes.

Above: The Atlantic’s Adam Harris, far right, was spotted at the D.C. screening of Exclusion U, a new documentary about Ivy League exclusion practices that’s streaming soon.

PEOPLE, JOBS

Who’s going where and doing what

🔥 EWA award snubs & winners: It was hard enough to take this year’s EWA awards seriously, given “Sold a Story” wasn’t a finalist. Then Mandy McLaren’s Courier Journal reading series got snubbed. But the full list of winners include many admirable pieces we’ve written about here. The three big individual prizes went to Camille Phillips, Fernando Ortiz Jr., Dan Katz, and Jacob Rosati of Texas Public Radio; NBC’s Mike Hixenbaugh; and Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards of ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune. Congrats to all whose work was recognized. My criticism is aimed at the flawed judging process.

🔥 Literacy 2023-24: Now at the Boston Globe, McLaren participated in a high-interest panel on how to cover literacy along with APM Report’s Emily Hanford and EducationNC’s Rupen Fofaria. One of Fofaria’s main takeaways was that a lot of reporters want to cover literacy but don’t know where to start. His advice? “This isn’t just one story. You don’t have to cover everything in one article; in fact, you can’t. Just start, and preferably start in a classroom so you can see things for yourself.” Sounds like good advice to me. Covering literacy should be the focus of education journalism in 2023-24. Given the high level of state and local activity, there’s no story that’s more under-covered — or more important to student success.

🔥 Strikes and layoffs: Hundreds of Gannett journalists walked off the job this week to protest job cuts, among other things. I’m told that there were at least 10 education reporters across 10 Gannett papers that participated in the strike. Meanwhile, there are layoffs at the LA Times — again. We haven’t heard of any education team members being affected, but anyone who needs it should learn about the Community Aid Network that Kati Kokal and others have created. 

🔥 Everyday journalism: In a new piece for Poynter, Report for America president and co-founder Steven Waldman argues that high school sports and school board coverage can help save journalism and protect our democracy. “These types of stories teach neighbors about each other, provide basic information on community problems and create a sense of shared interest.” Journalists focus on investigations and features at their own peril.

🔥 Frightening readers: In a very emotional speech during this week’s board meeting, LAUSD board president Jackie Goldberg called out media outlets for fear mongering coverage of the LGBTQ+ protests outside a North Hollywood elementary school. “When you broadcast this in the way that you did, you frightened LGBTQ kids and adults in every school in this district, and in this city,” said Goldberg at the 2:44 mark of the meeting. 

🔥 Job openings: The 74 is hiring an education reporter to replace Asher Lehrer-Small. Honolulu Civil Beat is also hiring an education reporter. Former Spencer winner and current education editor at The Conversation Jamaal Abdul-Alim is looking for freelance education editors. 

🔥 In real life: Lots of folks have never met the people they work with in real life, including APM Reports’ Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak. They worked together for more than three years before finally meeting in person this week.  

Above: The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein was on The Daily with podcast host Michael Barbaro, right.

APPEARANCES, EVENTS, & NEW RESOURCES

What’s happening and new research

⏰ Reading reckoning: There’s a brief but vivid bit of tape at just past the half-hour mark of the recent The Daily podcast in which the New York Times’ Dana Goldstein and Michael Barbaro debate the need for accountability and balanced literacy advocate Lucy Calkins turns a question about her own complicity into a call for her critics to apologize. However, there’s also a softness to Goldstein’s questioning of Calkins — some of which we also hear on tape — and the seemingly defensiveness of her responses to Barbaro. The current reckoning has to include the news media. We sold the balanced literacy story, too.

⏰ New ventures: Former Houston Chronicle education reporter Jacob Carpenter is now team leader for the Houston Landing, which launched earlier this month. There are lots of education stories already on the site. The 74’s Asher Lehrer-Small is coming on soon to cover the Houston suburbs along with a TBD reporter covering HISD. We can’t wait to see what else they do. The Trace has a new newsletter out called “The Trajectory” about solutions to America’s gun violence problem. Though not explicitly about school gun violence, there’s no doubt it will be an interesting read for ed reporters.

⏰ Another podcast: WHYY is out with its sixth season of “Schooled,” this one focusing on school funding. “On average, Pennsylvania spends more per student than most other states, but that fact hides something troubling. Across the Commonwealth, school districts are spending wildly different amounts, with the richest spending two or three times more per student than the poorest.”

⏰ Upcoming: Next week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is hosting an event with first-year teachers reflecting on the successes and challenges of life in the classroom. IRE is just around the corner (June 22-25 in Orlando), and this might be the panel with the most intriguing title — how to project manage like a duck: a guide for reporters and editors. See the full schedule here. And in case you missed it, every Thursday starting last month until June 15, the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government has been hosting a virtual conference on school governance. The last one will be about alternatives to school boards.

⏰ Style guides & policies: The AP Stylebook has new guidance on transgender coverage and other LGBTQ+ issues which I’m told is very good. The Chicago Sun-Times announced a new “right to be forgotten” policy that seems weak to me, putting the burden on the source who must fill out a form. 

⏰ Math wars: A few months back, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Stephanie Lee wrote about the much-undercovered controversy over how to teach math. Lee offers some tips on how to cover one of the sub-debates — tracking — including asking questions about how it will impact the math sequence that students take in high school and college, what the district will do if families pay for outside classes in response, and what research the district is looking at. “The question of how to teach math is so much more expansive and complicated (in my view) than how to teach someone how to read,” she told us. 

THE KICKER

“In the beginning, a parent filed a challenge to have the Bible removed from Davis School District libraries, citing passages describing sex and violence,” opens Salt Lake Tribune reporter Courtney Tanner’s story on a Utah school restricting access to the Bible. “The district said let there be a review of the book. And it was so.”

That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading!

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By Alexander Russo with additional writing from Colleen Connolly.