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DETROIT'S 'SEGREGATION
WALL' STILL STANDS
Best education journalism of the week
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🏆 BEST: The best story of the week is Built to keep Black from white by former Chalkbeat Detroit reporter Erin Einhorn and Olivia Lewis for NBC News and BridgeDetroit. The reporting duo investigated the history of a wall built in Detroit in 1941 separating a Black neighborhood from a white neighborhood and its legacy today — including on education. “The side of the wall these residents called home would later affect the sale price of their houses, the value of their next homes, and, eventually, the wealth they might inherit from their parents,” Einhorn and Lewis write. It would also affect their experiences in school and, by extension, the rest of their lives. The story is a good reminder that writing about education often means writing about housing, too — and that sometimes you have to go way back into the past to understand the present.
🏆 RUNNER-UP: This week’s runner-up is a three-part series on the children’s mental health crisis in the pandemic from Bekah McNeel, co-published in the Texas Tribune and The 74. In Part 1, McNeel talks to teachers seeking training on how to deal with the current crisis as emergency department visits increased by at least a quarter for children in the last year. “It’s scary,” one principal said. “Traumas have set in for our students, in their minds, in their thinking, that are really going to hinder them forever if we don’t address them.” In Part 2, McNeel focuses on a mental health organization that expected to see about 300 in their first six months of operation. But once the pandemic hit, the number soared to 1,600 students. McNeel was inspired by Alec MacGillis’ ProPublica story The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers. That story, she tweeted, “SHOWED US why despair is incredibly dangerous. It proved to us that we have a despair problem, and gave us choices about how we move forward. So, I looked back at my solutions journalism training, and said, ‘Who's working on this problem?’"
🏆 BONUS STORIES: How backlash to the largest school consolidation in U.S. cemented disparities in Memphis (Commercial Appeal), Staffing shortages, exhaustion, family vacations temper big summer-school hopes (LA Times), and A haunting photo led this yearbook teacher to uncover alleged sexual assaults at Berkeley High (Berkeleyside).
To get daily education headlines and hear about education journalism events, follow @thegrade_.
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MASK CONFUSION
The big story of the week, according to us.
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The big story of the week was — again — if kids and staff are going to be required to wear masks in schools whether or not they’re vaccinated. The CDC and AAP recommendations contradict each other, and states and districts are adopting a range of policies.
🔊 Going further than CDC, pediatricians group recommends masks in schools even for the vaccinated (Washington Post)
🔊 Everyone Should Wear A Mask In Schools, Vaccinated Or Not, U.S. Pediatricians Say (NPR)
🔊 Schools confront more polarization with mask rules for fall (AP)
🔊 Atlanta students must wear masks when school starts, district says (CNN)
🔊 Virginia urges all elementary-schoolers, some middle- and high-schoolers, to wear masks indoors this fall (Washington Post)
🔊 CPS will require masks for all students and teachers inside schools, regardless of vaccination status (Chicago Tribune)
🔊 Small California school districts will refuse to follow mask mandate (CalMatters)
🔊 Vaccinated staff and students can go mask free when school starts, Indianapolis district says (Chalkbeat Indiana)
🔊 San Diego parent group sues state to end school mask mandate (San Diego Union-Tribune)
🔊 Some Baltimore-area school districts are not planning to require masks this fall, leaving choice to parents (Baltimore Sun)
🔊 Surging number of suburban school districts will let parents decide if their students will be masked in the fall: ‘We’re getting kids their freedom back’ (Chicago Tribune)
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WHITE JOURNOS AND 'LEARNING LOSS'
New from The Grade
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In this week’s column, Chicago teacher Ray Salazar says that he sees too much education coverage that catastrophizes remote learning, downplays preexisting problems, and minimizes students’ successes. Most of it is being written by white journalists.
"Through this white lens, we see low-income Black and Brown students as a uniform group victimized by the pandemic rather than as complex humans whose experiences hold insights into how our educational systems and worldviews must change," he writes.
Salazar looks at a recent WBEZ story that decries “a devastating year for many Chicago students,” whose problems include that it focuses on third-quarter grades, which are usually not included on students’ transcripts and which are traditionally lower — even before the pandemic. He also takes a critical look at a ProPublica story, and praises a Chicago Sun-Times story.
Not everyone agreed with Salazar’s perspective. “Stop reporting on the truth? Hmmm. That's a new approach,” tweeted freelance education reporter Laura McKenna.
Coming soon: The Grade's annual newsroom diversity update, a column from USC professor Morgan Polikoff on how to cover district curriculum decisions, and how some Cleveland community members are trying to supplement dwindling education coverage.
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MEDIA TIDBITS
Thought-provoking commentary on the latest coverage.
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Above: David Zweig's latest WIRED story about confusing kid vaccine messages from the CDC
📰 CONFLICTING ADVICE OVER MASKS AND KID VACCINES: School planning was thrown into confusion again this week when the AAP recommended masks for everyone in schools, vaccinated or not — a step further than the recent CDC guidance. The AAP has played an interesting role in recent months, pushing for school reopening at one point, then pulling back. But it’s not alone. The CDC’s kid vaccination guidance is a hot mess, according to David Zweig in Wired magazine. “The agency's strange math and blunt statements are missing key nuances,” he writes, “and may be underplaying myocarditis cases in teenage boys in particular.” No wonder there’s so much confusion and disagreement over two critical reopening practices.
📰 THE MASSIVE ROLE OF LOCAL CONTROL: Even without conflicting national advice, states and districts would be adopting a range of policies. That’s largely because we’ve got such a decentralized system of state and local oversight, often featuring elected school board officials. That’s a problem, according to Westyn Branch-Elliman, Shira Doron, and Elissa Schechter-Perkins, because it makes local officials vulnerable to pressures to adopt restrictive policies. Check out their recent Washington Post op-ed, Leaving it to school boards to vote on mask rules is asking for trouble. The huge range of policies and the susceptibility of district decision-making to political pressures are angles that education reporters should include in their coverage: How does your district’s policy compare to another similar district? How does it compare or contrast to guidance from national organizations?
📰 WHEN THE COVERAGE FOCUSES ON WHITE SUBSCRIBERS: As Nikki Usher recently pointed out, too much of local journalism is focused on the real and perceived interests of white subscribers. As she points out in a Nieman Lab article (and in her new book), that’s why there’s so much high school sports coverage and so much coverage that seems oriented toward white readers. This plays out in education journalism, too, though the most obvious example is a national publication not a local one. When it comes to education, the New York Times seems most interested in how two disproportionately white groups — educators and work-from-home parents — feel about school. Too frequently left out: what vulnerable students and parents feel about school (or, to be specific, what they want from the school system and whether it's being provided to them). The latest examples? Last week’s district-focused look at efforts to recover from the pandemic and this week’s callout from the magazine for teachers to tell their recovery plans for the new year. I know and admire lots of education journalists at the Times, but the pattern is strong.
📰 THE CHILDREN'S BEAT? THE SCHOOL INDUSTRY BEAT? In a recent essay in Dissent magazine, journalist Carla Murphy notes that the crime beat would probably be renamed health and safety (or the prison economy) if it was written by and for what she calls “the affected persons.” So how would the education beat be reconceived if it were producing news by and for the communities that are being covered, whose lives are most dramatically affected by education? It’s an interesting thing to consider. I personally don’t care much for the “learning” beat, though I know some folks like it. (Too abstract and academic, in my opinion.) But my ideas — the children’s beat, the school industry beat — are surely not as good as yours.
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HIRES, JOBS, KUDOS
Who's going where & doing what?
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Above, left to right: Chalkbeat publisher Bene Cipolla, the Texas Tribune’s Brian Lopez, and Tiny News Collective member Jeannette Andruss.
🔥 Fellowships: Congrats to Chalkbeat publisher Bene Cipolla who is a 2021 Sulzberger Fellow with sponsorship from the Knight Foundation. Her project focuses on Chalkbeat’s growth strategy and operational plan as it confronts the local news crisis and its network model's application to other topics.
🔥 Welcome: Brian Lopez is the Texas Tribune’s new education reporter. The Tiny News Collective, which helps journalists start their own small newsrooms, announced its first cohort of six reporters. One of them, Jeannette Andruss, will cover education news in the Los Alamitos Unified School District “in a rapidly diversifying and politically 'purple' area." Follow her on Twitter.
🔥 Jobs: U.S. News & World Report is hiring an education reporter to cover the college beat. The Texas Tribune is hiring an education and health editor. EWA is hiring a program manager, a communications coordinator, and a program specialist. The 19th is hiring an education reporter. KPCC and LAist are hiring a temporary higher education reporter. California’s EdSource is hiring a managing editor. The 74 is hiring a senior education reporter to focus on policy, equity, and solutions. The News-Press and Naples Daily News in Florida are hiring an education reporter.
🔥 New generation: While Connecticut has recently lost veteran education reporters like Linda Lambeck and Jacqueline Rabe Thomas — part of a long-term trend David DesRoches chronicled in his 2019 overview of education coverage in the state — there is “a whole new generation of reporters covering education now,” tweets Rabe Thomas, listing the CT Mirror’s Adria Watson, the Hartford Courant’s Amanda Blanco, and the CT Post’s Cayla Bamberger. Follow them all if you don’t already.
🔥 Kudos: EdWeek reporter Stephen Sawchuk gets a big "cheers" this week from the Education Gadfly for his excellent story on how schools can address chronic absenteeism this fall. And ed tech reporter Audrey Watters’ book “Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning” is out! We interviewed Watters about her views on ed tech and journalism way back in 2017.
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EVENTS, INFO, PANELS
What just happened & what's coming next?
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Above: Don’t miss this essential reading from the New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi on the forgotten history of Indigenous boarding schools in the U.S.
⏰ Media appearances: Ed Week’s Andrew Ujifusa was on Vox’s The Weeds podcast to talk about critical race theory and what’s really at stake in the debate. The National Press Club hosted an event July 22 on education media, with Politico’s Delece Smith-Barrow, the Wall Street Journal’s Chastity Pratt, and EWA’s Caroline Hendrie talking about teaching history and critical race theory among other things. The event wasn’t recorded, but I bet it was a good one. EWA held a webinar on July 20 about rethinking post-pandemic grades and how to report on the topic.
⏰ Upcoming: Adam Harris will talk about his book “The State Must Provide” in a virtual event Aug. 18 with The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice. EWA is hosting a webinar next Thursday, July 29, on covering how the science of learning translates to the classroom. The free Poynter Power of Diverse Voices seminar will feature St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Aisha Sultan, Washington Post columnist Fernanda Santos, and NPR TV critic Eric Deggans. Politico education editor Delece Smith-Barrow enthusiastically says to apply.
⏰ Resources: Teacher prep programs vary widely in the percentage of graduates who pass certification exams, according to a new report from NCQT, giving policy makers and journalists a new view into the quality and rigor of these programs. Chalkbeat, EdWeek, and The 74 have written up the new study, but there’s lots of room for others to localize it. Also: Journalists of color, if you “need a resource to send your well-meaning white colleagues who ask how they can be allies,” Emma Carew wrote this just for you.
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Watch The Atlantic’s Adam Harris unbox the hardcover version of his new book about HBCUs. “If you hear sobbing in the distance that’s me happy crying,” he says.
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That's all, folks. Thanks for reading!
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Read more about The Grade here. You can read all the back issues of The Grade’s newsletter, Best of the Week, here.
By Alexander Russo with additional writing from Michele Jacques and Colleen Connolly.
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