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THE QUARANTINE DILEMMA 
The big story of the week, according to us.

Just days (or weeks) into the new school year, thousands of U.S. students are being sent home to quarantine. School districts are changing quarantine, masking, and vaccination policies and announcing new remote programs on the fly. Parents are scrambling:

🔊 Denver’s strict teacher vaccine mandate is keeping kids in school (USA Today)
🔊 East Bay school district gets pushback over surge of students switching to online learning in delta's wake (SF Chronicle)
🔊 MA hard line against remote learning this year has left some families feeling hopeless (Boston Globe)
🔊 How Can Schools Keep Quarantined Students Learning? (EdWeek - see also Are Schools Quarantining Too Many Students?)
🔊 Quarantines and teacher shortages: a double whammy for California districts (EdSource)
🔊 With 600 students and staff quarantined, IPS announces new COVID protocols (Chalkbeat Indiana)
🔊 Push To Reopen Schools Leaves Many Students Without Remote Options (The 74)
🔊 New Law Sows Confusion, Defiance Over School Quarantines (Montana Public Radio)
🔊 NYC teachers will hold ‘office hours’ for unvaccinated students in quarantine (NY Daily News)
🔊 The New (Temporary) Plan For Teaching LAUSD's Quarantined Students (LAist)

For those districts just starting class this week, bus driver shortages and other transportation problems dominated coverage. See stories from the NYT, NPR, Chicago Sun-Times, GBH Boston, and NY Daily News.

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STRONG COVERAGE FROM THE SOUTHWEST
Best education journalism of the week.
🏆 BEST: The best story of the week is Public information lacking as COVID-19 surges in Arizona classrooms by Maria Polletta and Shaena Montanari of the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. The reporting duo sheds light on a confusing and seemingly unorganized system of data collection and notification when children become infected with COVID-19. As a result, parents are left with a patchwork of information and few clues as to where children contracted the virus (at school or elsewhere). “While districts report infection data to county health officials, who in turn submit it to the state, that information is seldom relayed back to the public in an accessible, thorough way,” they write. Just 30% of the state’s 215 districts provide public-facing dashboards to track outbreaks by school. But this issue is not unique to Arizona. While reports of case counts without proper context can raise alarm unnecessarily, the data that does exist should be easy to access and distributed widely. Kudos to Polletta and Montanari for scrutinizing such an important piece of the pandemic puzzle.

🏆 RUNNER-UP: This week’s runner-up is Texas schools are surveilling students online, often without their knowledge or consent by investigative journalist Ari Sen in the Dallas Morning News. Texas school districts have more contracts with digital surveillance companies than any other state, but many students are unaware they are being tracked on everything from email and social media posts to web history. Sen looks at four of the most widely used surveillance tools in Texas schools, one of which scans more than a billion social media posts a day. Proponents of the technology say it keeps students safe, but others say it goes too far. “Kids need to have the intellectual ability to make mistakes, to suggest ideas outside the box, to give the wrong answer in class, to just test out their mind,” one source said. “And they are much less likely to do that when they’re being surveilled.”

BONUS STORIES: 

🏆 D.C. eliminated the admissions test during the pandemic at its most selective high school. It didn’t help diversify the school. (WaPo)
🏆 Racial Justice: The Effort To Bring Back An Elected Boston School Committee (GBH)
🏆 Santa Monica vs. Malibu: A messy school district divorce over money and who gets the kids (LAT Times)

HOW TO IMPROVE HBCU COVERAGE
New from The Grade

In his new book “The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal — and How to Set Them Right,” the Atlantic’s Adam Harris examines the history of discrimination against Black students and the higher education institutions that enroll them. 

The Grade consulting editor Amber C. Walker interviews Harris about how his personal experience with HBCUs informs his work and what higher education reporters can do to improve their coverage of the institutions, including digging into archives to find out the “historical antecedent for present predicaments.”

"A lot of times people treat HBCUs as sort of a parochial offshoot of higher education rather than an integral part of it,” Harris said. “… If we hope, as members of the media, to give people a greater understanding of colleges and the current situation in higher education, we should be doing more work to cover sectors like HBCUs.” 

Harris gives shout-outs to the Houston Chronicle’s Brittany Britto, Mississippi Today’s Molly Minta, and the Washington Post’s Danielle Douglas-Gabriel for their standout HBCU coverage. 

Can’t wait for the return of the newsletter’s Media Tidbits section next week? Follow me at  @alexanderrusso for real-time media commentary and analysis.

PEOPLE, JOBS, KUDOS
Who's going where & doing what?

Above: TIME Magazine’s Jasmine Aguilera, Madeleine Carlisle, and Katie Reilly reported across the country about the people who kept schools going last year in a collection of mini profiles, From Teachers to Custodians, Meet the Educators Who Saved A Pandemic School Year.

🔥 Jobs: EdSource in California is hiring a managing editor and a web design manager. Bridge Michigan is hiring a statewide education reporter. WBUR, Boston’s public radio, is hiring a new education editor. Chalkbeat is hiring for several positions. EWA is hiring a program manager, a communications coordinator, and a program specialist. Any new job opening out there that folks might want to know about? Let us know. 

🔥 Arrivals: Texas Standard editor T.L. Langford was hired as the Texas Tribune’s first health and education editor. Freelancer Casey Parks, who’s been covering education and working on her book “Diary of a Misfit,” is joining the Washington Post as a gender and family reporter. Ethan Bakuli is leaving the Burlington Free Press, where he covered Vermont identity, to report on K-12 schools for Chalkbeat Detroit. And Tara García Mathewson is back at the Hechinger Report after several months off. Congrats to all!

🔥 Departures: Voice of San Diego reporter Kayla Jimenez, who frequently covered education, is leaving the outlet. Her announcement follows the departure of managing editor Sara Libby, who is joining the San Francisco Chronicle as a politics editor. And speaking of the Chronicle, star intern Emma Talley, who wrote several education stories this summer, published her final story with the paper this week about how an elite high school got rid of their competitive admissions process and improved diversity. In her parting words, she thanked veteran education reporter Jill Tucker for her guidance.

🔥 Congrats to the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Kenya Hunter who won a watchdog award for the second time from her paper!

🔥 Looking for a new newsletter? You could do worse than Cafeteria Duty, which recently investigated a favorite topic of mine: the negativity in education headlines. "I started this newsletter because I thought much of education writing was not that great,” writes the anonymous education writer behind the Substack. “I don’t think it has to be!" Sign up or follow them at @cafeteria_duty

APPEARANCES, RESOURCES
What just happened & what's coming next?

Above: Check out the New York Times map of school mask mandates and guidance in each state. For more resources, see Burbio’s school closure map, Education Week’s teacher vaccination policy tracker, and CRPE’s new update on district reopening practices.

⏰ NYT national education correspondent Dana Goldstein appeared on the Times’ daily podcast to talk about the educational cost of the pandemic — and how the Delta variant could threaten the return to classrooms. WNYC’s United States of Anxiety aired a segment called How Zillow Explains Education Inequity, featuring the Hechinger Report’s Bracey Harris and Meredith Kolodner as well as New America’s Kevin Carey. The NBC News digital team is releasing a new documentary on Friday called “Southlake: Racial Reckoning in a Texas Suburb.” Here’s the trailer.

⏰ While most of us mere mortals can barely find time to get our jobs done, Nikole Hannah-Jones has just started an after-school program in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa. She describes the 1619 Freedom School as a “free, after-school program that infuses intensive literacy instruction with a Black history curriculum. Our motto: Liberation Through Literacy.

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THE KICKER

Hurricane Ida has already disrupted the beginning of the school year for thousands of students in the South — and the destruction has reached as far as New York City. A public school teacher tweeted this video of Flatbush high school flooding days before classes are due to begin.

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.

Copyright © *2020* Alexander Russo's The Grade, All rights reserved.

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