🏆 The best education journalism of the week is Casey Parks’ New Yorker story, The New York City Schools That Didn’t Close, which describes the efforts of volunteer NYC educators to provide a safe place for the kids of essential workers — and illustrates how difficult but not impossible it is to prevent infections from spreading in schools. While most of us were hiding out last spring, a group of NYC educators kept driving into the epicenter. "They had realized that if no one watched the kids of essential workers, the city's hospitals and transit system might shut down," Parks noted in a Facebook post. "They saw a need, and they said yes without hesitation.”

🏆 The runners-up for best education journalism of the week are the LA Times for School campuses in affluent areas plan to open quicker than those in poor Latino ones and the Chalkbeat/Associated Press team that produced A nationwide divide: Hispanic and Black students more likely than white students to start the year online. One local, the other national, both stories are deeply reported, comprehensive pieces that illustrate how school systems’ responses to the COVID crisis continue to echo and amplify long-standing inequalities in education. The two stories also both point to a similar trend, in which school systems serving wealthier, whiter communities are able to make a faster return to in-person instruction.

🏆 The big story of the week has been the adjustment to new and different forms of online learning: Days into the new school year, virtual classrooms have been hacked by hackers and pranksters (Chicago Tribune), School, but an ‘undead version’: Students, parents and teachers in Northern Virginia adjust to online learning (Washington Post), School discipline enters new realm (Washington Post), Social and Emotional Learning Has Never Been More Important—or More Difficult (Wall Street Journal), 'Hangry' kids, IT nightmares and Zoom bombings: Parents and kids adjust to virtual classrooms (Boston Globe), and How much online learning is too much? Schools’ shift to live virtual classes sparks pushback (Chalkbeat).

For the next few days, all eyes are going to be on the New York City school system, which is slated to reopen on a hybrid, phased-in basis starting this coming Monday.

In this week’s column, I argue that to cover the New York City effort fairly and effectively, media outlets will have to avoid some of the most persistent problems that have surfaced so far, including unnecessarily alarmist coverage and downplaying the tentative successes of in-person learning in other parts of the country.

I’m hopeful that the NYC reopening will be covered in a way that is enterprising and fair, steeped in context and deep questioning, and that gives voice to those we have so far heard too little from in the school reopening debate. But I'm not holding my breath. 

Earlier this week, contributor Tracy Tullis and I talked to Chana Joffe-Walt about some of the thinking that went into her blockbuster back to school podcast, Nice White Parents.

She told us how the story was reported and turned into a series -- and the rationale for putting white parents at the center of a story about the long-standing inadequacies of the education provided to Black and Latino communities.

"I was aware that focusing on the pathologies of white parents risked centering white parents," Joffe-Walt told us. However, "I believe it’s important to name and document white parents’ inequitable and antidemocratic practices in schools."

MEDIA TIDBITS

📰 KEEP UP WITH THE IN-SCHOOL COVERAGE: Slowly but surely, more reporters are getting into reopened schools and reporting what’s happening in them. This week’s additions include Casey Parks’ New Yorker story, The New York City Schools That Didn’t Close, and Zoe Greenberg’s Boston Globe story, ‘I don’t know if I made friends’: Kids reflect on the first day of school. It’s a challenge and a risk for journalists, but reporting from inside schools that are returning to in-person instruction is an invaluable service for readers, who are curious and concerned about the experience.

📰 PAYING ATTENTION TO WHO’S BEING LEFT OUT: One of the most interesting themes in the reopening coverage is stories about groups of students who are getting left out, unreached, disengaged, or otherwise not participating. These include special education students, medically fragile students, homeless students, and others. Fairly frequently, as in this New Haven Independent article, educators aren’t quite sure why students don’t show up for online learning.

📰 BRACKETING FEELINGS WITH FACTS: Today’s powerful The Daily segment from the New York Times, A Messy Return to School in New York, is a great example of something I’m seeing a lot in the coverage lately, which is to focus on emotions and perceptions (from a teacher and mother in this case) at the expense of context. Fears are high, but infection and mortality numbers for Department of Education staff are very low compared to the rest of the city. And most teachers aren’t being asked to provide both remote and in-person instruction, a deal between the union and the district that requires additional staff and has contributed to the challenges of reopening. The folks producing this piece would have done better to have bracketed some of the teachers’ statements with information, or at least provided it at the end of the segment. 

📰 MORE EXPERTS, LESS PANIC: All too often, recent school coverage has amplified fears and downplayed expertise, so it’s great to see examples of more measured, expert-focused schools coverage. These include the New York Times Coronavirus School Briefing's recent edition, It’s when, not if — but don’t panic, which notes that “a case at your child’s school does not mean you should panic. And a classroom in quarantine, or a school forced to switch to remote learning, does not necessarily mean a district has failed." And also the Boston Globe story Should you send your child back to school? The expert consensus leans toward ‘yes,’ with caveats, which finds that “experts consulted by the Globe say the latest scientific evidence skews strongly in favor of sending children to school — provided two conditions [low community transmission and robust school safety measures] are met." It was written by health care reporter Felice Freyer.

📰 DUAL BEAT COVERING EDUCATION AND HEALTH: Partly due to shrinking local newsrooms, some reporters cover both education and health. That’s a tall order during a pandemic. But it also has its advantages. Boston Herald reporter Alexi Cohan, who covers both, said it’s been a “whirlwind.” “I've never had a circumstance in which both my beats were this intertwined and spotlighted in the news cycle,” she told us in an email. You can follow her daily reporting on Twitter. The handful of other journalists who share this dual beat include Stephanie Daniel at KUNC (a Colorado NPR affiliate), Kate Masters at the Virginia Mercury, Cynthia McCormack at the Cape Cod Times, and Matt Butler at the Ithaca Voice.

Missed some previous editions? You can see the archive of past newsletters here. 

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

Above: Check out the Wall Street Journal's new education page, which not only looks good but gathers together their impressive education coverage.

🔥 Welcome! Hannan Adely just started covering education in New Jersey for the USA Today Network. Follow her here. And GBH education reporter Megan Woolhouse got her first education byline with a story on the first day of school in Boston's suburbs.

🔥 "A lot of times, white journalists, their experiences of our educational system is completely different from the experiences of most of the kids that they cover,” said Nicole Hannah-Jones in a Beth Hawkins write-up of an EWA conference panel earlier this year.

🔥 Media appearances: Jessica Gould was on the Advice Roulette segment of The Brian Lehrer Show. And Emily Oster, one of the people behind the COVID schools dashboard, was on WBUR On Point to talk about school reopenings. Speaking of the dashboard, AASA gives a shout-out to Oster and Qualtrics, but says it is looking for “all the help we can get on distribution and enrollment. What can you do?”

🔥 After nearly three years editing the education section, plus budget/approps, at Politico, Jane Norman has moved on. She is now the Washington bureau chief at States Newsroom. Congrats!

🔥 Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! The Clarion Ledger (Jackson, MS) is hiring a children and education reporter.  The Detroit Free Press is hiring an educational equity reporter who will cover the whole state. The Dallas Morning News Education Lab is still hiring an audience engagement producer and reporting fellow. The Washington Post education editor job is no longer posted, but nobody’s been named yet (that I know of). Lastly, EdWeek is hiring an assistant managing editor.

🔥 USA Today’s southern region has a new education beat they call “the children’s beat.” Regional editor Michael Anastasi told us it’s “less about education with a capital ‘E’ and more about a child’s development and well-being." Local reporters in the South have already transitioned to this beat, and Anastasi is currently hiring the beat’s first regional reporter.

Did someone forward you this newsletter? You can sign up here. 

Above: The New York Times annual magazine’s education issue came out last weekend, featuring stories by Nicole Chung, Paul Tough, Samantha Shapiro, and others. They also published a fascinating video (above) about how they came up with the cover images they used.

⏰ The Globe’s Meghan Irons is going to be a panelist at MassBudget’s Sept. 22 virtual discussion on how the state budget can equitably support K-12 during and after COVID-19. It’s part of the Envisioning Equity series. Register for the webinar here.

⏰ Wall Street Journal higher education reporter Melissa Korn is super excited to be talking (virtually) Sept. 22 about her book, “Unacceptable,” with Jennifer Levitz at Malaprops in Asheville, N.C. Sign up here!

⏰ Looking for ideas and expertise on how to cover COVID in schools? There's a special $30 offer for journalists from the Association of Health Care Journalists. Details here.

⏰ If you missed the Boston Globe event “How to minimize harm in reopening schools,” featuring editor Sarah Carr, the video is now available.

"Witnessing the fourth-graders eat lunch at Woodland Elementary School is a bit like viewing a surgical room filled with tiny doctors operating on sterilized tables."

That’s the delightful first line of Zoe Greenberg’s recent story about a school reopening.

The second line isn’t bad, either:

"In a nearby classroom, each third-grader sits next to an empty desk, as if haunted by the ghosts of Cohort A." 

That's all, folks. Thanks for reading!

Reply to this email to send us questions, comments or tips. Know someone else who should be reading Best of the Week? Send them this link to sign up.

Using Feedly or FlipBoard or any other kind of news reader? You can subscribe to The Grade’s “feed” by plugging in this web address: http://www.kappanonline.org/category/the-grade/feed/.

Read more about The Grade here. You can read all the back issues of The Grade’s newsletter, Best of the Week, here.