🏆 BEST: Perry Stein’s Washington Post story This entire second-grade D.C. class fell behind in reading. Now what? is a powerful, well-reported piece about a class of D.C. Public School 2nd graders at a critical time in their lives. Telescoping back and forth between national trends and one Southeast Washington, D.C., apartment, the story grabs you from the first sentence and doesn’t let go: “Zalaunshae leaned close to the laptop camera, her oversize pink bows filling the computer screen.”

🏆 RUNNER-UP: The New York Times’ Erica Green is back from her book leave, and stories like Week in the Life of a Baltimore School Getting Back to Class are what make that such a good thing for education journalism readers. ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis called the Sunday front-page piece “so good, and heartbreaking.” Chalkbeat NY’s Reema Amin admired how Green “told this story in a compact way without missing good details.” I appreciated that it encompassed the entire school ecosystem: students, teachers, parents, and staff.

🏆 BONUS PICKS: There were at least two other standout stories since the last newsletter, including Lisa Miller’s harrowing New York magazine feature, Children of Quarantine, and Michelle Chen’s feature for The Nation, For Some Workers, Schools Never Closed.

BIG STORY OF THE WEEK: INEQUALITY 
🏆 For a learning pod of homeless students, school days unfold in a motel carport (Los Angeles Times)
🏆 Failing grades double and triple — some rising sixfold — amid pandemic learning (Washington Post)
🏆 Children from poorer Chicago areas are still less likely to attend top-performing high schools, despite CPS efforts to level the playing field, new report finds (Chicago Tribune)
🏆 NYC Students Voice Concerns Over Low Diversity in Selective Schools (Wall Street Journal)
🏆 Virtual Charter Schools Are Booming During COVID-19 (NPR)
🏆 Amid a pandemic, a reckoning for a Chicago charter turning away from ‘no excuses’ (Chalkbeat)
🏆 Rundown schools forced more students to go remote (Hechinger Report)
🏆 Racial gaps in access to in-person instruction worse than expected, according to a new poll (Boston Globe)

In her latest column, contributing editor Amber C. Walker writes about ways to widen the pool of people interviewed for education stories, to help ensure news coverage better reflects the multitudes of people in our country. 

A bottom-up approach generally seems to work best, she writes: “In order for journalists to commit long term to the critical work of diversifying their sources and coverage, it must be a process they can easily manage as well as an intrinsic belief that the effort will improve their reporting.” Thanks to journalists from Chalkbeat, NPR, and the New York Times for sharing their experiences. 

Earlier this week, I wrote about the NYC school reopening announcement that seemingly came out of nowhere. While New York City school reopening coverage may appear to be abundant, it has repeatedly proven insufficient for a story so big and important. Why aren't newsrooms assigning more reporters to cover the story, or collaborating with each other to provide deeper coverage?

MEDIA TIDBITS

Above: Last night on CNN, President-elect Joe Biden reversed himself on school reopening, stating that elementary schools were safe, as long as needed investments and protocols were in place. Thanks ZB for the video snippet. CNBC story here. 

📰 WHITE HOUSE EDUCATION STAFF AND JOE BIDEN’S FLIP-FLOP: Everyone seems to want to figure out who the EdSec nominee is going to be, but White House staff appointments are just as critical, as EdWeek’s Andrew Ujifusa has pointed out. Figuring out who’s going to be the next president’s West Wing education staffer should be a priority. Speaking of priorities: Who’s going to get an answer from the transition team about the president-elect’s school reopening flip-flop? Last night on CNN, Biden told Jake Tapper that elementary schools were safe, assuming there was enough money — a big change from his pre-Thanksgiving answer to Lester Holt, which didn’t specify elementary schools. What’s changed since last week?

📰 MEDIA-AMPLIFIED SCHOOL FEARS: “Three years ago, we started to learn how to run from armed intruders,” says a St. Louis teacher in a recent New York Times story. “This year, we’re trying to figure out how to bring back learning in a pandemic.” The irony of this quote is that media overamplification played such a big role in amplifying everyone’s fears about school shootings and COVID. The Times is documenting a problem that it helped create.

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

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

Above, left to right: Former Spencer Education Journalism fellow S. Mitra Kalita, new Politico education editor Delece Smith-Barro, and The Atlantic's star reporter Adam Harris.

🔥 Awards and job moves: The Nieman Foundation announced its 2021 visiting fellows and former Spencer Education Journalism fellow S. Mitra Kalita is among them. After three years with the Hechinger Report, Delece Smith-Barrow is going to be the new education editor for Politico. She tweets: “New email address coming soon so get your pitches ready.” Someone else who needs to update their LinkedIn? The Atlantic’s Adam Harris is one of Forbes 30 Under 30. 

🔥 Here’s another trio of journalists you should be following and their latest work: Hayley Fowler’s Close bars and keep schools open, Fauci says. Has that worked in other countries? isn’t getting nearly enough attention. USA Today diversity and race reporter N’dea Yancey Bragg just published Families sue California, claiming state failed to educate poor and minority students amid pandemic. You should check it out. And The Brooklyn School Suing the C.D.C. is the most recent education-focused story by the New Yorker’s Zach Helfand.

🔥 Congratulations to all the reporters and producers behind NPR’s Code Switch! The podcast won Apple Podcast’s first ever Show of the Year award. NPR education correspondent Anya Kamenetz tweeted high praise for the show and dropped links to the episodes she worked on about the 30 million word gap and the James Loewen book “Lies My Teacher Told Me.” NPR education editor Steve Drummond now also edits Code Switch, so you have no excuse not to subscribe to it. 

🔥 Season 2 of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Class of 2025 podcast is now live! Like the Boston Globe’s “Valedictorians Project,” Class of 2025 follows kids over time, except these kids are only in middle school. Hats off to Rob Manning, Elyssa Dudley, and Elizabeth Miller. Also: Kirkus Reviews calls Washington Post investigative reporter (and former national education scribe) Emma Brown’s new book“eye-opening.” Read the review here. Brown tweets “she’s pinching herself.”

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EVENTS
What just happened & what's coming next?

Above: Chart from a recent Economist article on the poor quality remote instruction Black and low-income kids have been receiving while schools are shut down. 

⏰ Don’t miss the deadline this Sunday to apply for the Solutions Journalism Network grant for reporting on schools in the pandemic. They are looking for reporting that “examines immediate responses that essentially adapt the existing education system to the logistical demands of the pandemic.” We need more stories about effective innovations. More info here.

⏰ New York Times Coronavirus Schools Briefing newsletter writer Amelia Nierenberg will moderate a panel discussion on university-wide COVID testing on Tuesday, Dec. 8. Register here. Hosted by the University of New Hampshire and others.

⏰ ICYMI: Did you catch WBUR On Point on Monday? Host Meghna Chakrabarti and producer (and former education reporter) Grace Tatter tackled the education crisis facing homeless students. Also: Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler got personal in an episode of Post Reports about the emotional toll of distance learning on young children, including her own. And Chalkbeat Philadelphia hosted a discussion with students about journalism in the time of COVID and virtual learning. Watch here.

⏰ Journalist resources: Here’s a reminder that you can use the brilliant EdBuild website to track inequities in your state’s spending on school districts. The CT Mirror’s Jacqueline Rabe Thomas is a fan, and so are we. And if you’re a reporter in New England, the Center on Reinventing Public Education is tracking 80 school districts’ reopening plans in six states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Any other great resources out there? Let us know!

Chalkbeat Indiana reporter Aaricka Washington returned to her old stomping grounds at the summer school community center in her hometown to see how their free learning pods are operating. “This is the neighborhood I grew up in,” she tweeted. “The students need it.”

That's all, folks. Thanks for reading!

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