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BIDEN 100-DAY PLEDGE UNDER PRESSURE
The big education story of the week

With controversy over the CDC’s teacher vaccination guidance and the confirmation hearing for EdSec nominee Miguel Cardona, the big story of the week has been the increasing pressure on the Biden administration to make good on its 100-day school reopening pledge:

🏆 One of Biden’s biggest problems comes from an unlikely place (Politico CA)
🏆 Vaccines for Teachers Not Prerequisite for Safe Reopening: Walensky (Bloomberg)
🏆 Biden's 100-day school goal smacks into reality (Axios)
🏆 Biden Is Vowing to Reopen Schools Quickly. It Won’t Be Easy. (NYT)
🏆 Biden Wants to Reopen Schools. Here’s Why That Might Not Happen (Time)
🏆 McConnell Accuses Biden of Rejecting Science on School Reopening (US News)
🏆 Biden’s Plan for Reopening Schools Faces Challenges (WSJ)
🏆 Teachers Unions Say They Need More COVID Tests Before Reopening Classrooms. But Experts Are Warning About the Limitations (The 74)
🏆 COVID-19 vaccines for teachers comes down to location — and luck (USA Today)
🏆 It Won’t Be Surprising If Chicago Teachers Strike Over Reopening Schools, But It Could Change the Rules for Labor Actions in an Unprecedented Crisis (The 74)
🏆 Teachers Union Head: Examples Of Success & Trust Key To Reopening (NPR)

All eyes are on Chicago, where a showdown between the city and the union was put on 48-hour hold, but reopening is generating headlines from outlets across the nation: Washington Post, Richmond Times Dispatch, San Francisco Chronicle, LA Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Washington Post.


BLACK PARENTS' MISTRUST OF SCHOOLS
The best story of the week
🏆 BEST: The best story of the week is the New York Times’ Missing in School Reopening Plans: Black Families’ Trust by Eliza Shapiro, Erica L. Green, and Juliana Kim. We've read a lot about teachers' mistrust during the reopening debate. But this is one of the first pieces we’ve seen that examines one of the underlying causes: Black parents' mistrust of schools, which predates the pandemic and the current reopening debate. "For generations, these public schools have failed us and prepared us for prison,” said one parent advocate quoted in the story. “And now it’s like they’re preparing us to pass away."

BOSTON SNAPSHOT, GIFTED STRATEGIES
The runner-up and bonus stories of the week
🏆 RUNNER-UP: This week’s runner-up is Less excited, less prepared, less challenged: Mass. high school students report big disparities in learning online vs. in person by the Boston Globe’s Naomi Martin. Data is crucial to writing stories about disparities in pandemic learning, but we don’t always get it. We also don’t always get to hear students’ voices. This story does both. Massachusetts high school students learning from home during the pandemic report feeling less excited about learning, less prepared for college, and less challenged in class than those learning fully in person. Roughly the same percentage of students in hybrid and remote learning reported feeling behind academically. (Disclosure: The Barr Foundation, which partially funds us, funded the survey used in this story.)

🏆 BONUS: This week’s bonus story is Joy Resmovits’ How a Diverse School District Is Using a Strategy Usually Reserved for ‘Gifted’ Students to Help Everyone Overcome COVID Learning Loss published in The Seattle Times and The 74. Based on the work going on in the Highline school district, this solutions-oriented story focuses on equity and highlights student resilience and teaching methods that work. “In many cases, districts turn to acceleration to leapfrog gifted students ahead,” Resmovits writes. “Highline, a diverse district where 71% of students are living in poverty, is trying to speed up students across the board. And they’re finding it can work for everyone.” 

For another equity-focused solutions story, see James Vaznis’ A remote learning success in Cambridge: Students start school midmorning and meet one-on-one with teachers in the Boston Globe.

A NEW ERA FOR NYT NATIONAL COVERAGE
New commentary and content from The Grade

This week’s new column from me notes that there are some good things brewing at the New York Times when it comes to education, many of them likely due to the arrival of editor Jim Dao, who’s now coordinating national coverage, and the recent announcement of an expanded education newsletter. However, the next challenges include expanding the effort into deep, well-themed projects and backing away from the paper’s much-noted tendency to amplify COVID dangers and focus on teachers’ experiences. A new interactive about teacher vaccinations is a perfect example of those two problems, centering teachers over more vulnerable groups and reinforcing the notion that vaccination is a necessary prerequisite to a safe reopening.

HOW PERSONAL EXPERIENCES SHAPED ONE REPORTER'S WORK

Reporters' personal experiences with school shape the way they think about and cover the education beat. In a new column, contributing editor Amber C. Walker shares her own story on how her education influenced her work. “My experience shaped my belief that if students, no matter their backgrounds, are treated with dignity and are provided with educational spaces where they feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable, coupled with the tools and resources they need to absorb the curriculum, they will succeed academically,” Walker writes.

MEDIA TIDBITS

Thought-provoking commentary on the latest coverage.

Above: White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki answered a reporter’s question Thursday about whom Biden would choose if it comes to it: teachers or kids. Psaki dodged: “The president believes schools should be open. Teachers want schools to be open. Families want schools to be open. But we want to do it safely.”

📰 BLACK MISTRUST CUTS BOTH WAYS: Black families’ mistrust of schools has been pushed to the center of the reopening debate, demanding attention from reopening opponents and proponents alike. “Both sides of the re-opening debate are using Black kids as justification,” tweeted the Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones, “when in truth, many of these same entities on BOTH sides were not advocating for Black kids before & were quite content to sustain the unequal systems that the pandemic exacerbated.” It may be true that reopening advocates and in-person parents skew white, Hannah-Jones notes, but so do teachers who seem to oppose resuming in-person classes. “You all can ignore that for whatever political purposes you see fit, but I won’t.”

📰 SPOTLIGHTING TEACHERS’ FEARS: Another issue that’s been lurking around the reopening debate for many months is the uncomfortable question of teachers’ fears of low-income students and the communities that they come from. Teachers' fears of Black children and neighborhoods have come up in the past, including in Alec MacGillis' New Yorker piece, expressed by a Black teacher. They’ve also come up here and there on Twitter, where one person referred to what was going on as “racialized fear” of Black kids. The uncomfortable issue was raised most recently in the latest New York Times education newsletter, where one of the caregivers interviewed expressed the belief that "white teachers in particular don’t want to come back to schools in Black neighborhoods."

📰 DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE RIGHT-WING SCHOOL REOPENING CONSPIRACY? You'd never know from this truly misleading story published in The Intercept about right-wing groups backing efforts to block teachers unions that liberal parents, Democratic officials, and civil rights groups are also pushing back. You’d never know that a much-admired school administrator in California has proposed limiting bargaining rights to get schools reopened, or that the NY chapter of the ACLU wrote a letter protesting the proposed 3 percent shutdown, which was adopted to appease the teachers union. The Intercept has published some important journalism in the past, but this kind of story reminds me of Salon or AlterNet. While accurate in the most narrow factual sense, the story is written with blinders on.

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

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

🔥 Report for America folks are everywhere lately. A new person for you to follow might be Becky Dernbach, who's reporting on education in Minnesota's immigrant communities for the Sahan Journal. See also Sara Cline’s well-done report with Gillian Flaccus on the debate about vaccinating educators or the elderly. Just this week, Morgan Mullings wrote about segregation in Boston for the Bay State Banner. The Grade contributor Colleen Connolly wrote about RFA’s impact on the education beat last fall.

🔥 Jobs: Politico is seeking an education reporter who’s passionate about policy. Chalkbeat is looking for its first bureau chief in Newark and has several other job openings, including a Detroit reporter, a story editor, and a Tennessee bureau chief. AZ Central has posted a higher ed reporting job. The LA Times Metpro program is accepting applications until Feb. 15, and ed reporter Melissa Gomez, who was in the 2018 class, highly recommends it to early career journalists of color. Also, the LAT Latino Caucus is also holding its first-ever virtual open house Feb. 6 to answer college students' questions.

🔥 Welcome, new ed reporters! The Chattanooga Times Free Press’ Anika Chaturvedi got a warm welcome to the beat from EWA’s Emily Richmond. And Danya Pérez, the newest member of the San Antonio Express-News' ed team, had her first byline on Jan. 30.

🔥 Exit interview: Former journo Sara Simon wrote about why she left the industry, and it resonated with a lot of reporters, including Charlotte Observer education reporter Annie Ma, who said she cried at how much truth is in Simon’s words. My favorite line from Simon’s exit interview? “For the industry to actually serve its purpose, we need to take deliberate steps to build reflection into our process. We need to be engaged in sharper, more honest, more rigorous conversations about the historical effects of our work."

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EVENTS
What just happened & what's coming next?

⏰ Nikole Hannah-Jones has good news for educators looking to teach the 1619 Project. The Pulitzer Center’s new The 1619 Project Education Network includes $5,000 grants to educators, and those teaching incarcerated youth are encouraged to apply. Applications are due March 15.

⏰ NPR launched its Station Investigations Team, the third major component of the Collaborative Journalism Network, in a push to boost local news, including education news. Details here. "This is an amazing opportunity to work with our Member stations to do those stories that hold the powerful accountable," said NPR investigative reporter and team leader Cheryl W. Thompson.

⏰ Elliot Haspel, author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It,” will discuss the childcare crisis and its implications for children and families with Dorian Traube of USC's School of Social Work on Feb. 9.

 
THE KICKER

What happens when student journalists realize that local coverage in HBCU towns are racist? In at least one case, they study the problem, confront the outlets contributing to the problem, and generate changes in the coverage (H/T Carla Murphy).

By Alexander Russo with additional writing from Michele Jacques and Colleen Connolly.

That's all, folks. Thanks for reading!

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