The big story of the week is the one-year anniversary of school closures across the country. Some have since opened, others still haven't. Here's a look at what's changed and what we've learned in the last year:

🏆 Lessons Learned From a Year of Closed Schools (US News)
🏆 Growing up on screens: How a year lived online has changed our children (WaPo)
🏆 Inside a Long, Messy Year of Reopening Schools (New Republic)
🏆 Back to Class After a Year Online (New York Times)
🏆 A Year Of School Like No Other (NPR)
🏆 They sent early SOS signals about COVID and schools. Here’s what life looks like for them, one year in. (Chalkbeat)
🏆 A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, school as we know it has been transformed (Chalkbeat)
🏆 A Year of Upheaval and Unexpected Insights (Education Week)
🏆 Education Disrupted: 52 Unforgettable Weeks For Students & Schools Captured in 52 Iconic Photos (The 74)

For other big stories this week, see Media Tidbits two sections below.

Shutdowns. Remote learning. Crowded Halls. Protests.

Over the past 12 months, education reporters have had to cover a year of grief and anger — for the most part, without going inside schools. 

To mark a year’s efforts at chronicling the story, this week’s column features the 15 most memorable K-12 COVID stories of the year. 

These stories dominated the conversation, changed minds, and altered the course of events — for better or worse. 

Bonus: Here's another list of COVID-era journalism, this one from EdWeek columnist and high school teacher Larry Ferlazzo.

MEDIA TIDBITS

Above: Chalkbeat launched a new initiative about source diversity after auditing their own coverage and finding an overrepresentation of white voices. “We used our findings to hold ourselves accountable, and we increased the share of Black and Hispanic/Latino voices...” Read this thread for more on their findings and next steps. Diversifying sources won’t solve all of education journalism’s diversity problems, but it can be a helpful first step. Read more about the importance of source diversity from The Grade's Amber C. Walker, who’s currently working on a new piece about the progress that’s been made in revamping newsrooms since last summer.

📰 RETHINKING REOPENING OPINIONS: We’ve seen tons of polling results and coverage about parents’ preferences for or against reopening schools, much of it based on the assumption that lower support for reopening from Black and brown communities results from long-standing mistrust of schools and disproportionate experiences with infection and death. But the availability of in-person school options can dramatically change those views, according to Ohio State’s Vladimir Kogan and Brown’s Jon Collins. According to Collins, "people in districts that had already opened for some form of in-person instruction at the time were about 20% points more likely to support reopening..."

📰 GIVING VOICE TO THE MIDDLE GROUND: I had the chance earlier this week to talk with journalist Amanda Ripley, who’s been thinking a lot about how extreme viewpoints are increasingly highlighted in our politics and in our journalism, drowning out middle voices and nuance. I was reminded of that conversation a few days later, reading a pro-reopening teacher’s lament about education coverage she’s seen in New York City: "All year, I’ve been wondering why journalists and reporters refuse to give voice to all the middle-ground teachers," she wrote. Indeed, viewpoints among teachers are remarkably varied, though you might not necessarily know that from the coverage. I hope to write up the conversation with Ripley soon. She wrote about the prevalence of “cartoonish narratives” not too long ago, and has a new book coming out next month.

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

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

Above: The Boston Globe’s Naomi Martin (right) was on MSNBC to talk about the impact of COVID on education.

⏰ Don’t miss CNN’s “back to school” segment tonight at 9 EST, featuring Jake Tapper, new Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, and NEA head Becky Pringle. Crossed fingers that Tapper won’t give these folks a free pass.

⏰ The San Francisco Chronicle’s Jill Tucker and Politico California’s Mackenzie Mays were on high school newspaper podcast The Paper Tiger to talk about the battle to reopen schools. KQED’s Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez moderated a panel on SFUSD’s school reopening, and you can catch the replay here. And the NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones was quoted in the University of Colorado, Riverside’s student newspaper, The Highlander, encouraging young journalists to dig deeper: “We get into journalism to hold power to account,” she said.

⏰ Scholarships: The deadline for the CUNY education reporting scholarship has been extended to March 15. CUNY students, alumni, and community journalists can apply to receive a $2,500 reporting stipend and funds to cover registration fees and expenses to attend an education conference. Apply here.

⏰ Resource: Curious about how different state reopening thresholds compare? You might start by checking out this National Governors Association resource. But be careful. ProPublica had to issue a correction on this data in Alec MacGillis’ story this week.

“I don't want to brag, but when I work from my ‘mobile office’ I write about 3x faster,” tweeted Philadelphia Inquirer education reporter Kristen Graham. “Had to drop my kid off somewhere, banged out a story in 30 mins while waiting for him.”

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