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STUDENT MENTAL HEALTH CRISES
The best education journalism of the week, plus a runner-up or two.
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🏆 BEST: The best story this week is How Rural School Counselors Confront Life in a ‘Mental Health Desert’ by Whitney Bryen in Oklahoma Watch. Bryen examines the crucial role of school counselors in a year when many students’ home lives were upended. But in Elk City, Oklahoma, counselors are hard to come by — and those who do work at schools are often tasked with other duties because of a statewide teacher shortage. Counselors are especially needed in rural Oklahoma, Bryen writes. A study shows that Oklahoma students are among the most traumatized in the nation, and in rural areas they are more likely to have access to guns, live in poverty, have an incarcerated parent, use drugs, experience depression, and die by suicide.
RELATED: The Connecticut Mirror’s Adria Watson also reported this week on the growing crisis in mental health care for children in Connecticut in her story Children with psychiatric needs are overwhelming hospital emergency departments in CT.
🏆 RUNNER-UP: This week’s runner-up is a data-driven story from The Markup and The City: NYC’s School Algorithms Cement Segregation. This Data Shows How. Reporters Colin Lecher and Maddy Varner write that while most school segregation stories in New York City focus on a handful of specialized schools, like Stuyvesant High School, the same things are happening at screened high schools all over the city. “New admissions data obtained by The Markup and The City shows how Black and Latino students are regularly screened out of high schools across New York City — most strikingly, the city’s top-performing schools,” they write. There is no uniform formula, but the outcome is often the same: the top-ranked schools have more white students than the lower-ranked schools.
🏆 BONUS: Check out Caught in the Study Web by Fadeke Adegbuyi, which dives into parts of TikTok and other social media platforms where Gen Z students indulge their “anxiety-fueled pursuit of straight A’s."
To get daily education headlines and education news events, follow @thegrade_.
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Note: Barring unforeseen circumstances, Best of the Week is going to take a Memorial Day break next week. See you back here in two weeks!
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PUTTING PARENTS FRONT AND CENTER
New from The Grade
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Unsatisfied by a journalist panel on parent engagement earlier this month, the Powerful Parent Movement’s Sarah Carpenter shared her views on media coverage of schools in an open letter that we published a couple of weeks ago.
This week’s new column features reactions to Carpenter’s letter, including The 74’s Asher Lehrer-Small reflecting on his own biases, St. Louis Public Radio’s Ryan Delaney engaging with parent advocates about the lack of parents in one of his pieces, and EWA panelist and Family Engagement Lab head Vidya Sundaram sharing insights on where she sees more parent coverage — and where she sees less.
Since then, there have been more journalist reactions. “There are ed reform dollars and national public relations campaigns behind some parent groups,” tweeted St. Louis Post-Dispatch education reporter Blythe Bernhard, “and it is fair to report that.” Reporter Jenny Anderson, who used to cover education at the New York Times, said that she, too, has “failed to get enough parent voices.”
Disclosure: Since its inception in 2015, The Grade has been supported by a number of different education organizations and foundations. Read our about page here.
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FULL-TIME REOPENING
— NEXT YEAR
The big story of the week, according to us.
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The big story of the week was several states and big-city school districts announcing that they’d be reopening schools full-time in person — next year:
🔊 States and cities across the U.S. debate the future of online learning. (NYT)
See also Chalkbeat
🔊 N.Y.C. will eliminate remote learning for the fall, in a major step toward reopening (NYT)
See also Politico, WNYC, WSJ, NY Daily News, NY1
🔊 LAUSD to fully reopen schools in the fall plus offer an online option (LAT)
See also LAist, Los Angeles Daily News, KTLA
🔊 Online learning at home isn’t going away next school year (San Diego Union-Tribune)
🔊 Texas districts poised to keep virtual school offerings (Dallas Morning News)
🔊 Chicago will fully reopen next fall, with mandatory attendance for most (Chalkbeat)
🔊 New Jersey Schools Won’t Offer Remote Learning in Fall (NYT)
Other big stories of the week: The debate over how to teach about systemic racism (and the Tulsa massacre) in American schools, questions about whether to focus on remediation or accelerations, and whether or not to vaccinate kids and make them wear masks in school.
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MEDIA TIDBITS
Thought-provoking commentary on the latest coverage.
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ABOVE: While police violence has been front and center since last year’s George Floyd murder, systemic racism and inequality in schools and other areas of society have gone unaddressed or even intensified, notes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
📰 COVERING THE ANNIVERSARY OF GEORGE FLOYD’S MURDER: There were lots of good stories pegged to the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and the protests against police violence and systemic racism that followed. Among them: What’s changed — and hasn’t — for Berkeley schools a year after George Floyd’s murder (Berkeleyside), Momentum Stalls in Fight to Remove Police From Schools (U.S. News & World Report), The Black and Brown Families in Oakland Reimagining Education for Their Kids (KQED), Black teachers ground down by racial battle fatigue after a year like no other (Hechinger), Students at a Suburban Minneapolis HS Mark 1st Anniversary of George Floyd’s Death, Push for Change (The 74).
A year ago in The Grade, education reporters reflected on their own experiences covering the events, including being tear-gassed, arrested, and shot with a rubber bullet. Last month, The Grade’s own Amber Walker wrote about newsroom changes that have and haven’t been made since last year. My favorite George Floyd-related education story of the past year has to be the Washington Post’s look back at the under-resourced Houston high school he attended.
📰 “EXTREME” CAUTION ON MASKING: In one of his daily newsletters, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt called out "extreme CDC caution” in a new mask study, cautiousness that I and others think too often gets picked up in media coverage — including at his own paper. One especially cautious NYC parent has been featured four times in the NYT and Chalkbeat, according to an observant reader. Hmm.
Coverage of the CDC’s masking guidance is a big opportunity for education reporters, given how directly summer school, camp, and the 2021-22 school year could be affected. Ditto for kid vaccination guidance. Some stories that have already come out: For Colleges, Vaccine Mandates Often Depend on Which Party Is in Power (NYT), 27 States Abandon Universal Masking in School (The 74), Iowa Bans Face-Mask Mandates in Schools, Joining Texas (WSJ), and The Payoffs and Perils of Mass Vaccinations for Children (U.S. News & World Report). Last weekend, NPR’s Cory Turner responded to critics of his CDC masking story.
📰 MATH COVERAGE IS THE NEW READING COVERAGE: We don’t see much coverage of math instruction, though it’s arguably as important as covering reading/literacy. But we came across some good stories this week, including A Problem for Math Teachers: Solving the Dilemma of Learning Lost to a Year of Zoom (The 74), Here’s how California’s bold plan to change math instruction could help or hurt students (LA Times), and California math curriculum spurs new controversy about accelerated learning (EdSource). Maybe it’s the start of something?
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PEOPLE, JOBS
Who's going where & doing what?
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ABOVE: The Baltimore Sun's Liz Bowie and Erica Green, now at the New York Times.
🔥 Leading the charge: If you heard her on a recent NPR segment, you’d know that Baltimore Sun education reporter Liz Bowie led the valiant effort to keep her paper out of the hands of Alden Global Capital. When Alden loomed as a possible buyer for the Sun and other Tribune papers, she and other reporters attempted to gain grassroots support from readers and the community as well as support from leaders. They were successful, delivering to Tribune Publishing a petition signed by 6,000 Marylanders in support of selling the paper to local owners. Local buyers for the Sun and other papers were found, with one exception: the Chicago Tribune. “I don't have any background in organizing," Bowie told me via email. She says she's "only been a leader in the union since Erica Green left the paper and begged me to take over her union position” four years ago. In case you didn't know, Bowie and Green worked together at the Sun, producing a string of strong stories.
🔥 Tenure track: Hundreds of notable people have signed an open letter in The Root in support of Nikole Hannah-Jones after the UNC-Chapel Hill tenure debacle, though none that I have seen are education reporters. Reporters Lindsay Ellis, Jack Stripling, and Dan Bauman dug into the controversy and what it says about the politics of college governance at public universities for the Chronicle of Higher Education. And Clay B. Morris writes in Poynter about how Hannah-Jones’ denial of tenure devalues the degrees and work of Black student journalists. The university is said to be reconsidering its decision — as it should.
🔥 Jobs: Colorado Public Radio is hiring an editor to oversee their education, health, and justice coverage, and KPCC is still looking for an education editor. (So is the New York Times, though I haven’t seen a job posting.) The San Antonio Express-News is hiring another education reporter to join Andres Picon and Danya Pérez. And XQ Institute, a foundation-funded organization dedicated to redesigning the high school experience, is looking for freelance writers.
🔥 Big congrats to former ed reporter Alexandria Neason, who is joining WNYC’s Radiolab as a producer/editor after four years as a staff writer at the Columbia Journalism Review!
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EVENTS
What just happened & what's coming next?
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ABOVE: WNYC’s Jessica Gould, left, was on the Brian Lehrer Show to talk about the announcement in New York City that schools will be fully open next year, with no option for remote learning. And KQED’s Vanessa Rancaño was on The Bay to talk about how Black and brown families in Oakland are reimagining education for their kids.
⏰ Upcoming: NPR’s Anya Kamenetz is moderating an event on fatherhood on June 19, featuring authors Gregg Behr, Ryan Rydzewski, and Jordan Shapiro who’ve written books on parenting and dads.
⏰ ICYMI: Listen to the broadcast version of the United States of Anxiety’s “Two Schools in Marin County: Can We Finally End School Segregation?”
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The Linda Lindas went viral with their library performance of “Racist, Sexist Boy” this week, but they aren’t used to the sudden flood of requests for them to perform yet. “I’m like, ‘Next week? I’m in school,’” band member Lucia told Buzzfeed.
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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.
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