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🏆 WHEN ‘THREAT ASSESSMENT’ GOES TOO FAR 🏆

The best education story of the week was The Oregonian’s Targeted: A Family and the Quest to Stop the Next School Shooter (above), by Bethany Barnes. The piece looks at what happens when a high school boy is suspected by school officials to be a potential school shooter. It’s an amazing piece, accompanied by a pretty memorable image. Read all about it in the newsletter.

👀 HECHINGER REPORT CHARTER SCHOOL INVESTIGATIONS HITS & MISSES 👀

This week’s column takes a look at the recent Hechinger Report investigation Nearly 750 charter schools are whiter than the nearby district schools, which attempts to show that disproportionately white charter schools are proliferating in some states. There’s much to admire about the piece. The topic is important, the story appears to be carefully reported, and some of the writing is lovely. However, it turns out that just 1.6 percent of charters are disproportionately white, based on the data presented in the Hechinger Report piece. What lessons can we learn from this example?

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📰 MEDIA TIDBITS 📰

I hope I’m not the only person wishing for more education-related coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Congressional candidate who, in a somewhat surprising turn of events, defeated a long-term incumbent on Tuesday. We know she went to Boston University. We know that Mayor Bill de Blasio endorsed her opponent. What does she think about education issues? Which education (or labor) groups endorsed or supported her in the primary?

🔥 PEOPLE, JOBS, & AWARDS 🔥

Let’s all send our best thoughts to all the journalists at the Capital Gazette, including especially education reporter Rachael Pacellawho has been listed among those injured in yesterday’s attack. Her Twitter feed shows that earlier in the day she was working on a story about new arrivals at the Naval Academy.

⏰ EVENTS, DEADLINES, ANNOUNCEMENTS ⏰

Lucky you if you were at the two-day PRX Podcast Garage workshop called The Art of Narrative in Education Reporting. The workshop focused on telling education stories using design thinking, “a system focused on audience first,” said PRX’s Kerry Donahue. “It’s a process that requires empathy as a first step.”

📢 FAVORITE GIZMOS & APPS 📢

This week we asked folks to tell us their favorite app or gizmo these days and we got a lot of fun recommendations: an XLR to 1/4 inch cable (to record phone calls from the field), apps like Trint, ACR, & oTranscribe (for transcriptions), and browser extensions like @crowdtangle (for social).

“As much as a computer or another person transcribing for me would save me time, as a radio reporter, I think a lot about how someone said something,” KPCC’s Carla Javier told us. “oTranscribe is great for me because it allows me to hear the tape and transcribe what I need quickly. And, it helps me skip the rest.”

The Grade is going to be on vacation next week, so there will be no newsletter on Friday July 6th.  Sign up to get your own copy here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Russo

Alexander Russo

Alexander Russo is founder and editor of The Grade, an award-winning effort to help improve media coverage of education issues. He’s also a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship winner and a book author. You can reach him at @alexanderrusso.

Visit their website at: https://the-grade.org/