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BEST OF THE WEEK

One of many excellent pieces about the national student walkout on Wednesday, from WBEZ Chicago Public Radio

One of many excellent pieces about the national student walkout on Wednesday, from WBEZ Chicago Public Radio

Coverage of the National School Walkout was pretty overwhelming and in some cases seemed indiscriminate, but perhaps that was for good reason. Held a month after the Parkland shooting, the event seems like it might turn out to have been a historic event. It was said to have included students from at least 3,000 schools nationwide. An estimated 100,000 NYC students participated. The legislative response so far has been smaller than some may have hoped, but the conversations about school safety and gun violence have lasted longer than in the past.

🏆 WSJ: New York-Area Students Join Nationwide Walkout, Some Risking Punishment
🏆 WBEZ: School Walkouts: Teens Say ‘We’re Fighting For Our Lives’
🏆 Washington Post: Thousands of students walk out of school in nationwide gun violence protest
🏆 NPR: In Gun-Friendly Montana, Student Walkout Steers Clear Of PoliticsThe 74: The Revolution Will Be Hashtagged. Social-Media-Savvy, Irreverent, and Maybe a Bit Entitled, Parkland Students Succeed Where Others Have Failed to Launch a National Movement Around Guns
🏆 Chalkbeat: ‘I can be a part of this change’: New York City students prepare to join nationwide gun violence protests

HONORABLE MENTIONS

The walkout wasn’t the only education news of the week.

GUN CONTROL DEBATE

🏆 MSNBC: Despite recent rhetoric, Trump abandons ambitious plans on guns
🏆 Politico: Trump administration to aid states in firearms training for teachers, school staff
🏆 USA Today: White House supports arming teachers, will audit FBI tip line
🏆 Politico: Educators blast Trump plan to help arm school staff
🏆 Denver Post: NRA gave $7.3 million to hundreds of schools but Denver will turn down grants 
🏆 NPR: Trump’s Plan To Secure Schools Calls For Arming Teachers, Improving Background Checks
🏆 WHYY: Decades after Columbine, preventing school shootings still vexes security experts 

STUDENT DISCIPLINE REFORM
🏆 Washington Post: D.C. officials move closer to overhauling school discipline policy
🏆 NYT: Trump Finds Unlikely Culprit in School Shootings: Obama Discipline Policies
🏆 Chalkbeat: When Chicago cut down on suspensions, students saw test scores and attendance rise, study finds
🏆 Chalkbeat: Inside one of three Denver schools serving as a national model for how to do discipline differently

PRIVILEGE, INEQUALITY, & RACE
🏆 PoliticoNY: De Blasio has means, if not will, to reform specialized school admissions
🏆 Journal-Sentinel: Suburban school district imposes limits on ‘privilege’ discussions
🏆 Boston Globe: Invisible in any language: Mass. Latinos face intense inequality
🏆 The 74: There Are Three Times as Many Latino Students as Teachers in America. Two New Reports Show Why That’s Bad for Both
🏆 Chalkbeat: Detroit students filed a lawsuit seeking the right to an equal education — 18 months later, they’re still in legal limbo

For more Parkland coverage, see some recent stories describing videotape showing the school resource officer standing outside for a half hour and the confusion among different law enforcement agencies whose radios couldn’t communicate and who didn’t realize they were looking at tape delay video.

BEST WAYS TO COVER THE FEDERAL ESSA LAW

Like Lisa Simpson with a pile of books, education reporters are increasingly confident covering ESSA.

Like Lisa Simpson with a pile of books, education reporters are increasingly confident covering ESSA.

Six months ago, insiders, advocates, and educators complained that #ESSAcoverage was skimpy, superficial, and overly bureaucratic. But in the months since, coverage has improved greatly,

As you’ll see from the latest column, there’s a slew of praise for reporters like Jessica Bakeman, Joy Resmovits, Erica Green, Jeff Solocheck, Jessica Calefati, Mark Kerlieber, John Fensterwald, Matt Barnum, Lauren Camera, and Tara Garcia Mathewson for the work they’re doing covering ESSA, and scads of expert advice pointing to emerging storylines journos should pursue this spring. (Go deep rather than wide, says the Alliance’s Phillip Lovell. And don’t wait for formal announcements of new state lists of struggling schools, recommends Bellwether’s Chad Aldeman.)

Coming next week: We know that pretty much anytime educators propose teaching kids to code-switch between Standard English and nonminority dialects, the public freaks out. (Think Oakland 1996.) But how well do reporters and news outlets do covering these controversial, racially-charged situations — and what could they do better the next time?

MEDIA TIDBITS

📰 MORE SHAMELESSNESS FROM THE POST: Over the weekend, the Washington Post published a sprawling piece on the rise and fall of DC public schools — without any acknowledgment of the Post’s own role in fluffing the district’s accomplishments and missing problems that were developing right under its reporters’ noses. Shameless. Do they think nobody’s noticing?

📰 OVER-EAGER DEVOS COVERAGE: Much of the media (and DeVos critics) piled on the criticism of her lamentable 60 Minutes performance. In just a few short hours, the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss tallied four posts about the interview. But when CNN.com posted a breathless story about White House concerns, Inside Higher Ed’s Andre Kreighbuam pointed out that the piece lacked the usual anonymous quotes and reactions and maybe White House officials were “not that alarmed?” Meanwhile, reporters like Greg Toppo, Erica Green, and Lauren Camera who cover her regularly noted that her remarks were standard DeVos. Premature claims that DeVos was in peril aren’t new.

📰 THE 4th GRADE TEACHER WHO MADE OPRAH OPRAH: The DeVos interview might have been the most obvious segment in Sunday’s 60 Minutes, but the Oprah Winfrey segment on new efforts at addressing childhood trauma might have been the most important. There’s also a great post-game interview with footage of Oprah and the 4th grade teacher she credits for making her feel specialduring her rough childhood.

📰 STAYING CLEAR ON SCHOOL SHOOTING NUMBERS: A display in front of the Capitol of 7,000 pairs of shoes took over social media, but there was confusion over what the 7,000 were supposed to represent. Snopes looked into it and found the figure being used was youth gun deaths over all since Sandy Hook not school shooting deaths.

📰 LOOKING IN THE MIRROR ON SCHOOL SHOOTING FEARS: It’s great that media outlets are now reporting school shooting statistics more accurately, and even talking about the gap between the actual incidents and public perception of them. But they should really take the discussion a bit further. Segments like Thursday’sNPR piece on the gap between perceived dangers and actual threats don’t mention the media’s role in exaggerating the sense of danger.  Fear of school shootings is as much a media creation as anything else. For more on the media’s role, check out this recent column on misleading coverage of school shootings.

📰 GOOD NEWS MOVES SLOWER THAN BAD: Speaking of media exaggeration: The media exaggerates negative news, which creates a structural problem, says Steven Pinker in The Guardian: “Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle.” This is a problem as big as any other.

📰 A MAGAZINE EXAMINES ITS OWN RACIST COVERAGE: This piece from the National Geographic (examining racism in its own past writing) is the kind of honest self-reflection that I think is so important — and so rare. But the effort is incomplete. The cover story that it accompanies is getting slapped around by the NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones and NPR’s Gene Demby.

📰 WRITING 2017 STORIES IN 2018: Dear Marketplace: Why are you still writing about AltSchool? It’s 2018. That was last year, you know, before the schools closed and the AltSchool model blew up.

📰 WHERE’S THE AWL WHEN YOU NEED IT? This NYT story about lack of enough parking spaces in high schools in affluent communities is just the kind of story The Awl would have gobbled up for how it pampers wealthy readers (and those who aspire to be).

PEOPLE, JOBS, & AWARDS

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🔥 For #ThrowbackThursday — and in honor of his just-announced move to Inside HigherEd starting next month — here’s Greg Toppo’s high school photo ID (above). Don’t feel too bad for him. He’s racking up congratulations on Twitter.

🔥 Here’s the memo announcing the hiring of Chronicle of Higher Education education reporter Adam Harris that went out from The Atlantic Friday afternoon. It reads in part, “Adam, who comes to us from The Chronicle of Higher Education, is a tremendous reporter and writer, with an eye for both the nitty-gritty of education policy and the big-picture issues of our time: segregation, inequality, rising costs, free speech, and beyond.” Congrats to all. Can’t wait to see what happens next.

🔥 Voice of San Diego education reporter Mario Koran corrected Nikole Hannah-Jones the other day, describing her take on school choice as “a simplistic, polarized description.” Which indeed it was. As profound as Hannah-Jones is on race and segregation, and as important and influential as she has been at elevating and re-energizing education journalism, she seems much less authoritative when she writes and speaks about choice — a topic she’s only very recently begun to address.

🔥 That Newseum event featuring Richard Prince, EdWeek’s Francisco Vara-Orta, and the WashPost’s Tracy Jan discussing media depictions of communities of color is finally online.

🔥 The Grade contributor Kristen Doerer had a fascinating piece in The American Prospect about the DeVos appearance at CPAC last month. ICYMI, here you go. For The Grade, she has written columns about best books for education journalists and how to fix journalism’s “fellowship” model.

🔥 On the most recent episode of EWA Radio, WLRN’s Jessica Bakeman talks about the special challenges that come with radio reporting on violent incidents and the ethics of interviewing traumatized teens.

🔥 US Senator Marco Rubio complained about Erica Green’s NYT writeup of the debate over the 2014 Obama school discipline guideline that’s emerged following the Parkland shooting last month. We should all have such important critics.

🔥 Green’s colleague Dana Goldstein is sharing pictures from Oklahoma, where pretty much everyone seems to be predicting there’s going to be a teachers strike early next month. While you’re waiting for her story, you can get the latest Oklahoma updates from the The Oklahoman’s Ben Felder.

🔥 So it turns out that Robert Pondiscio is working on a book about Success Academy, slated to be published by Penguin Random House. He says the book is based on a year spent at a Success Academy school and focuses on the school and the classroom rather than the network or its head. “We are incurious about what kids do all day,” says Pondiscio when asked about why he’s writing the book. “For all the attention [Success Academy] has received, I didn’t have a good sense of what happens in their classrooms, the curriculum, instruction and school culture.”

🔥 Speaking of books, the digital parenting book written by NPR’s Anya Kamenetz got a very nice review in the NYT!

EVENTS, DEADLINES, & ANNOUNCEMENTS

⏰ The Center on Health Journalism is offering an all-expenses-paid National Fellowship, which provides “reporting grants of $2,000 to $10,000 to 20 journalists from around the country (and community engagement grants of up to $2,000 for five), plus six months of expert mentoring.” Deadline: March 23.

⏰ The Ida B. Wells Society is hosting an investigative reporting workshop at Wake Forest March 24th. Rumor has it ProPublica’s Topher Sanders and the NYT’s Ron Nixon are going to be there.

⏰ Speaking of investigative reporting and JOC, Reveal offers an investigative reporting fellowship for journalists of color, and managing editor Andy Donohue asks that you apply. “Pitch us a story. We’ll work w/ you (and your news org) to do the project. Includes data/radio/investigative training. And good food.”

⏰ Love local news? You have until March 30th to apply to the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund.

⏰ The early bird deadline for the NAHJ 2018 conference is March 31. It’s being held in Miami on July 18-21. Register here.

⏰ Earlier this week, the Lumina Foundation held a fascinating-looking training on racial and economic justice for its media partners (including EWA, APM Reports, WGBH EDU, and Hechinger Report).

⏰ Also this week, EWA held a webinar on covering grad rate deception, featuring WAMU’s Kat McGee and NPR’s Acacia Squires. During the webinar, Kate McGee described “red flags” that came up during the reporting of her original feel-good Ballou high school story.

⏰ Last but not least, I would have loved to have caught Guardian reporter Lois Beckett and others talking about gun violence journalism at Tuesday’s Center for Health Journalism webinar. No video that I can see, but lots of helpful resources are online.

KICKER

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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/