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BEST EDUCATION JOURNALISM OF THE WEEK
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Along with the clip above, there’s been a lot of great journalism about last week’s school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas — and an appropriate amount of caution before coming to any conclusions. Some examples:

NPR: New Details Emerge About Suspect In Texas School Shooting
AP: Police response to Texas school shooting remains unclear 
Houston Chronicle: Details emerge about victims, survivors of Santa Fe shooting
Houston Chronicle: My daughter phoned: ‘I’m hiding in a closet. I love you, Mom.’ 
Vox: “Stop this bullshit”: uncle of Pakistani girl killed in Texas shooting pleads with America

This is the web archive version of the weekly newsletter, Best of the Week, which comes out on Fridays. Sign up here to get it first. 

HONORABLE MENTIONS
THE BELTWAY:
🏆 Vox: Schumer, Pelosi unveil $100B plan for teacher raises
🏆EdWeek: DeVos Says Schools Can Report Students to ICE. Advocates Say She’s Wrong.
🏆 NPR: Education Department Launches ‘Top-To-Bottom’ Review Of Grant Program
🏆 WashPost: Families sue city following investigation that found widespread enrollment fraud.
🏆Washington City Paper: Behind the Consulting Firm Raking In Millions From D.C. Charter Schools
🏆Washington Post: Why does Bowser keep saying D.C. is the ‘fastest improving’ school district in the country?SCHOOL GUN VIOLENCE
🏆CNN: Since Parkland, 14 states have introduced 25 measures to arm teachers and staff. Only 1 has passed
🏆 The Atlantic: The Futility of Trying to Prevent More School Shootings in America
🏆 Houston Public Media: Five Things To Know About Texas’ School Marshal Program
🏆 The Guardian: Parkland survivor David Hogg aims to ‘create the NRA – except for the opposite issues’ 
🏆 KLCC Oregon: The Thurston School Shooting, 20 Years Later: Profiles Of Tragedy And TriumphSEGREGATION & INEQUALITY
🏆 NYT: New Jersey Law Codifies School Segregation, Suit Says
🏆 ChalkbeatNY: Another integration plan for Upper West Side middle schools is met with some support, but also familiar concerns
🏆 NYT: ‘It Has to Start Somewhere’: Grass-Roots Drive to Integrate New York Schools
🏆 WBEZ: Inspector General: End Free Full-Day Montessori For Chicago’s Wealthiest
🏆 ChalkbeatNY: Chancellor Carranza offers harsh critique of NYC school admissions.
🏆 Chicago Reporter: Study: After mass school closings, impacted students lagged [WBEZ version here]
🏆 WSJ: Fewer Suspensions, More ‘Hugs and Bubbles’: Oklahoma City’s Experiment in School Discipline
🏆 CSM: More than ‘beautiful words’: How one school fights to keep racial equityTEACHERS
🏆 Payday Report: 61% of Louisiana Teachers Want to Strike According to Union Survey
🏆 Bridge (MA) Magazine: He loved teaching math in Michigan. Then he quit to manage a Chick-fil-A
🏆 The Hill: Teachers union expects to lose 300k members if high court overturns fees [see The 74 story here]
🏆 VOSD: Inside the Fight to Make Public School Misconduct Records Public
🏆 Courier-Journal: House GOP leader Jonathan Shell loses primary to teacherMISC
🏆 Harvard Crimson: Fryer Facing Harvard and State-Level Investigations, Barred from Lab He Heads
🏆 San Diego Union-Tribune: How a principal worked in 3 districts despite concerns about his leadership, behavior
🏆 Washington Post: Court sides with transgender Va. student in his fight to use the boys’ bathroom
🏆 The 74: Watch: 7 of This Year’s Most Memorable — and Inspiring — Graduation Speeches [including Abby Wambach and the Black Panther]
FOR EDUCATION JOURNALISM, RACIAL DIVERSITY REMAINS A STRUGGLE
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A recent story reported by WBEZ Chicago’s new education reporter, Adriana Cardona-Maguigad.

Last week, #EWA18 highlighted the importance of diversity for education journalism. This week, The Grade reported how individual newsrooms are doing on that front — and highlighted some stories that illustrate the benefits of having diverse newsrooms and journalists of color on the education beat.

Where do things stand? As of May 2019, journalists of color make up 30 percent or less of the education teams at many places such as NPR Education, the LA Times, and WBEZ Chicago. Some nonprofit education outlets like Chalkbeat and the Hechinger Report are making progress towards more diversity compared to previous years. Journalists of color are the majority at a few education teams like KPCC Los Angeles and WNYC New York.

Education is a beat where reporters are often covering communities of color and reporting on racially charged issues. Journalists of color and diverse newsrooms can bring new context and coverage approaches to education stories. And yet, as of 2016, just 22 percent of reporters who cover education identified as journalists of color.

Big thanks to all the organizations that participated in this year’s roundup, and congrats to those making progress. (Demerits to the news organizations who have not shared information — though this is a journalism-wide problem.) Thanks also to all the journalists of color who are writing and editing great education stories — so much great stuff! — and to folks like Danielle Belton and Jean Marie Brown who helped inform this piece.

Want to do better? Of course you do. Here’s Tanzina Vega’s 10 tips for making your newsroom more inclusive. Pass it along.  Let’s make the education beat the diversity leader in American journalism. There’s no real reason we can’t.

MEDIA TIDBITS
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📰 HYPING THE DANGER: Remember that Washington Post story about how more kids had been killed in school shootings than in the military? Sure you do. Now corrected, the story illustrates ongoing problems media outlets are having about overstating the extent of school shootings. As Snopes noted, “the number of active duty U.S. military personnel killed from all causes so far this year (including training accidents) is greater than the number of people(including adults) killed in school shootings.”

📰 PUTTING SCHOOL GUN DEATHS IN CONTEXT: “According to the most recent federal data, between 1992 and 2015, less than 3 percent of homicides of children 5 to 18 years old occurred at school, and less than 1 percent of suicides,” writes the NYT’s Dana Goldstein in a story about why school shootings are so shocking.

📰 PARKLAND ACTIVIST DECRIES PROTECT COVERAGE: At EWA18, David Hogg slammed broadcast media coverage of a recent Miami-Dade student protest “look like a riot.” There were a few reporters covering the protest from the ground, however, including WLRN’s Nadege Green, whose reporting on gun violence colleague Jessica Bakeman describes as some of the best reporting in Florida or the entire country. Check that out herehere, and here.

📰 COVERING TEACHER STRIKES: Last week at the EWA conference, the Washington Post’s Moriah Balingit asked if there was something journalists missed or undercovered in the spring teacher strikes. “We felt like it was labeled a teacher strike, and it wasn’t just a teacher strike; it was everyone — bus drivers, aids, cooks. We were truly unified. A lot of their stories got left out, and they were the backbone,” responded teacher activist Katie Endicott.

📰 MISSING IN ACTION: Two stories that I wish were getting more attention than they currently are: revelations about Broward schools stonewalling Parkland investigators and the media (including disturbing new revelations), and news that Portland, Oregon (and other districts) regularly expunge parts of teachers’ disciplinary files (to devastating effect). Another story I’m not seeing as much about as you might think: Census report information about which districts spend the most on kids.

📰 DEBUNKING THE 30-MILLION WORD STORY:  “I’m incredibly grateful for this important work which debunks the widely circulated myth that low-income kids (mostly of color) suffer from a 30 million word gap, but I’m also sad that we have to spend so much time disproving bigoted ideas when we could be up to so much more,” tweeted Stanford’s Dr. Jonathan Rosa.

📰 TRANSPARENCY: The Gould Foundation (which sponsors the Eddie Award) announced a new media transparency program at EWA18 last week. NYU’s Jay Rosen also talked about the importance of transparency during a conference session. He floated the idea of nonprofit outlets naming the funding levels they receive from foundations (rather than just listing names) and establishing a code of conduct. Chalkbeat and The 74 have adopted codes of conduct in recent years.

📰 INTERVIEWING KIDS: How do you approach talking to kids who are so young? That’s the question a reporter asked John Woodrow Cox at EWA18. “I would spend as much time with them as I could before I start talking to them about anything,” Cox responded. “I would ask them to go to their favorite place. I would sit on the floor. I would try to get my eye level below theirs,” Cox said.

PEOPLE, JOBS, AWARDS

NHJ at podsave america

Nikole Hannah-Jones at Radio City Music Hall as part of this week’s Pod Save America segment. Click here to watch clip.

🔥 “Children who score lower on tests aren’t scoring lower because they don’t care,” explained Nikole Hannah-Jones in a recent Radio City Music Hall appearance on Pod Save America. “They clearly don’t get the same education as those of us who have privilege can ensure that our children get.”

🔥 “I think humor is vital to painting a 360-degree portrait of someone,” said WBEZ’s Linda Lutton on how she reported and produced her piece “The View From Room 205.” “I included a lot of humor.”

🔥 Currently the engagement editor for The Seattle Times Education Lab, Dahlia Bazzaz will be the paper’s K-12 reporter starting this summer, covering schools throughout Seattle and the Puget Sound region. The ST is looking to replace her (and also to replace editor Linda Shaw, now at the Solutions Journalism Network).

🔥 NJ Governor Phil Murphy backed out of a public radio event at the last minute because he disapproved of the inclusion of Politico reporter Linh Tat on a segment focused on school funding, according to WNYC’s Nancy Solomon. The governor’s office says the dispute was over the use of time, not the reporter or the topic.

🔥 Kudos to NPR’s Chris Arnold and Cory Turner for their work reporting on the problematic USDE teacher grants turned into loans. As you may have seen, the program is now getting a full review.

🔥 In just-released emails, a story written by the NYT’s Kate Taylor was the subject of NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ire. Via Alex Zimmerman.

🔥 The sole former education journalist running for office (that I know of) has been defeated. But I think we can all agree that former Slate education columnist Laura Moser had a good run.

🔥 Silvia Foster-Frau is leaving the education beat at the San Antonio Express-News to cover immigration, according to a tweet from Francisco Vara-Orta, but the beat is “in great hands” with Alia MalikLauren Caruba, and Krista M. Torralva.

🔥 The Kojo Nnamdi show is hiring a senior producer. The daily talk show onWAMU, DC’s NPR station, covers local politics, culture, history, transit, food, schools, urban planning, sports, crime, health, housing, and more.

🔥 Mallory Falk is a 2018 Report For America corps member. She’ll be joining KRWG as a multimedia reporter, covering education, healthcare, economic development and sustainability in Southern New Mexico and Far West Texas.

🔥 It was great to meet Chalkbeat Chicago’s Adeshina Emmanuel last week. It was even more fun to read some of his backstory here, including how transferring schools helped him and how he thinks schools need to be covered.

🔥 “We haven’t saved the world but it’s only midday on Friday,” said Dallas Morning News reporter (and new EWA board member) Eva-Marie Ayala. “So we still have time.”

EVENTS, DEADLINES, ANNOUNCEMENTS
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⏰ Last week at Columbia, Ira Glass told newly-minted journalists “It can take a long time to be as good as you want to be. And be kind to yourself, during that period. And work hard.” via Bethany Barnes.

⏰ Here’s the first edition of Chalkbeat’s new “How I Teach” newsletter, edited by Ann Schimke.

⏰ Seeking: Reporters of all skill levels to join “Chicago’s best reporting fellowship.” City Bureau has entry-level positions and mid-career positions available. Applications are due May 28.

⏰ “Chicagoans: Let’s make the dream of an Ida B. Wells monument in Chicago a reality,” tweeted Nikole Hannah-Jones. The fundraiser is May 31. RSVP here.⏰ Student publications do some of the country’s most important community journalism. The Chronicle of Higher Education is starting reporting workshopsfor those student publications. “Think of it as a kind of higher-ed boot camp,” writes Andy Thomason. The deadline for applications is June 1, 2018.

⏰ “I’ve wanted to see this panel forever. This year I finally pitched it — and it’s happening!” tweeted Bethany Barnes.  Perla TrevizoMaud Beelman, and Alanna Autler will discuss ourcing while female at #IRE18 in Orlando on June 16.

KICKER: ALL ABOUT PROM
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Yep. That’s education reporter Mario Koran at prom circa 1997.

The New York Times’ “This Strange Thing Called Prom”  might be my favorite prom story of all time — from 10 years ago. What’s yours? Another good one from Koran is the NYT story “Proms as do-overs for Adults.”

Last week’s newsletter, ICYMI

This is the web archive version of the weekly newsletter, Best of the Week, which comes out on Fridays. Sign up here to get it first. 

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/