Last month I posted a commentary about a new Brookings Institution report that chronicles the alarming decline in the quality and quantity of U.S. education news coverage. One way to push back against the trend, I asserted, would involve a kind of grass-roots writing spree on the part of school administrators and teachers. The theory holds – but in the weeks since the column ran, a number of readers and colleagues have responded with opinions on the issue. Their ideas seem well worth airing here.

At the heart of the discussion lies the question of local education reporting. The writers of the Brookings report admit that local journalists tend to cover the substantive work of schools better than national reporters, but they nevertheless takes a doom-and-gloom stance. The report concludes that “it is difficult for local outlets to maintain the quality of their coverage in the face of financial cutbacks and staff layoffs.”

Local papers certainly face many of the same challenges as the national news media, but whether or not their education coverage has been adversely affected seems to be up for debate. For example, Washington Post columnist Jay Matthews recently published a column in which he challenges the very premise of the Brookings report:

Maybe national education news is hard to find. Maybe it deserves to be, as boring and repetitive as it can be. But education reporting, at least the local kind that fills most of my days, is alive and well and provides more than 1.4 percent of what Americans read in their newspapers each day. […] Smaller papers are still devoting much of their space to schools.

Jay is not alone in his optimism. One reader responded to my column by pointing out the increasingly active and visible teacher blogosphere. Another, the managing editor of a local Denver paper, wrote saying that she has readers imploring her to cut back on her paper’s schools coverage.

The most striking response came from a friend in Indiana, who alerted me to an extraordinary series that has been running for six months in the Indy Star. The project began when columnist Matthew Tully decided to embed himself at Manual High, one of Indianapolis’s toughest public schools, and the results are nothing short of dynamite. Tully’s stories are colorful, incisive, and full of analysis that connects the school’s goings-on with changing conditions at the local and national levels. The project has garnered an impassioned following – so impassioned, in fact, that more than 2,000 people showed up to the school band’s winter concert after Tully chronicled the heroic efforts of its director.

This is the stuff of reporters’ fantasies and Hollywood movies, and it certainly suggests that local education coverage is still flourishing in some corners of the country.

My question, when it comes to the Manual project, is why nobody except for local Hoosiers seem to be in the know. Sure, a series focused around a specific school seems most directly relevant to local citizens. But given the lack of substantive national educational coverage, such a coherent and insightful series deserves to be brought to the attention of interested readers everywhere.

Maybe, then, national papers should start featuring a roundup of links to the best local stories? The industry has always worked in the opposite direction, with local papers relying on AP headlines to round out their content, but unusual times call for unusual measures. The roundup would take minimal effort and space, and it is hard to imagine that audiences would mind.

For this to work, of course, local education stories need to make their national relevance utterly clear. As far as I am concerned, this should happen anyway. Most of the interesting work happening in schools right now is either influencing or responding to national policy – oftentimes both. Journalists need to follow Tully’s lead and explore these two-way connections as best they can, connecting policies to classrooms and classrooms to policies. Only then might the public begin to fully understand the real, complicated, and exciting experiments that have begun to shift the landscape of public education in America.

Sarah Fine spent four years working at a charter school in southeast Washington, D.C. Her recent piece on the community schools movement appeared in Education Week’s February 3^rd issue.

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In his final from-the-editor post of 2009, Alan Gottlieb makes a spirited case for the value of this website by outlining the gloomy findings of a new report published by the Brookings Institution. The report, titled “Invisible: 1.4 Percent Coverage for Education Not Enough,” chronicles the decline in both the quantity and quality of U.S. education reporting.

The authors suggest that one way of reversing the trend would be for foundations and non-profits to expand their own forms of education coverage – exactly what PEBC has done by founding Education News Colorado.

I am certainly proud to be part of such a forward-thinking project, but the Brookings report hits a raw nerve. This fall, after four years of teaching and a summer spent mulling over my professional future, I decided to apply to doctoral programs in education. The decision represents what I intend to be a lifelong commitment to the field, and more specifically a commitment to writing about the complex stories that play out in the classrooms and offices of urban public schools.

I know that traditional media journalism faces an uncertain future, and that education stories rarely make the front page – but 1.4 percent? Can the effort to reimagine and reform our nation’s school-system really be that much less compelling than, say, the H1N1 flu?

It is not just my nascent career that concerns me. I have long been intrigued by the fact that American society tends to relegate education to the realm of the un-newsworthy. The relevant issue now seems to be about causes.

Why does education rank so low on the public radar? The question is obviously complicated, and the researchers at Brookings sidestep it neatly. They attribute recent shrinking of coverage to global media budget cuts – a reasonable explanation, but one that hardly explains why education coverage so often verges on invisible.

One thing that seems clear is that the problem does not stem from a lack of actual relevance. Almost all Americans have had at least some contact with the public education system, and a significant portion of these – parents and parents-to-be, teachers and their spouses, not to mention students – have an immediate stake in its success. It is hard to imagine that the American public would be unreceptive if they were offered some ongoing, in-depth, jargon-free reporting about the state of their schools.

Sadly, this is exactly the kind of reporting that is verging on extinction.

According to the Brookings study, the majority of recent national education coverage has been devoted to budget issues, school crime, test results, and school-based outbreaks of the flu. Even publications that educators turn to with great respect have been focused almost exclusively on big-picture issues around national policies and standards. Absent are stories about the ins-and-outs of school life: experiments with new rules and curricula, hallway tangles and triumphs, board meetings, poetry slams.

“The lack of coverage of the actual work of schools remains a significant problem,” write the authors of the Brookings study. They go on to outline three strategies for addressing the problem: first, school administrators should more proactively share information with the public; second, education reporters should write meatier stories; and third, nonprofits and foundations should follow PEBC’s lead and create their own sources of education coverage.

If principals and journalists and CEOs hearken to this call, education coverage certainly will deepen in some important ways. It strikes me, however, that the people whose voices best can represent the actual work of schools include not only administrators but also the rest of the school-level corps: parents, students, staff, and teachers. These are the people who know the rhythms and questions that punctuate daily life in schools, and who can tell stories which reporters rarely have time to unearth.

Especially teachers. Anybody who has spent time in a faculty-room knows that most teachers love nothing better than discussing the ins-and-outs of daily life in their classrooms. Many also have insightful observations about the impact of particular structures and policies on their students. Too often, however, these ideas are absent in public discussions, leaving teachers feeling disempowered and making education journalism the sole domain of think-tank researchers and overburdened reporters.

Of course, being a teacher or administrator or parent does not leave much room for extracurricular activities like laboring over op-eds. But the task does not have to be “extra.” When I began writing about the goings-on in my former school, it was as much to make sense of my experiences as to contribute to the larger dialogue about public education. The project was humbling and grueling, but the process allowed me to find clarity around some of the most troubling issues I faced.

And, astonishing to me at first, people seemed interested in what I had to say. I do not think it was because I have more insight than the countless other teachers out there who fall asleep each night musing about their students. I think it was because I tried to ground big-picture education issues in real stories about a real school, and readers were, and are, hungry for that kind of perspective.

So: people who spend time in schools need to write, prolifically. They need to find space to set aside their to-do-lists and think about what the public might need to hear in order to more fully understand the experiments in reform that have begun to change the American public-school landscape. Such an effort could go a long way toward restoring depth, breadth, and visibility to education coverage. It might give a leg up to education reporters, too – and they surely need it.

Sarah Fine spent four years working at a charter school in southeast Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Education Week, Teacher Magazine, and The Washington Post.

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