The Power of One Student's Story

In my “Stories That Work” columns, I like to feature an article I feel that other reporters, no matter how taxing their beats, can—and should—emulate. Pretty early in my conversation with Diette Courrege, I realized that this wasn't going to be that sort of column.

If journalism were ranked by an index that measured effort expended per column inch, “Failing Our Students,” Diette's May 3 article about how one boy made it from kindergarten to age 17 without learning to read, surely would rank toward the top. Most of what Diette, who covers Charleston, S.C., schools for the Post and Courier, had to go through to make these 100 inches a reality isn't obvious on the page. Maybe you don't have the time, or interest, to pursue a similar project. Still, there's a lot to learn from the piece, and a lot to admire.

Last spring, Diette was swimming in “hyperlocal” stories about downtown Charleston school board friction and magnet school admissions. At the time, she was the paper's only education reporter and, as always, was publishing about five stories a week. Diette's reporting has always relied on conversations in the community, far from school buildings: with presidents of neighborhood associations, board members, church leaders. During one of these chats, the talk turned from local politics to a grittier reality. “I know there are kids in high schools who can't read,” the source said. Not long after, the source introduced Diette to Ridge Smith.

This seems obvious when you see it on paper: When you're writing about people who are disconnected from institutions, you can't rely on the institutions to provide you with your subjects. You've got to go to churches, to soup kitchens, to court-mandated parenting classes. You've got to pound the pavement of the projects.

Diette first met Ridge and his mother, Daphney, at their house in April 2008. He was 16 and had recently been suspended from his second year in ninth grade. When Diette said, “as delicately as I could,” that she wanted to tell the story of Ridge's literacy problems, he protested that he could read. “Okay, well, I need you to show me then,” Diette said. A newspaper was lying around—Daphney would bring them home from her job cleaning hotel rooms—and Diette asked Ridge to read an article aloud.

“It blew my mind,” she said. “Every couple of words he just stopped.” Diette highlighted all the words Ridge didn't know: August, local, politics. After several grafs she stopped and asked him about what he had read. It was clear he hadn't understood a thing. She would later find out he was reading at a third-grade level.

Diette set out to write a comprehensive narrative about how one student can pass grade after grade without reading. In the fall, with Daphney's permission and a letter written by an attorney with the South Carolina Press Association, Diette requested Ridge's records. The massive file was incredibly helpful, especially because Ridge was in special education and thus had detailed IEPs. But Diette had a sense that things were missing. For example, by doing the math she had concluded that Ridge had been held back in first grade, but all she could find in the file was a one-line mention on a sheet of paper discussing an unrelated issue.

She would only learn this for sure months later, when in a defensive move, district officials gave her their own chronology of Ridge's education, which included many facts omitted from the original file. When Diette began calling Ridge's former teachers, the district told her that the original affadavit had expired so no longer applied to these conversations. Tracking down Daphney to sign a new affadavit was not easy; at one point Diette found herself chasing down a city bus, with a notary public in her passenger seat.

“The file was absolutely critical,” Diette says—without it, she wouldn't have had a story. She was able to track Ridge's interventions, find his teachers and fact-check his recollections, which were spotty and sometimes inaccurate. For example, he said ninth grade was the first time he had been held back, which wasn't true.

Obviously you are not always going to have a formal record to go on, but it's never a bad idea to check your subject's assertions, to truth-squad a teenager's memory lapses and equivocations. When Ridge said he could read, a quick exercise showed otherwise. After he said he was going to GED class, Diette would wait for him at class and watch as he never showed up.

Diette couldn't find some of Ridge's teachers. Some weren't willing to talk. But enough did, and these are the strongest parts of the piece: the third-grade teacher  discussing in tears how her personal efforts failed to help Ridge, the fourth-grade teacher explaining the boy's strengths and weaknesses, the eighth-grade teacher describing Ridge's descent that year. The reader doesn't get much detail on what exactly was attempted with Ridge academically, but I'm probably overly geeky about such things, and anyway who wants this to turn into a technical primer on reading interventions? 

Also, you don't get a great sense of Ridge's personality or hear many of his own thoughts. For months, Diette sneaked out of the office to hang out with Ridge. She'd watch Ridge sit on the couch. She'd drive him around to the projects where he used to live, take him to eat. She'd watch him watch his girlfriend watch their baby.

Ridge was not reflective, or articulate, or particularly engaging, and believe me, I know how difficult it can be to make someone like that come alive on the page. While Diette and her editor ultimately decided the details she collected during these visits weren't germane to the story—and, frankly, were boring—she still thinks the time spent was crucial. “It helped me get to know him better,” she said. “It gave me the authority to write about him.”

As any reporter who covers people in poverty knows, even making contact is no simple thing. “You can't just set a time and they're there,” Diette said. Daphney's phone number changed at least three times during the course of reporting, and she never returned one message. Ridge had a phone for only one month. After a year of contact, the first time Daphney phoned Diette was when she saw Ridge's photo in the paper.

Meanwhile, she was basically reporting under the radar. “If you're smart and you're a good reporter, that's how you do it,” she said. The best stories are rarely reported on the clock. Diette's regular editor knew the project existed but was unaware of the details; she was working with a special projects editor. The only time she was loosed from her daily grind was a week before the story ran, when she needed to fact-check and tie up loose ends.

The piece was followed by a forceful editorial. In  letters to the editor and online comments, some people faulted Daphney; some faulted the schools. There's no one clear bad guy, no one fatal mistake, and that's part of what makes the piece strong. Reality rarely comes in black and white.

In what I think was a strange move, on the same day the piece ran, the superintendent was offered about 20 inches on the op-ed page to make the district's case. (She had not seen Diette's story at the time.) Diette liked that she didn't have to muck up her narrative with the superintendent's response. But to me that sets a bad precedent.

Still, it doesn't take away from a tremendous effort. The piece, when you think about it, is fairly bare-boned: no quotes from literacy experts , no “across the nation” context. But the skeleton Diette built, on a year's worth of hard work, could not be stronger.

Linda Perlstein is available to help you. Contact her at 410-539-2464 or lperlstein@ewa.org.