STORIES THAT WORK

That Raven Hill conceived this interesting article about high principal turnover and its effects speaks to two of the most important ways to generate story ideas: Be curious, and read widely.

In this case, Raven was reading the competition, the alternative newsweekly Austin Chronicle, when one thing caught her eye. It was a brief mention, really, one graf in a very long story by Kimberly Reeves:

“The second factor, which few people want to acknowledge publicly, is that Austin traditionally has had a weak principal corps. For whatever reason, most AISD principals have lacked longevity, and some have lacked quality. Johnston may be the worst with 10 principals in eight years, including the infamous and arrested Al Mindiz-Melton but almost every high school in the district has suffered from regular principal turnover.”

Raven wondered, How common is this exactly? Why is this so, and what does it mean for a school?

There are scores of story ideas to be found buried in other pieces. While reading “Will Johnathan Graduate?”, Lonnae O’Neal Parker’s wonderful article about a D.C. high school, back in November, I underlined twenty sentences that each could have been fleshed out into their own article. Among them:

“They duck into stairwells layered with graffiti.”

“Around the room, cords from a dozen headphones snake up to students’ ears.”

“Burton estimated that one teacher missed nearly 40 of 90 days last year.”

“A student this late often has to spend first period, all 80 minutes, in tardy hall.”

And “Burton was the seventh principal in nine years” nearly exactly the sentence that inspired Raven.

Raven knew that principal turnover was an issue for some schools, but now she realized the problem might be more systemic. She and her colleague, Bob Banta, contacted area school districts, asking for principal turnover rates for the last five years, no matter whether the principal was promoted, retired, or resigned. “Regardless of the reason the person left, the leaving creates instability,” she told me.

From there they calculated annual turnover rates, sought data from other urban districts, and looked for human examples to speak to. Ed Fuller from the Center for Teaching Quality at the University of Texas, a longtime source of Raven’s, was helpful on the state and local numbers—in fact, local sources were more helpful than national associations for the reporting, she said—but the latter two tasks proved more difficult.

“One of the hardest things was finding former principals,” Raven said. “I thought that because these principals were no longer with the school district, they would be open to talking.” No such luck. Of the ten she called, no more than four spoke with her.

“It would have been stronger to have more of the former principals’ voices,” she said. And to have more of the voices that she did have kept intact: A quote from former principal Brenda Burrell was cut in half during the copy-editing process, removing some of the context a bit and upsetting the source. The reporters didn’t have any more luck finding veteran teachers who endured through several principals at a given school.

The story ran about a month after Raven and Bob, both education beat reporters, first began work on it. Most of the reporting spanned two and a half weeks, a time the reporters were working on other stories too. It was one of Raven’s last stories for the paper; she left at the end of February to take a job with the Education Trust in Washington, as a communications specialist.

Now, we can hope, she’s in the business of giving us story ideas.

If there’s a Story That Works you want to know more about, e-mail Linda at lperlstein@ewa.org.