Just a few days left....
EWA’s 62nd annual meeting is just around the corner and we’ve got an all-star lineup of journalists, policy makers and education experts.

The meeting will kick off April 30th with sessions at the Madison Hotel in downtown Washington. EWA has pre-sessions scheduled that afternoon with one track for K-12 reporters and another for higher ed reporters new to the beat. If you are contemplating life after the newsroom and you want to blog, we'll have people offer advice on how to do it. Another two-part session will look at social media.

The first part focuses on using social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, as reporting tools. The second part looks at the ethical issues.

Practical sessions will offer reporters tips on how to track stimulus spending in their districts. If you are making the transition to freelancing, we'll have advice on how to make pitches and earn a living. Other sessions focus how to read school budgets, how to use federal statistics, FERPA/FOIA issues, how to judge the way your school system uses its tests.

Check out more information here. If you already know you want to attend and you're a journalist, apply for a scholarship ASAP.

Also, you can stay up to date on what’s happening at our conference at http://ewaindc.blogspot.com/.

Stories That Work: The Associated Press and Historically Black Colleges
By Linda Perlstein, EWA public editor

Historically black colleges and universities have long enjoyed the reputation that compared to majority-white schools, they do better by African American students. If that were the case, Justin Pope wondered, then why do so many HBCUs consistently wind up at the bottom of lists of college graduation rates?

Justin, the Associated Press’s national higher education reporter, had long thought college completion—or lack thereof—was an important, underreported story. At the same time, he felt like the press wrote little about HBCUs. “They kind of exist in this bubble, separated from both positive stories and accountability stories,” he told me. So Justin began poking around on the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS, the federal government’s higher ed statistics database, to find out the truth about HBCUs and graduation.

“IPEDS is an incredible resource, but you have to know how to use it,” Justin said. He soon found out that he didn’t. Sure, he could create a list of schools and retrieve certain types of data for them; it was far more complicated, however, to measure and compare graduation rates from school to school, and from group (HBCUs) to group (all schools). And he was asking a question that hadn’t been asked before, rather than relying on research that already existed—terrific journalism, without shortcuts.

In short, overwhelming.

Justin eventually realized that on his own he wouldn’t achieve the flawless methodology he wanted. He sought help from researchers at Education Trust, which tracks graduation rates with its own web tool, to mine IPEDS for data more current than what their organization had posted. Pride of ownership, he says now, should not stop a reporter from asking for this kind of help, and he only wishes he had done so earlier.

What he ultimately found out, and reported in his March 28 piece: 37 percent of black students at HBCUs graduate within six years, compared to 41 percent of blacks nationally. For black men at HBCUs, the story is worse: 29 percent of them graduate within six years.

“This is a tight-knit community of people, and this group of schools plays a very proud and important role in the tapestry of American higher education,” Justin told me. Given the emotional and historical importance of HBCUs, he faced some resistance to his reporting.

There are complex explanations of how this problem came to be, he was told. (He did a great job of addressing this in the story; the blame is shared widely.) You can’t look at HBCUs as a group because they are so different from each other, he was told. (Well, he said, other types of colleges are diverse, yet we compare them all the time.) Our research shows otherwise, one organization said. (Justin was so thorough with the data analysis that he felt comfortable favoring his own methodology.) He also challenged himself, asking if it was the right time to dive into such an exhaustive story that wasn’t about the economy. Yes, he decided. “I don’t think we can just stop covering other things that are going on in education,” he said.

Of course, like most stories about college, in many ways this one is about the economy too. Data in Justin’s piece, beyond graduation rates, show how. At some HBCUs, per-student spending on teaching and support is as low as $5,000, compared to $23,000 at Howard and $102,000 at Yale—and even that little funding is now at risk. (This astonishing gap is far bigger than in K-12 education and is a ripe topic for stories, Justin points out. Check IPEDS for more.) $94,000? The debt one Florida A&M student racked up in three years before dropping out.

This dropout, Brandon Rossi, only gets two grafs in the story, but it’s enough to get a feel for his plight. So far in the hole for an incomplete education? Which brings me to an important point: You can’t write about dropouts without talking to dropouts. And, unfortunately, they don’t tend to hang out on the quad, waiting to be interviewed by reporters.

“There were some moments in the reporting of this where I thought, ‘Boy, I am writing this story essentially about how many black males dropped out, and I can’t find any,” Justin said. He asked people he interviewed for the names and numbers of dropouts; that didn’t get him anywhere. He found luck posting queries on HBCU community websites.

Justin was worried he’d be vulnerable to criticism that, writing about a group of schools with hundreds of thousands of students among them, he couldn’t possibly understand all the nuances involved. In my eyes, including the voices of so many people—who were loyal to their schools yet clearly dissatisfied—headed off such criticism. The story was solidly based in data, but Justin interviewed widely and stretched to show what the numbers meant in real life—particularly compellingly, he wrote about how the lack of men on campus made it hard for women to find dates, and how it led them to tolerate poor treatment from boyfriends.

Justin said that most of the HBCU presidents were open and honest about the problems, but his story benefited from the blunt observations of one in particular, Walter Kimbrough at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark. Kimbrough said HBCUs “have gotten lazy” and called the idea of them as an unusually nurturing environment a “flat-out lie.” He had been described to Justin as part of a new generation of HBCU leaders committed to raising academic standards. This, Justin told me, reflects a conflict playing out at many schools around the country, one worth writing about if you cover HBCUs: Can you continue a mission of open access at the same time you improve academics and graduation rates?

Justin began playing around with the data in January, while he reported other stories. In February he wrote two pieces, one on the gender gap and one on the graduation rate, which were eventually combined into one article of about 3,000 words—“because they are inextricably connected,” he said. He also wrote an abridged version that ran most commonly.

While the piece took a lot of time, Justin, who works in the AP’s Raleigh, N.C., bureau, said his expenses probably only came to $40. He did almost all of his reporting by phone, except for a detour on his own time to LeMoyne-Owen College, during a family trip to Memphis. An AP colleague in Atlanta conducted some interviews there.

Justin’s article touched on so many issues that in and of themselves could be 3,000-word pieces: the massive gender gap at colleges, the challenges of arriving unprepared, enrollment loss due in part to the economy, the spending disparities. Come to think of it, they could be 600-word pieces too. So take a look and grab some ideas.

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

PS. Reporters can get lessons on how to use IPEDS at the EWA National Seminar at 3:45 p.m. on Thursday, April 30.

Media Note
The Future of News
Mesha Y. Williams, EWA

Like explorers facing unchartered terrain, journalists are now forced to navigate the uncertain tide of change sweeping the news industry.
 
“I’m optimistic about the future, but I’m scared to death of how we get there,” said Lou Ferrara, managing editor of sports, entertainment and multimedia for the Associated Press. He made those remarks at the annual Newsvision Conference in Washington, D.C.,sponsored by the Online News Association and the University of Maryland's Phillip Merrill College of Journalism. This year's conference focused on the future of news and how journalists are adapting as content becomes more digitized.

Ferrara’s sentiment seems to accurately sum up the current news climate. A recent report released by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and ONA finds attitudes in the news industry are uneasy today. Journalists who work online are more optimistic about the future of the industry than those tied to more traditional media platforms, says the report.

The survey of ONA members finds that a majority of journalists thinks the industry is headed on the wrong track and that the Internet is changing the fundamental values of journalism for the worse. The journalists surveyed work online or work for legacy media who have ties to websites. Fifty-four percent of ONA members said journalism is headed in the wrong direction, compared to 45 percent who believe it is on the right track. In particular, journalists worry about declining accuracy, loosening of standards and carelessness of online newsgathering.

But not all news is bad. The report also finds that journalists surveyed praised the growing diversity of voices in news, the potential of technology, and in some cases the move toward more overtly ideological points of view at news sites.

What the future of journalism looks like is anybody’s guess which is a tough concept for an industry who likes to deliver its news in a neat package.

Industry leaders at the Newsvision Conference said there is a renewed emphasis on moving the industry forward and media companies are trying to figure out how.

“We don’t have the answers,” said Ju-Don Marshall Roberts, managing editor of the WashingtonPost.com. “We still have to embrace the idea of failing and the need to move forward at the same time. We need to be nimble and flexible to make sure our content is where users want it and that will continue to be a challenge... the way we produce journalism has got to change,” she says.

For an industry that was blindsided by the rise of the Internet more than a decade ago, journalists say they are now looking beyond the web to deliver content to audiences.

More content being available for users via their cellphones may be the next step of connecting with audiences, but there has to be more experimentation in that direction.

Instead of looking at this as a defeating period for journalism, leaders like Vivian Schiller, president and CEO of National Public Radio, said this is a perfect opportunity to explore challenges in order to create some fresh and exciting changes.

“This is a crisis that we will not waste,” Schiller said. “The answer for us is not to retrench. We need to innovate, take risk and not be afraid to fail.”

Schiller believes the thirst for good storytelling is strong among the public as evident by NPR’s Morning Edition. The show has an audience of 27 million people, which is more than the viewership of the major network's three early morning shows, she said.

Reports to Watch
The Nation’s Report Card: NAEP 2008 Trends in Academic Progress was released today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The results for 2008 are compared to 2004, when performances were last released. Reporters who need a copy of the report can visit http://nationsreportcard.gov/.

The Schott Foundation for Public Education will present its recommendations to increase the federal role in ensuring that all children have an equal opportunity to learn. A press briefing will be held in Washington, D.C. at the Capitol Hill Visitor Center when Thursday, April 30. All people planning to attend the event must RSVP at least 48 hours beforehand. For more information, go visit http://www.schottfoundation.org/ .

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) will release a new report Basic Reading Skills and the Literacy of America’s Least Literate Adults: Results from 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) Supplemental Studies. The report will be released Wednesday, May 6th and a conference call is planned at noon. The full report will be made available at 10:00 a.m. EST at http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009481. For more details, please contact Raquel Maya at 202-842-3600, ext. 212 rmaya@hagersharp.com.

Reports: New Career/technical website, the state of prek

President Obama Talks Student Loans
If you missed President Obama’s remarks on student loans last week, read them here. The president has said he will increase funding for the Perkins Loan program by $6 billion.
 

Career Tech Helper
If you are writing a story about career and technical education and need some data, check out the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) website. The Career/Technical Education Statistics section includes information on the secondary/high school, post-secondary/college career education and adult education. You can get information on 10-year educational trends, student enrollment, financial aid, faculty and state data. For more information, go here .

Why aren’t more black males graduating from college?
The Associated Press’ spotlight on the struggles of black male students enrolled at historically black colleges and universities has created buzz among academics, policy makers and journalists. You can read AP’s story here.

The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) held an audio conference identifying educational opportunities in the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to help black males. The National Council on Educating Black Children will focus on how best to educate young males at its convention May 2.

You can read this Inside Higher Education story on black males and remediation.

You can also listen to this National Public Radio piece, featuring Morehouse College President Robert Franklin and Philander Smith College President Walter Kimbrough. They discuss black males and college retention rates.

Education advice for Obama Administration and Congress
The Obama Administration is getting more advice on education issues -- this time from the RAND Corporation. The organization has released five policy briefs that summarize research on issues such as improving accountability in public education, No Child Left Behind, pay for performance, preschool and charter schools. To read each brief, go here.

The State of Preschool
The National Institute for Early Education Research released its annual "The State of Preschool 2008" report.Enrollment expanded in most state programs and standards improved, the report says. Highlights include:

• More than 1.1 million children attend state-funded preschool
• States prek enrollment of 3- and 4-year-olds approach 1.4 million in general and special education
• Total state funding for pre-k rose to almost $4.6 billion

The report says as the nation continues to grapple with its worse economic crisis in a generation that pre-k may lose resources as a consequence. NIEER proposes that the federal government commit to doubling the rate of growth and continue to raise quality so that all four-year olds have access to a quality preschool education. You can read the rest of the report here.

EWA News and Notes

Linda K. Wertheimer, a long-time education writer and editor, has taken a buyout at the Boston Globe. She plans to freelance, write a memoir and spend more time with her one-year-old.

EWA board member Kent Fischer has also taken a buyout at the Dallas Morning News. Fischer, a four-time EWA award winner, has accepted a job with Greer Margolis, a consulting firm based in Seattle, Washington. His last day at the Dallas Morning News was April 24th. EWA wishes Wertheimer and Fischer the best of luck!

The 2009 Payne Awards for Ethics in Journalism has announced its winners, and journalists who won in EWA’s reporting contest were recognized again. The Seattle Times’ Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry won the news organization award for their reporting on the cover-up of unlawful player conduct at the University of Washington’s football program. In March, Armstrong and Perry won a special citation in EWA’s contest for newspaper investigative reporting (over 100,000). Congrats guys!

EWA board member Elizabeth Green has been named as a new Spencer Education Journalism Fellow. Green, a reporter with Gotham Schools.org, will join Peg Tyre of Newsweek, and Sarah Garland of Newsweek International at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Upcoming Events, Webinars

The Education Sector will sponsor “Ensuring Accountability for Federal Incentive and Innovative Funds" on Wednesday, April 29. The meeting will be held at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C. Go here to register for the event.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is sponsoring an event entitled "International Lessons About National Standards" Tuesday, May 5. The all-day event will be held at the Capital Hilton. To attend RSVP Christina Hentges or call 202-223-5452.

The Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution will host U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to speak about the economic stimulus Monday, May 11. Go here to register.

The See Forum is hosting a forum entitled “Building a Foundation for the Future: A Discussion on the Latest Research on Elementary Math Curriculum". The seminar will be held May 12th. Go here to register.

From the Beat

Poor Neighborhoods, Untested Teachers
By Daniel de Vise and Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post
Students in the region's poorest neighborhoods are nearly twice as likely to have a new or second-year teacher as those in the wealthiest, a Washington Post analysis finds. The analysis shows 93 schools in the past academic year at which at least a third of the faculty were beginners, such as Clinton Grove Elementary teacher Lisa Johnson, who became a teacher last year.

Grade records show the highs, lows among UWM teachers, courses 
By Erica Perez and Ben Poston
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Students interested in taking an Africology survey course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee might want to do a bit of math before choosing an instructor. Only 3% of students who took Africology 100, "Black Reality," with renowned scholar Patrick Bellegarde-Smith earned an A or A-. This is just one finding from a database of UWM grades obtained through an open records request. The Journal Sentinel analyzed more than 29,000 records of undergraduate and graduate courses from the fall 2006 semester through fall 2008.

Oregon high school dropout rate drops to lowest in a decade
By Bill Graves
The Oregonian
Oregon's dropout rate fell last year to an all-time low, in part because of better school options focused on kids in danger of quitting, state officials reported.

Strip search review tests limits of school drug policy
By Joan Biskupic
USA TODAY
Eighth-grader Savana Redding was scared and confused when an assistant principal searching for drugs ordered her out of math class, searched her backpack and then instructed an administrative aide and school nurse to conduct a strip search.

My Students. My Cellphone. My Ordeal.
By Ting-Yi Oei
For the Washington Post
Ting-Yi Oei, an assistant principal in Loudoun County, Va., shares his story of how a school sexting investigation left him in hot water with local law enforcement authorities.

Please send your best stories and member news to Mesha Williams at publications@ewa.org.

**About us**

The Education Writers Association is the national professional organization of education reporters dedicated to improving education reporting to the public. Contact us by email at ewa@ewa.org, by phone at (202) 452-9830, by fax at (202) 452-9837 or by mail at 2122 P Street NW, Suite 201, Washington, DC, 20037.Our officers include: Richard Whitmire, president; Kent Fischer, of Greer Margolis, vice president/actives; Marie Groark, senior policy officer and spokeswoman for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, vice president/associates; Kathy Baron, morning host/education reporter at northern California's KQED-FM (on leave), secretary; Linda Lenz, publisher of Catalyst, immediate past president. Our board members include Dale Mezzacappa, former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and now a Philadelphia-based freelance writer, Tanya Schevitz, higher education reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle; John Merrow of Learning Matters Inc.; Rodney Ferguson, executive vice president of Lipman Hearne Inc.; Stephanie Banchero, reporter for Chicago Tribune; Cornelia Grumman, executive director of the First Five Years Fund; Elizabeth Green, reporter for Gotham Schools. org; Scott Elliott, columnist for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News. Find contact information at our Web site, http://www.ewa.org/.