How I Did the Story -- 2009 Edition

Read how 2009 EWA contest winners  got story ideas, the challenges they experienced and what they learned over the reporting process. Also see how Bob Hohler of the Boston Globe and grand prize winner reported his story "Failing Our Athletes: The Sad State of Sports in Boston Public Schools." 

IA. Small Media -- Breaking or Hard News
IC. Small Media -- Series or Group of Articles
IE. Small Media -- Opinion
ID. Small Media -- Investigative Reporting
IIB. Large Media -- Feature, News Feature or Issue Package
IIC. Large Media -- Series or Group of Articles
IID. Large Media -- Investigative Reporting
IIE. Large Media -- Opinion
III.A Multimedia
IVB. Large Media -- Beat Reporting
V. Magazines
VI. Special Interest, Institutional and Trade Publication
VIIB. Television -- Documentary

IA. Small Media--Breaking or Hard News

"Tackling Bus Challenges"

This was a breaking news story.  I learned about it from  the father of the child involved, the result of having established a strong working relationship with the school community that includes not just school officials and staff but parents and others who have a stake in what happens every day at 30  public schools in Bloomington-Normal. So, knowing I had this network at my disposal, I dropped what I was doing and made it my new priority to write a story about a little boy with autism who was dropped off at the wrong house by his school bus driver.  

My story reflected the raw emotions of a father worried about his child: “Jeff Smith panicked Wednesday because almost an hour had passed and his severely disabled son hadn’t arrived by school bus.“

When the facts become clear in a story like this, approaching school officials isn't as difficult as it may sound. That is, they HAVE to take action, and -- if they are good at their jobs -- make those actions known to the public. The best way to do that was through me since I already had the story and clearly had access to the father.

Being able to personalize the story through the dad also was important: The boy was a "sweet, innocent and unassuming" child, his father said. "He doesn’t have the capacity to know that he was lost and would have gotten in a car with anyone." That kind of quote really hits home with readers who can empathize with what the father was going through.

My favorite piece of writing advice is to write a story like I'm telling it to MY mom. That's what I did: Minutes later the boy got off the bus, greeted Smith with, "Hi, Daddy" and went in the house to get a snack and play video games. The child had no idea how afraid his family had been for him.

Phyllis Coulter, The Pantagraph -- First Prize

IC. Small Media -- Series or Group of Articles

"Asia Rising/America Falling"

The "Asia Rising/U.S. Falling" project started out with a general observation: funding for American higher education is on the decline, while Asian governments are pumping billions into their higher education systems.

We decided to tackle the issue with two broader pieces, from Asia and the U.S., focused around two questions: What accounts for these dramatically different trajectories, and is the U.S. higher education system at risk of losing its dominant position?

For the Asian reporting, we asked our China correspondent to look at several key countries: Singapore, Hong Kong, China and S. Korea. We knew each had made higher education a key part of their development strategy.

Mara Hvistendahl focused as much on the political strategy behind these investments as their practical effect. She spent a lot of time talking to policy makers and university leaders to understand how education funding fit in with the government’s long-term economic goals. And she looked for people with a pan-Asian perspective who could speak broadly about the similarities and differences between the U.S. and Asian approaches to higher education.

We also reported a series of focused pieces looking at specific projects in Singapore, S. Korea and China with these profiles we were able to illustrate both the effects of these investments (creating world-class research centers) and how each country has taken a slightly different approach in its investment strategy.

The U.S. reporting was more challenging. Many people have examined the disinvestment in higher education in recent years, but few have contrasted the U.S. and Asian approaches. We needed that perspective to get at the question of whether the American system is in danger of losing its dominance. Our reporter, Karin Fischer, ended up talking to dozens of people in order to be able to pull together a coherent analysis of how a combination of politics and economics has pushed higher education further back in line when it comes to public funding, what that meant for the future of higher education, and what might be needed to ensure the health of the system.

Most challenging of all were the statistics. We went through several wish lists with our data chief and our reporters to determine what data we’d like to get, what we could get, and what we absolutely needed. Each country compiles statistics differently and some agencies did not respond to our requests. So we had to think carefully about how to do cross-country comparisons in a meaningful way. That took several weeks of discussion and much hard work on behalf of our Asian correspondent, dealing with each country’s education ministry, to get the best possible data.

Told by Beth McMurtrie

Mara Hvistendal, David McNeill, Jeffrey Brainard and Karin Fischer -- First Prize

"Little Bill Clinton: A School Year in the Life of a New American"

How do you teach third grade math to English learners? In three stories, we looked at  how a veteran teacher handles a single day’s math class, leaving no child behind while holding none back; what “failure” can mean under “No Child" and how hard it is to gauge academic progress in English learners.

Three things were important to the success of the series:
1. Familiarity and trust developed with the subjects of the story. The series was done as part of a project in which the reporter Mary Wiltenburg spent a year inside a charter school for refugees and American students – day in day out, getting to know faculty, administrators, students and families. This series was done at Month 9. It could not have been done if she’d walked into the school cold. Patience  in building a relationship with sources on a beat is key.
2.Get some context. We had Mary talk to some education experts  -- in particular, a former teacher working on a PhD in lifelong learning at Harvard-- ¬about what to look for in how a teacher conveys knowledge, and to ask how that teacher prepares curriculum to meet the range of student abilities.  This helped Mary take a step back in order to determine  best  what was important in the intimate moments between teacher  and student.
3. An eye for telling detail.  This is innate but it can be developed. Mary does it well because she projects herself – with great imagination – into her subjects.  This allowed her to set marvelous scenes that ‘show’ rather than ‘tell.” For example: She brought alive that moment when the teacher asks a question and a roomful of 3rd graders writhe with the positive energy of knowing the answer, hands shooting up in pleas to be called on.  But Mary took it further, understanding completely and illustrating the teacher’s mental calculus about which student “ needed to be right most.”

Told by Clara Germani, project editor for Mary Wiltenburg’s Christian Science Monitor project "Little Bill Clinton: A school year in the life of a new American". Special Citation

IE. Small Media -- Opinion

"MEA Cooks Healthcare Numbers to Boiling Point"

School-employee health insurance is a hot issue in Michigan, where most teachers are insured by MESSA,  a nonprofit created by the Michigan Education Association.

MESSA insurance is considered top-notch, but costly. Yet even as most school budgets are getting whacked, most teacher contracts still require MESSA insurance — an increasingly controversial bargaining stance.

So with their cash cow under fire, the MEA issued a study last summer that claimed Michigan schools spend less per employee than private companies for health insurance.

Really? In reading the report,  I  quickly realized the MEA  manipulated the numbers to reach the desired conclusion. The study's author, an MEA analyst, calculated the average cost per school employee by dividing the number of workers by the $1.7 billion that schools spent on health insurance. That number — $8,311 — was compared to the Midwest average premium for family coverage for a private-sector worker, which was $13,255.  But that comparison assumes all school employees enroll in their insurance plans (not) and all school employees require family coverage (also untrue). The private-sector number also included employee contributions toward premiums, while the number for school employees did not.

Those three factors considerably skew the MEA analysis. In fact, even the cheapest MESSA plan costs 15 percent more than the private-sector average.

To make sure I wasn't misreading the study, I called the MEA staffer who wrote the report.  He acknowledged my observations, but  said he had to "work with the numbers that were available" — as if MESSA premium costs were secret.

My report about the study was done as an opinion column, in which I suggested that "The MEA didn't just cook the numbers in this report. They made the pot boil over.
The MEA never responded to the column. But they did pull the report from the home page of its website.

Julie Mack, Kalamazoo Gazette -- Second Prize

 "Rigged Privilege"

When beginning reporting on a large subject, start with simple questions. The East Valley Tribune’s investigation of the Arizona private school tuition tax credits program began with just one: Are the credits changing who gets to learn in private classrooms? Arizona lawmakers pledged in 1997, when creating the program that would funnel hundreds of millions of state tax dollars to pay private school tuition, that low-income families would be the chief beneficiaries.

Often the answers to basic questions are difficult to find. In our case, that was true because private schools don’t release any data on their students’ household incomes. But there was another path to the answer.

Private schools report some demographic data to the U.S. Department of Education every other year. Arizona’s Hispanic student population had swelled dramatically during the life of the tax credit program, now comprising more than 40 percent of the state’s public school enrollment. At the private schools, change didn’t come.

Or as we said in our first mainbar in the series: “A Tribune analysis of Arizona private school enrollment data, likely the first such examination here, found that the 20 schools receiving the most income tax money have been largely immune to demographic shifts taking place around them. Hispanics comprised 15 percent of enrollment at these private schools in 1996. Their share remained unchanged in 2008.”

Told by Ryan Gabrielson

Ryan Gabrielson and Michelle Reese -- First Prize

  II. B Large Media -- Feature, News Feature of Issue Package

Poor Neighborhoods, Untested Teachers

The only real hurdle in reporting the story -- and it was a major hurdle -- was time. It took months to get the records from the school districts showing the distribution of teachers by experience level and by school, more months to analyze those records, and more months to identify and visit schools that we picked based on the data to tell the story. (And still more months to arrange the reporting around the ebb and flow of an academic year. You can't start a reporting assignment in a school in spring, if it's something big like this.)

Michael and I were patient. We wrote dozens of other articles as we waited for pieces of this one to fall together. Only toward the end did we spend a few weeks devoting our undivided attention to this story. Had we tried to compress the work into a couple of months or even a single academic year, the project probably wouldn't have come together in quite the right way.

The other memory I have of this project is that we were fighting against conventional wisdom. The D.C. school system is heavily invested in the concept of alternative certification. Chancellor Rhee herself comes out of that movement, and she has filled her schools with young, talented, intelligent, inexperienced teachers who sometimes perform as well or better than experienced teachers from traditional education schools. The outer suburban school systems were more receptive to the research we presented, but many leaders in the education field were (and are) strong advocates of the alt-cert model. We had a very hard time convincing a very many people that there was any merit to our central thesis, which is that inexperienced teachers aren't very good teachers.

Back to this time-management thing: I feel like Michael and I mapped out how to do this story right after getting back from an EWA convention in Chicago, where we heard someone from the Houston Chronicle map out how he had done his series. It's not a bad idea to talk to someone who has just completed a year-long project if you are about to launch one youself!

Told by Daniel de Vise

Daniel de Vise and Michael Alison Chandler, Washington Post -- First Prize

"Eyes on the Prize"

"Eyes on the Prize" began with a class photo -- but even getting that photo was an exercise in ingenuity, and a harbinger of the tricky reporting to come.

Our task was to find a class photo that would put faces to the students we'd try to find a dozen years after the photo was taken: one class of low-income, African American kids who would tell us the stories behind the devastating high school dropout statistics from the California Department of Education. Judging by that, we loosely expected that one in three of the kindergartners in the photo would quit school before graduation. 
 
At Carver Elementary in San Francisco -- probably the only school in the city where an all-black class could be found from 1995, an era of federally mandated desegregation -- I asked to see the old yearbooks. A flood had wiped out many of the old records. But the principal said she could think of one place to look, in an old box behind the stage where some records had escaped the disaster. And there was the photo book from the year we needed. It was filled with photos of little kids who, fingers crossed, would have just graduated from high school.
 
The principal then phoned the San Francisco Unified School District headquarters to confirm it was OK to release the old photo to the press. The public information officer agreed. I left with the photo, promising to return it after we'd copied it. But just as I returned to newsroom, the PIO from the district was calling. She'd checked with the district's attorney and been told she'd made a mistake; it was a violation of the federal FERPA privacy act for the district to release the photo, and she was driving over to the newspaper office RIGHT NOW to pick up the photo. And I shouldn't even think of making a copy. 
 
I didn't argue, but neither did I make any promises. I did bring the photo to our photography department, where it was scanned into our computer system. Then I left the photo with the guard for the PIO to pick up. 
 
If copying the photo did turn out to be a federal offense, I thought, I could always get a new one from one of the children featured in the photo -- that is, if we ever found any of them. 
 
We did. 
 
Some of the kids were easy to find, through the Web, MySpace, 411, Nexis/Lexis -- and from each other. Stereotypes were busted from the very beginning. I remember walking into my first interview with one of the "kids," Ja'Bar Gibson, in a Starbucks. I arrived first, and didn't see Ja'Bar. So I went to the ladies room. When I came out, there he was at a table, a lot bigger than he was in kindergarten, and with the typical hooded and baggy-pants appearance of a teenaged boy who'd rather be anywhere else. As soon as I sat down, a man approached us. "Are you Ms. Asimov?" he asked. "I'm Ja'Bar's father." 
 
Mr. Gibson had been sitting at another table, watching to make sure everything was OK with his son meeting a stranger. Ja'Bar himself was friendly, bright and engaging. Months later, when Mr. Gibson died of cancer before the story came out, I understood what Ja'Bar had lost: a pillar in his life whose love and attention had made it possible for Ja'Bar to graduate from high school and defy the state's statistics. 
 
Once we started finding the kids, they knew of other kids, or who their boyfriends and girlfriends were. 
 
Not all the kids were as easy to find, though a check of the death records thankfully turned up no one. Sometimes we had to learn parents' names by purchasing birth certificates and tracking them down that way. Sometimes we just got lucky: a school employee knew the woman who owned the children's clothing store where so-and-so had shopped. And yes, the store-owner still kept in touch with that child's family. Another time, a conversation with a school security guard yielded some surprising information: His son was Mager Webb, one of the boys in the very class we were tracking down. 

Most kids wanted to talk. Some didn't. Chinese food magically seemed to smooth the way, and we met more than one former student over moo shoo pork. 
 
For the kid who'd spent much of his high school years in Juve Hall, it took some good conversations with the educators who'd helped him to glean any information. 
 
In time, we found every student but one, Jerrell J. Green. The closest we got was a creased, old photo of him with his former counselor, Veronica Lightfoot, the only person we could find who knew him. She not only remembered the troubled little boy, but loved him. So even though we never met Jerrell, we learned that he had pain and that he responded to hugs. He was the only child whose fate we never learned. Of the other 27, 21 had graduated, and three more were on track to do so. Several were in college. 
 
It's unlikely that a story like this-- in which Jill Tucker and I spent the better part of a year finding and interviewing children and educators to present a portrait of how real children succeed in the face of adversity -- could be written today in an era of shrinking news resources. The metro editor who came up with the idea, Ken Conner, and who rejoiced each time we returned to the newsroom having found another kid, is gone. So is the editor who oversaw the story day to day. 
 
Even though tracking down these kids took so much time, we think readers were well served by the effort. The story of each student, including Jerrell, and each educator we profiled, illustrates and personalizes challenges so many students and educators face today. 
 
We're glad we had the opportunity -- at the 11th hour, just before devastating cuts in reporting, editing and photography staff in our newsroom throughout 2009 -- to offer readers an intimate portrait of students typically dismissed as statistics.

Told by Nanette Asimov
Nanette Asimov and Jill Tucker, San Franciso Chronicle -- Second Prize

"Doctors in Exile"

Our reporting for "Doctors in Exile" started with a notion -- that political refugees were enrolling at community colleges in Florida, and that they had a compelling story to tell.

Having spoken with refugee service agencies in Tampa and Miami, I knew they were seeing a steady stream of clients from Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, and other nations experiencing war or political tension. And these refugees -- legal entrants who had often been persecuted in part due to their political status and occupations -- did not fit the typical (or stereotypical) profile of immigrants. They were often highly trained and educated, and came to America with the very specific goal of continuing their professional work.

It was clear they were often having a hard time making that leap. We were hearing of scientists and doctors who were forced to do menial work to pay the bills, as their skills and credentials grew stale. My challenge was to find them and persuade them to let us tell their story. And since this project was being funded by a community college fellowship from Columbia University's Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, I really needed to find them studying at community colleges, engaged with that challenge of getting their careers restarted in America.

I hit the jackpot at Miami-Dade College: a class of doctors studying to take their US medical board exams. Most had been targeted or persecuted in their home countries, and many were struggling to attend college while holding down part-time or full-time jobs. We found surgeons who had cleaned bathrooms, washed dishes or parked cars in order to survive in America.

I joined the class with a St. Petersburg Times photographer, who set up a portrait booth in the back of the classroom. At every coffee and lunch break, we'd interview doctors. And we followed their progress through the course, as they grappled with the learning challenge of transferring their skills to a new culture.

It wasn't easy reporting; some were queasy with sharing their full identities, out of fear that their families could be victimized at home. Others didn't want to speak to us at all. And time was short. But gradually we gained their trust, and the opportunity to tell a unique story about higher education.

Tom Marshall, St. Petersburg Times -- Special Citation

IIC. Large Media -- Series or Group of Articles

 "The Challenge of Choice"

This series originated from a desire to understand how accessible New Orleans’ unprecedented school options are to families, and the degree to which time, savvy and connections matter in winning a spot at the city’s better schools. I knew from the start that I wanted to find four different families -- in terms of income, parent’s education background, knowledge of school system, and children’s age and needs--and follow them through the process of looking for a school. I found the families by reaching out to community groups that work with parents, school guidance counselors, and other contacts in the schools. In one case, the family came to me, asking for my help in finding a school. In each case, I had no idea how the story would end.

I stayed in touch with three of the four families over months, checking in on the phone and in person every couple weeks to see how their search was going. Since I was also covering the New Orleans schools beat alone during most of the time I worked on the project, I could not shadow the families at school-admissions events and visits as much as I would have liked. But all of the families were very open in recounting to me the details of their searches. I wanted to feature one family who started looking at the last minute (comparatively speaking). So I found the last parent, Michelle Mosby, only a few weeks before the start of school. This series would not have been successful if I had not connected with families who were willing to open up their lives and stay in touch over a long period of time since I relied so much on their descriptions of events (which I fact-checked with multiple sources) rather than first-hand observations.

I initially planned to write one inter-woven narrative moving back and forth between the four stories. But an editor who looked at an early draft of the project suggested devoting a separate story to each family’s search, with one introductory piece laying out the issues more broadly. In hindsight, I wish that I had tried to write more during the reporting process. In some cases, I had to ask the families for additional details about specific scenes and moments months later. If I had started writing sooner, I would have been able to ask those questions while the events and emotions were fresher in their minds.

Sarah Carr, Times-Picayune -- Second Prize  

IID. Large Media -- Investigative Reporting

"Trouble on the Tray"

Our investigation began with two basic questions:  Where does the food served in school cafeterias come from, and how safe is it? What we realized quickly that school administrators, even those who are entrusted to buy the food, could not say for certain. So we sought to determine what we could about the food that the federal government supplies to some 31 million schoolchildren each day through the National School Lunch Program.

We created a variety of data sets that included state-by-state counts of the number of schools that had cafeteria inspections; complaints against companies that provided school food; and outbreaks of food-borne illnesses at schools.

We also negotiated to get data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that showed which companies the government bought food from and where that food went. But the data only showed which states received the food, not where it went after that. This highlighted a problem that became clear in our months-long investigation: When managing recalls, the federal government struggled to determine which schools got tainted food.

The data also enabled us to determine that the government bought and sent to schools millions of pounds of chicken that was of such low quality that it is otherwise used in pet food and compost. We obtained from the USDA the results of more than 150,000 pathogen tests on ground beef bought by the government and sent to schools. The results helped us show that the USDA was buying beef that fast-food restaurants — whose standards for microbial testing were higher — would have rejected. But the microbial test data came with the names of the beef companies redacted. USDA said that disclosing the names would discourage companies from working with the government. Documents we obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, however, helped us crack the USDA code. Through that FOIA request, we obtained a lab report on Beef Packers Inc., a Fresno company that had been suspended three times from the school lunch program. The report contained the test date and specific results for various bacterial indicators, including a positive test for salmonella.

We simply filtered our Excel data on microbial tests to find the only company with those results on that day — labeled "Company CC" in the data. We then used the contract number from the lab report to confirm the company name from the other data set we had obtained that kept track of government purchases. After that breakthrough, the USDA re-released the testing data — with the company names included.

Told by Peter Eisler, USA TODAY

Peter Eisler, Blake Morrison, Anthony DeBarros and Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY --  First Prize

IIE. Large Media -- Opinion

"A Powerful Voice"

My entry was a collection of 10 editorials I wrote about the Chicago Public Schools, pushing and prodding the school districts on a number of issues.

My main piece of advice for editorial writers is pretty straight forward: don’t forget how to be a reporter! I cover education as beat, almost the same as I did when I was an education beat reporter.

That way, I can write timely, newsy and relevant editorials that actually shape policy and are read. Keeping up with the beat allows me to keep my sources fresh, my information up to date and to write on a range of topics.

I also try very hard to set my own agenda and not just follow the news. After covering education for years as a reporter, and keeping up with what is happening as an editorial writer, I can speak with authority about what needs to change in the school system.

Kate Grossman, Chicago Sun Times -- Second Prize

World Class Schools for Iowa? (Year Two)

After the first year (2008) of my project looking at how Iowa - and the nation - could have world- class schools, it was clear one change would make the most difference: well-prepared, engaging teachers. This was based on research firsthand in Finland and Alberta as well as reading every study I could find and interviewing global experts.

So in year two (2009) of the project, I focused on how to get a great teacher in every classroom. First, I wanted to show what great teaching looks like. We videotaped three Iowa teachers selected by school administrators as exhibiting the characteristics of successful instructors (one urban, one rural, one suburban), and put the footage online. Then I broke the rest of project into logical, big pieces:

• A call for Iowa's roughly 30 teacher-preparation programs at colleges and universities to aim higher than average. It typically takes no more than a "C" average to be admitted, which means many would-be teachers aren't very strong students themselves. This included an online questionnaire about each program's goals.
• Why Iowa should raise its statewide minimum teacher salary above $28,000 to attract more of the brightest young people to the profession.
• The need for teachers to have more time to collaborate to improve instruction, focusing on the effort to make that possible at an Ankeny, Iowa, elementary school.
• Why it's critical to get rid of teachers who are poor instructors, and way too hard to do that the way teacher evaluations are set up.
• A plea for the Legislature to require evaluation of teachers to be based in part on student academic progress.

We also surveyed teachers statewide about their views on how to improve education, and included those results through the year.

And I started a blog, called Class Matters, with three teachers to offer a more personal, up-close perspective.

Last, I continued my World-Class Schools blog. Again, making this Opinion project work took extensive research to discover what teachers need to be successful in the classroom, and then focusing on the big changes that could make that happen.

Linda Lantor Fandel, Des Moines Register -- Special Citation

 III.A Multimedia

"Quality Counts 2009 - Portrait of a Population, Student Profiles"

In focusing the Quality Counts 2009 report on English language learners, (“Portrait of a Population: How English-Language Learners Are Putting Schools to the Test”), we at Education Week wanted to make sure that our readers got a real sense for the diversity of these students. A good share are born in the United States. Those who are immigrants arrive in the United States with a wide range of schooling experiences. Some are on grade level. Some never went to school before. As we planned this report, it soon became apparent that an effective way to tell these stories would be through individual profiles that would both complement the more broad scope reporting and research, and ‘put a face’ on our subject matter. These profiles, photographs and audio interviews were the basis of a multimedia Web package to which the Education Writers Association awarded first prize in the “multimedia” category for 2009. As Mary Ann Zehr and other reporters visited schools to write stories for the report, they identified and interviewed individual students who could be featured in the report. For example, at Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn, Mary Ann met Arif Uzzaman, 17, who had arrived in New York City from Bangladesh three years before. He had a decent education in Bangladesh, was taking courses such as physics, and was set to graduate in 2009. She met another student, Morry Bamba, 18, in New York City who had a completely different schooling experience. He had arrived in the city at age 15 without ever having gone to school in his country of origin, the West African nation of Guinea. Mary Ann and other reporters wrote short profiles of some of these students that touched on their experiences in school as well as their personal lives. Arif talked, for example, about how when he first arrived he missed his friends from Bangladesh and had to learn to make meals for himself. Morry talked about his discouragement that while he had learned to read, it was difficult to read high school textbooks.

Involved from the initial planning stages throughout the project, the photography, design and Web departments had the necessary time and opportunity to plan and execute effective visual and Web-based storytelling. Associate Director of Photography Christopher Powers traveled to Boston, New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles, where he photographed profile subjects, and recorded audio interviews with them. Powers then worked with Online & Multimedia Design Manager Chienyi Cheri Hung to package these profiles for online presentation on the edweek.org Web site. "Quality Counts 2009 - Portrait of a Population, Student Profiles" is the result of this collaboration, a collection of 13 student profiles that effectively combines interesting reporting, compelling portraiture, first-person audio, and dynamic Web design.

Told by Charlie Borst

Charlie Borst, Christopher Powers, Mary Ann Zehr, Chienyi Hung, Mark W. Bomster, Education Week -- First Prize

IVB. Large Media -- Beat Reporting

"Katherine Leal Unmuth Beat Reporting"

My stories encompassed a variety of topics, so I came about them in different ways. Often they come from getting out in the community and just working my beat--talking with school officials or picking up on an item that comes up during a school board meeting. To find the compelling high school graduates I wrote about, I didn't just approach a principal to ask for names. I attended a scholarship banquet where numerous awards were given out and chose those I thought had the most interesting stories. I found the unusual debate over a parent using a Bible verse to challenge a school dress code just by attending a school board meeting where the issue arose.

Since I write about a local suburb, I'll often pick up on a scrap of information that comes up there and try to widen it into a broader issue or pick and choose whether it would have readership beyond that specific geographic area. I don't think you should feel limited by the fact that you cover a suburban school district. Technically I cover just one city (Irving, TX), and I've found plenty of important and interesting issues on my beat.  For example, I got my idea about how millions of dollars in textbooks were being stored unused just by getting out and talking to someone in town whose uncle worked in the warehouse. It ended up relating to the larger issue of textbook use in Texas, an issue that was addressed in the Legislature that year.

Katherine Leal Unmuth, Dallas Morning News -- Second Prize

V. Magazines

"Who Needs Harvard?"

My story was a precursor to my book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. My reporting process was sparked by an item in the New York Times Magazine Annual Year in Ideas issue, which contained a small item on the term "edupunk," coined by Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington. By coincidence, I attended the South by Southwest conference in March 2009, which had a panel on "edupunks" and I met a large number of innovators in higher ed, both onstage and attendees, and managed to interview some of them there. The entrepreneurship side of the story was sparked by my attendance at the first-ever Venture Capital in Education summit at Stanford University in May 2009, where I met many of the companies and investors featured in the story.

Anya Kamenetz, Fast Company -- Second Prize

VI. Special Interest, Institutional and Trade Publication

"Piece by Piece: How Schools Solved the Achievement Puzzle and Soared"

I was an early refugee from the upheaval in daily journalism, joining The Education Trust six years ago to chronicle what high-performing and rapidly improving schools with significant populations of low-income and minority students do differently to generate strong results for all kids.

I always begin with data. After poring through Web sites like www.greatschools.com and state report cards to identify schools with consistently high proficiency rates on state tests, I would call the principals and ask to visit. Sometimes they never called me back but when they did they were usually tickled that someone had noticed the good work they had done. Such educators are often marginalized by other educators who are used to blaming the poverty of their students for their low performance and regard more successful schools with resentment and suspicion.

In any case, the principals usually welcomed my visit—a nice change from the battles reporters often have to wage to gain access to school campuses.

I visited these schools with no preconceived ideas about what I would find. I wasn’t looking for cooperative learning groups, or the faithful implementation of some program, or any of the other things most education researchers look for. Instead I did basic reporting, asking teachers, administrators and students what went on in the school and how those things made them successful.

I was worried that I would find “test-prep factories,” because the generally accepted wisdom was that the only way poor kids could pass those state tests was by endless time spent with practice tests and work sheets. But, happily, that’s not what I found. Instead I found principals and teachers adamant that their students get every advantage of knowledge and experience that middle-class children have, driving them to apply for grants to get instruments for music classes; incorporate art into their lessons; and support chess teams.

These schools accomplish the goals of helping all students meet or exceed state standards not by “narrowing” the curriculum but by deepening it. But that means they focus closely on what students should learn and think deeply about how to teach it. The do assess frequently because they want to know if kids really are learning and act quickly to make sure no child slides too far behind, but they assess to collect information not punish. Teachers and administrators work collaboratively and publicly, and they’re clear and honest about their successes and failures.

I have spent a lot of time in schools, and I know how different successful ones are from others. For example, they see time as their major lever and try not to waste any of it. I’ve watched teachers in these schools plan how to make instructional use of the time their kids spend in line waiting to go to the library. They know that if their students do not learn an enormous amount they risk futures of poverty and dependence. Compare that to my daughter’s middle school, which allowed the Barbizon Modeling Agency to give a two-hour sales pitch to the entire school because, the school leaders explained, “it was a free assembly.”

Since 2004, I have documented successful school approaches in two books: It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (2007) and How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools (2009) both published by Harvard Education Press. American Educator, the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers, did a beautiful job excerpting How It’s Being Done for the piece that won the special citation from EWA.

By the way, any reporter wanting to understand some of the key issues regarding reading and math instruction, education research, and so forth would be well-advised to subscribe to American Educator, which has been on my must-read publication list for at least the past decade. And of course they should check the Ed Trust Web site regularly for story ideas, trenchant analyses of data and public policy, and profiles of many of these exceptional schools.

Karin Chenoweth, American Educator -- Special Citation

VIIB. Television -- Documentary

"ESPN's Outside the Lines: Physical Education and Childhood Obesity"

The genesis for our story was rooted in an interest in discovering the relationship between the ongoing child obesity crisis and increasing cuts to physical education in the public schools. The reporting was relatively straight-forward in that we sought to educate ourselves extensively about each of the topics, reaching out to experts from both the health and education areas. We read a series of in-depth reports on both topics, as well as documents that addressed the various causes of child obesity, including a decline in physical activity amongst kids.

We also reached out to several national organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control, the American Heart Association, the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. We sought political sources who could speak to the legislative component of such a story. Ultimately, we wanted to humanize the story, and we sought a cross-section of schools throughout the country that could illustrate the challenges they faced both on the obesity and exercise front. Through one organization, we were provided access to a list of more than 20 schools in various regions of the nation that were particularly involved in confronting these issues, and we conducted pre-interviews with many educators at those schools before narrowing our list to four we wanted to visit.

The key to making the piece successful was an extensive amount of reporting that went on prior to actually sitting down for formal interviews. It was imperative both that we fully immerse/educate ourselves in the issues AND that we conduct extensive pre-interviews to determine the most effective ways to tell the story.

Told by Mark Fainaru-Wada, reporter and Nicole Noren, producer, ESPN

Mark Fainaru-Wada, Nicole Noren, Vince Doria, Craig T. Lazarus, Dwayne Bray and Tim Hays, ESPN -- Second Prize