EWA Radio

Who takes a cross-country reporting road trip in the midst of a pandemic? NPR’s Elissa Nadworny decided it was the only way to find out for herself what life is really like on college campuses these days, and how students, faculty and administrators are dealing with a new world of logistical challenges.

When choosing a college, students and families often turn to popular rankings to help inform their decisions. Rather than focus on test scores and how difficult it is to gain entry, The Washington Monthly gives schools points for factors that benefit society as well as individual students, like upward mobility for low-income graduates and encouraging civic engagement on campus and after graduation.

In her new book, education writer Melinda D. Anderson chronicles LaQuisha Hall’s 17-year journey from nervous rookie to “teacher of the year” in the Baltimore city school system.

It’s a new academic year like no other on the K-12 and higher education beats. A pair of veteran education journalists share tips and insights for what’s ahead this  fall and beyond.

The tension over having armed police on public schools campuses isn’t new, but it’s moved back into the spotlight in recent months. In early June, the school board in Minneapolis — where George Floyd was killed during an arrest by the city’s police — voted unanimously to sever its ties with the city’s police department.

For education reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez of KPCC, Southern California Public Radio, life has been “an emotional roller coaster” since he was shot in the throat by police with a rubber bullet. The incident happened May 31 in Long Beach, where Guzman-Lopez was covering a protest against police brutality and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

With the nation facing a pandemic-driven recession unlike any in generations, public schools are bracing for a big financial hit. Reporter Daarel Burnette II of Education Week shares insights from his school finance coverage during the crisis and a new database that gauges the economic vulnerability of districts from coast to coast.

Few, if any, education reporters are tackling tougher issues right now than Erica Green of The New York Times, whose stories often share a common theme of focusing on the unmet needs of marginalized students. She discusses recent coverage, including how school cafeteria workers in Baltimore are feeding an entire neighborhood, concerns about a potential federal waiver that would let districts pause services for students with disabilities, and a rare look inside a juvenile detention center where young adults are being left largely unprotected from COVID-19.

Education reporters, like everyone else, are struggling to cope with the stress and many day-to-day challenges of life during a pandemic. At the same time, they’re working hard under difficult conditions to chronicle the impact on students, schools and families. and pitching in on broader coverage for their newsrooms.

They say history is a tale told by winners — so who’s writing the textbooks for the two most populous states? And how are the differing political climates in California and Texas reflected in those materials? what do the differences in those books reveal about the political climate do they tell Dana Goldstein, a national education correspondent for The New York Times, read over 4,800 pages of U.S. history textbooks to determine how the political leanings of policymakers and the appointed textbook review committees influence what students — and future voters — are being taught about the nation’s history.

In Chicago, thousands of students are earning high school diplomas but showing up at the city’s two-year colleges unprepared for the next step in their academic journeys. In a new project, Kate McGee of WBEZ looked at efforts to buck that trend, including an innovative program developed not by outside experts but the system’s own faculty.  Along the way, she explored a number of questions: Do students benefit more from remedial classes that re-teach them material they were supposed to master in high school, or from being placed directly into college classes with additional support like tutoring

Education reporters are increasingly covering incidents of racism, antisemitism and other forms of hate committed by K-12 students. But what happens after the media spotlight shifts to the next story?

In the mainland United States, typical conversations about Hawaii are more likely to center on dream vacations than teacher shortages. But there’s plenty to be learned from the state’s educational challenges, and how Hawaii is approaching teacher training, recruitment, and retention. Suevon Lee — who covers Hawaii’s public schools for Honolulu Civil Beat, an investigative news outlet — examined these issues with support from an EWA Reporting Fellowship.

While it’s a new calendar year, plenty of familiar issues are carrying over from 2019 on the higher education beat, says reporter Collin Binkley of The Associated Press. Many of the biggest headline-grabbers this year are likely to center on admissions – the process of deciding who gets into what college. To settle a federal anti-trust case, colleges recently scrapped old rules that limited what they could do to compete for applicants. Now, a potential admissions marketing free-for-all will create new winners and losers. The Trump Administration’s policies against immigration, and tensions with countries such as Iran can’t help but impact foreign students interested in studying in the U.S. And the growing trend by colleges to drop application requirements for ACT and SAT test scores could also mean big changes to college access.

February 7 will mark the three-year anniversary of Betsy DeVos’ confirmation as the U.S. secretary of education. Few observers had bet she would stick around this long. But today, DeVos is one of the longest-serving members of President Trump’s cabinet. Rebecca Klein of The Huffington Post recently talked with dozens of people about the education secretary’s tenure, crafting an in-depth analysis of what motivates her decisions and keeps her on the job.

In a joint investigation, ProPublica Illinois’ Jodi Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards of The Chicago Tribune teamed up to investigate  the use of seclusion rooms in Illinois’ public schools. In the process, they discovered that seclusion — billed as a humane way to control misbehaving students — was misused, overused and ended up being disproportionately inflicted on students with disabilities.