The Education Writers Association offers tip sheets with story ideas, reporting, advice and lists of resources on a variety of education topics and journalistic skills.
The Education Writers Association offers tip sheets with story
ideas, reporting, advice and lists of resources on a variety
of education topics and journalistic skills.
EWA Tip Sheet: How to Cover Students’ Academic Recovery
Get background, tips and story ideas for covering academic recovery, and any resulting achievement gaps, at K-12 and higher education institutions.
More than two years into the pandemic, colleges and schools are trying to help students make up for lost instructional time.
What’s ahead on the path to academic recovery? Experts offered their perspectives on what reporters should look for and be mindful of during a session at the Education Writers Association’s 2022 National Seminar.
The panel agreed that students have a lot of ground to make up because of the disruption, though all students don’t have the same distance to go.
EWA Tip Sheet: School Finance Reporting Tools and Databases
Learn how to find and use school-level spending data.
School funding can be very murky terrain to navigate for journalists. When the Every Student Succeeds Act took effect during the 2017-18 school year, it became a bright spot for data advocates. Under the federal K-12 education law, school districts across the U.S. were required to disclose school-level spending for the first time.
EWA Tip Sheet: How to Produce a Great Child Care/Early Ed Story
The coronavirus pandemic has created unprecedented interest in child care. Without child care, many parents cannot work. At the same time, providers are struggling to remain open.
Those facilities that have powered through the pandemic are serving fewer children, have laid off staff and have encountered additional costs, such as cleaning supplies and PPEs. Many have closed, possibly permanently.
Follow the K-12 Money
This tip sheet was compiled during an EWA 2020 National Seminar caucus on Following the K-12 Money. Participants, led by facilitator Tawnell Hobbs of the Wall Street Journal, shared strategies for tracking how school districts are spending money and budgeting dollars during the pandemic.
EWA Tip Sheet: How to Monitor Colleges’ Financial Health During a Funding Crisis
The pandemic and economic shutdown have slashed colleges’ tuition revenues, reduced state government funding for higher education and, in some cases, even wiped out football ticket sales. Colleges’ severe new financial challenges are already forcing many budget cuts and layoffs.
EWA Tip Sheet: Using Data to Improve Your Stories About Adolescents
Stories about adolescents present the opportunity for a variety of compelling characters, from parents and teachers to the teens themselves who feel passionately about the issues. But data can also be a powerful tool in crafting such narratives, as it provides vital context for the audience.
EWA Tip Sheet: Writing About Colleges’ Finances Amid Coronavirus
This post was originally published on Journalist’s Resource. It has been republished here with permission of the author.
Colleges across the country face deep financial losses after the coronavirus forced school officials to shutter campuses and cancel events. Administrators worry their money troubles will only get worse if enrollment, government funding and other sources of revenue continue to fall amid a likely recession.
EWA Tip Sheet: Using Data to Report on Risky Youth Behavior
Here's how to use CDC survey findings in your reporting
Today’s teenagers are generally steering clear of risky behaviors compared to young people in years past, but they still face hazards, especially if they identify as LGBTQ. The biennial Youth Risk Behavior survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looks at key risk factors that can make high schoolers more susceptible to diseases, violence, and death.
“You don’t have to know Excel to find story hooks in here,” said Daniel Willis, education journalist and session moderator.
Participants who contributed to this advice:
EWA Tip Sheet: How to Tell If Your College Is Going Bankrupt
By scrutinizing enrollment data, external financial pressures, operating revenue and expenses, and tuition discounting, reporters can start spotting red flags in the finances of public and private colleges they cover.
EWA Tip Sheet: Covering the Student Loan Debt Crisis
A leading student debt researcher, the CEO of the nation’s biggest income share agreement company, and a veteran education reporter discuss the biggest concerns, misconceptions and stories to pursue when it comes to the country’s student loan debt crisis.
EWA Tip Sheet: Covering College Certificates and Microcredentials
Here are resources for understanding non-degree higher education alternatives.
Students and workers looking to quickly advance their careers are beginning to seek shorter and cheaper alternatives to traditional college degrees. And colleges, worried about a decline in the number of “traditional” freshmen, are creating alternative programs to attract new tuition-payers.
EWA Tip Sheet: Covering Innovations to Bachelor’s Degrees
Driven by changing student demographics and demands from employers, colleges are experimenting with new, more flexible and affordable bachelors’ degrees, a panel of higher education leaders and experts told journalists at the Education Writers Association’s 2019 National Seminar.
Colleges are trying boot camps, competency-based education, credit for prior learning, and other strategies to lower costs, speed up and improve the value of bachelors’ degrees.
EWA Tip Sheet: How to Write About Graduate Schools
Most journalists covering universities focus on undergraduate programs, even though, in many cases, the graduate student population is larger and has a bigger impact on the school’s financial health. So graduate schools can be a trove of fresh, under-covered story ideas, according to graduate student representatives and researchers who spoke at the Education Writers Association’s 2019 National Seminar.
EWA Tip Sheet: How to Cover Instruction in College Classrooms
Many instructors still use traditional-style lectures despite growing scientific evidence that less-passive approaches are more effective in building students’ skills and knowledge. At the Education Writers Association 2019 National Seminar, Harvard professor Eric Mazur demonstrated to journalists how active engagement – both inside and outside the classroom – stimulates higher-order thinking and motivates students to learn.
EWA Tip Sheet: Using Facebook to Report the News
Reporters can use Facebook to create communities, start conversations, find story tips and sources, and build their individual brands. Lynn Walsh, a veteran reporter, walked journalists through ways to make the most of Facebook at the Education Writers Association’s 2019 National Seminar in Baltimore