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American schools are at a historical inflection point.
Now more than ever, we need good journalism to understand the convulsive and sometimes confounding trends shaping schools. That’s why we’re launching a new section devoted to explaining, examining, and elevating ideas about the policy, politics, and practice of American education.
I’ll be the editor and lead writer for Chalkbeat Ideas. I’m returning to Chalkbeat after two years covering U.S. schools for the Wall Street Journal. While there, I wrote about the efforts to close the federal education department, the way technology is changing education, and challenges facing underenrolled school systems. Before that, I helped launch Chalkbeat’s national coverage as the team’s first reporter in 2017, covering education policy and politics, while finding a niche writing about research on improving schools.
I decided to rejoin Chalkbeat because I’m convinced that there is a void in journalism at this moment. The traditional confines of news can make it difficult to step back and examine the big ideas and debates within education.
We’ll still be looking at topics in the news — the potential and perils of AI in schools, the future of the Education Department, the state of learning loss and recovery — but we’ll be taking a step back to offer deeper exploration. We’ll be approaching these and other issues as ideas worth dissecting, debating, and explaining.
In practice, that means we’ll be asking and trying to answer questions like: Why exactly did test scores start to slide even before the pandemic, and what are some solutions? Is AI changing schools and is that exciting, alarming, or both? What can the history of education technology tell us about the future of AI? How and why are Democrats debating each other over education? How should we make sense of Trump’s effort to close the Education Department at the same time he’s increasingly wielding its power?
We’ll also be covering under-the-radar ideas that deserve attention — say, compelling academic research or an intriguing classroom innovation. We’re interested too in the people and institutions that drive the ideas changing schools. And we’ll sometimes be looking backwards to understand how the past, including the unprecedented upheaval in American schools during the pandemic, continues to affect the present.
I’ll be writing a regular column about ideas in education. This will be a bit different than Chalkbeat’s regular news coverage because I’ll share my own perspective and analysis at times. The voice will be mine — sometimes in the first person, as here — rather than the omniscient voice that defines normal news coverage. And we’ll be trying out lots of different formats: explainers, Q&As, book reviews, and events with interesting people. (Don’t worry: Chalkbeat’s existing national coverage isn’t going anywhere. We expect this new section to complement it.)
At the same time, Chalkbeat Ideas will maintain the commitment to rigorous, open-minded reporting and fact-based analysis that defines all of our journalism. Like the rest of Chalkbeat, we’ll be covering this topic as a beat. That means I’ll be talking to people with a variety of perspectives: parents, teachers, policymakers, academics, nonprofit leaders, and anyone else who’s interested in schools and the ideas that shape them.
I’ll also be collaborating with the rest of the Chalkbeat newsroom to elevate interesting ideas and insights from our local bureaus.
We’re still developing this section and I’d love your help. Please consider following our work by signing up for the Ideas newsletter, which will get you access to my columns when they’re published. Sign up to join our first event, a webinar with fresh insights on learning loss and recovery data, featuring Brown University professor Emily Oster.
Finally, reach out to me directly to share your thoughts on how to approach this work.
Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.
