Chalkbeat

Election Day is here. These are the education issues and races we’re watching.

2020-11-02T23:44:58+00:00

As Americans cast their ballots, we’re watching to see how the results will affect schools in individual communities and across the country.

Chalkbeat reporters in Detroit and Indianapolis will be monitoring school board races that could decide the course of local school improvement efforts. In Colorado, a ballot measure will determine whether schools take a big budget hit next year. And in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, legislative races could send important signals about education policy.

Of course, we’re watching the national results too. President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden offer very different visions for education, while the specifics of any additional financial coronavirus aid for schools depend on control of Congress. Hundreds of billions in federal money for schools may be at stake, with Biden and Congressional Democrats saying they want to send a huge infusion of money to schools and state governments while Trump and Congressional Republicans are less interested in plugging state budget gaps.

Here are other reasons the national election results matter for schools — and, below, a rundown of the local races we’re watching.

In Indiana, we’ve got our eyes on a school board race that will shape the future of Indianapolis Public Schools. Four of seven seats are up for grabs in the state’s largest district, which is known for partnering with charter school organizations and nonprofit operators to run what are known as innovation schools. The candidates who back innovation schools had far out-raised their competitors by early last month.

In Michigan, we’re watching the Detroit school board race, where three of seven seats are in play. The incumbents were elected in 2016 and have worked closely with Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, whose efforts to turn around the city’s long-struggling schools began in 2017. That makes these races something of a referendum on Vitti’s tenure.

Also on the ballot: Two openings on the state’s board of education, and in Detroit’s Wayne County, the fate of a special fund that sends millions to local school districts for things like lowering class sizes, boosting teacher salaries, and buying technology.

In Colorado, we’re watching a ballot measure that will help decide whether school districts will face big budget cuts next year. Voters are choosing whether to repeal an amendment that will require residential property taxes to fall sharply this year. At stake: nearly $500 million for schools.

A proposed tax on nicotine, meanwhile, would provide the money needed for universal pre-K. And in Denver, voters will decide whether to approve two measures that would pay for things like air conditioning in schools and teacher pay raises.

Also on the ballot: Three seats on Colorado’s seven-member state board of education, which Democrats took control of in 2016 for the first time in 50 years, and three seats on the University of Colorado Board of Regents.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats could take back control of the legislature and change how schools are funded. Pennsylvania’s entire House and half of the Senate are up for election. If Democrats win control of one or both chambers, they could make changes to a school funding formula that critics say sends too little to urban districts like Philadelphia.

How legislative races in Pennsylvania could affect education spending

In Tennessee’s legislature, one question is whether fierce fights over private school vouchers will have bruised some Republican incumbents. The balance of political power in the Tennessee statehouse, where Republicans hold a supermajority, isn’t going to shift. But education is playing a role in individual races — most notably the one involving the chair of the House Education Committee, Republican Rep. Mark White, who supported the governor’s plan to launch a voucher program in Memphis and Nashville. He’s facing a credible challenge from an anti-voucher Democrat.

Why school vouchers are an issue to watch in Tennessee legislative races

And teachers — no matter where you are — we still want to hear from you. What have conversations in your classroom around the local and national 2020 election been like so far? What specific lesson plans are you crafting for after Election Day? If you’re willing to give us a peek into your planning, fill out the form below.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said there were 10 total seats on the Indianapolis Public Schools board, rather than seven.

8 don’t-miss Chalkbeat reads from 2019 to get you through winter break

2019-12-22T14:00:22+00:00

One of the most appealing things about this time of year — after the office holiday parties and when most of the gift shopping is done — is the yawning promise of free time that comes during winter break. For many of us, that means catching up on a backlogged list of stories and books we haven’t yet had time to sit with.

Allow us to add to that list with the stories below. These are some of the standout features, storylines, and investigations our team has published in the last year, in no particular order.

1. Colorado reporter Yesenia Robles brought us the story of William, and so many unaccompanied minors like him: “Every year hundreds of children are arriving in Colorado schools with uniquely challenging stories after crossing the border into the U.S. without their parents.” Some school districts have programs for newcomers like William, during which students spend time learning English and U.S. culture to settle into their surroundings. This plea from William is hard to forget: “We’re the same as everyone, we’re not bad people. And we are here because we had no choice. It’s not something we want.”

2. Chalkbeat New York has long been covering the entrenched segregation in the city’s school system. That storyline began to see real shifts this school year, as several districts began implementing integration plans. Reporter Christina Veiga covered those efforts for District 15 in Brooklyn, where a pioneering diversity plan has already shown encouraging results. Christina spoke with some of the 6th-graders who were the first to enter middle school as part of the district’s new admissions plan. Their feedback will be integral to the success of the diversity push, which, as Christina reports, rests heavily on families overcoming fear of the unknown.

3. The deaths of two children with asthma at the same Newark school just two years apart has drawn to light some startling statistics for the city. Newark has a rate three times the national average for children living with asthma, and averaged a death per year from 2010 to 2017 for children with the illness. Devna Bose told the story of grieving parents in Newark who are pushing the district to prepare teachers for the likelihood of having students with asthma in their classes. A day after Devna published her story, the Newark Teachers Union vowed to make sure all teachers, aides, and clerks receive proper training to help these students.

4. The first year of college can be tough for anyone. But the challenges are greater for graduates from high schools in disadvantaged cities. In our ongoing Ready or Not series, Detroit bureau chief Lori Higgins and Newark senior reporter Patrick Wall set out to unpack those challenges, and find out what colleges are doing to help these students thrive. Programs like the Charles Drew Science Scholars at Michigan State University offer academic and career advising, as well as a tight-knit community of support. In Newark, summer “boot camps” and online remedial courses have had mixed results. (Want to keep following this series? Sign up for the Ready or Not newsletter to get the latest from Lori and Patrick.)

5. The dangers posed by lead was a significant storyline in our markets this year. Elevated lead levels were found in the water at seven out of 29 schools in Newark, according to district data released in October, and two out of three tested homes had lead in the water despite their use of filters. Lead found in hundreds of water sources in Indiana’s Marion County schools prompted legislators to call for the state to mandate blood testing for children and require schools to regularly test the water. In Detroit’s school district, students started the academic year with brand new water hydration stations, a vast improvement over the start of the previous year, when drinking water was shut off across the district due to elevated levels of lead and copper. And in Tennessee, we dug into the first wave of test results required by a new state law, identifying nearly 100 schools across the state that had high levels of lead in the water. — ; Shelby County Schools later revealed that 39 schools had been flagged for high lead levels. Tennessee reporter Laura Faith Kebede captured this unforgettable moment on the campus of one of the flagged schools: “Bending to take a drink from a water fountain at Idlewild Elementary School …, Superintendent Joris Ray wanted to make a statement: ‘The water is fine. The water is fine,’ he said. Down the hall, a water fountain near the front door was disconnected and had a large ‘Please do not use’ sign. It was one of three at the Midtown school that tested for high levels of lead.” Chalkbeat Tennessee also published this helpful guide for parents of children at schools with contaminated water.

6. Our Chicago bureau did more than provide live, on-the-ground coverage of October’s 11-day teachers strike and another labor dispute with the union representing bus aides, custodians, classroom assistants, and security officerst. We also dug deep to explore major sticking points in contract negotiations: class size, prep time, support staffing, contract length, and teacher pay. Ariel Cheung’s piece on the district’s lowest-paid workers was deeply affecting: “I do this every day, faithfully, for 10 years,” bus aide Althea McCaskill told Ariel. “Why can’t I get paid what I’m worth?” Almost two months after the strike ended, Chicago educators and most support staff still hadn’t received the retroactive pay and full raises they agreed upon.

7. The nonprofit GreatSchools has created one of the most prominent school rating systems in the country — you’ll see its school scores on Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com. Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum and Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee found in their investigation this year that GreatSchools’ ratings effectively penalize schools that serve mostly low-income students or black and Hispanic students. And that’s despite GreatSchools’ own data that shows many schools serving low-income, black, and Hispanic populations are doing a good job helping students learn math and English. The result “is a ubiquitous, privately run school ratings system that is steering people toward whiter, more affluent schools.” If you haven’t already, read their deeply reported story — or watch the video produced in collaboration with Vox here.

8. Indiana reporter Dylan Peers McCoy investigated how a loophole in state law has allowed schools and districts to report dropped-out students as leaving to home-school, with little oversight to ensure these students are indeed learning at home. A Chalkbeat analysis found that of the 3,700 Indiana high school students in the class of 2018 that were recorded as leaving to home-school, more than half came from 61 of the state’s 507 high schools. Those numbers, Dylan writes, “suggest that Indiana’s lax regulation of home schooling and its method for calculating graduation rates are masking the extent of many schools’ dropout problems.” Following Dylan’s reporting, the state superintendent questioned the manager of Emmerich Manual High School, which had recorded the highest proportion of students leaving to home-school of any traditional high school in the state. Now, the for-profit operator of Manual and two other schools in Indianapolis may have to hand back the reins to Indianapolis Public Schools.

What we heard during Chalkbeat’s second annual Listening Tour

2019-12-16T23:42:48+00:00

“Show your work.” I remember that phrase primarily from math classes throughout my school career. Since I joined Chalkbeat almost a year ago, that phrase has taken on more meaning as I work with our network of local bureaus to take our journalism deeper into the communities we serve.

In our day-to-day reporting, we show our work by embedding a key source document, explaining data analysis on a story, or posting a Twitter thread with behind-the-scenes insight. For my part as engagement editor, showing our work means supporting what we call the feedback loop: the continuous cycle of soliciting community input before, during, and after our reporting on essential education stories, and reflecting what we hear back to the community.

We do this throughout the year using reader callouts — Google Forms that typically ask about a particular topic or news event, like education funding or an upcoming teachers rally — and, when appropriate, we publish what we heard.

But with our annual Listening Tour, we have more in-depth conversations. Now that the 2019 tour has wrapped up, I want to take a moment to show our work — both the work that went into the tour and the steps we’re taking to incorporate what we learned into our journalism.

What we did

In the Listening Tour’s second year, we narrowed our focus to parents in our bureau communities — Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Memphis, Newark, and New York. As we looked at past audience survey results, we saw an opportunity to serve parents better — folks without a professional tie to education who need to be able to make informed decisions about their children’s futures.

Our bureaus organized in-person listening sessions around the start of the school year. We weren’t aiming for ComicCon-sized crowds: We designed them for between 12 and 40 attendees to foster more intimate conversations.

Colorado organized a conversation around school choice, while Indiana let attendees talk more broadly about what was and wasn’t working in Indianapolis schools. New York and Newark both centered their events around special education; Tennessee talked with parents about literacy from pre-K through third grade. Because Chicago had already done strong engagement work with parents, the bureau organized a happy hour and story slam for teachers to find out what issues were front-of-mind for them. (Detroit had planned to talk to parents about school facility issues, but at the last minute, the event was cancelled due to logistical issues.)

To reach more parents than those who could attend our in-person events, we also designed an online information needs assessment. Again using Google Forms, with versions in Spanish and English, we asked parents in or near each of these cities about how they got their news, what information is hard for them to access, and what topics they were most interested in seeing us cover. The surveys were online from July through the end of September, and in October, we chose one lucky parent from each city to receive a $50 gift card — we know it takes time to answer these questions thoughtfully, and we’re grateful to those who did.

The results

Nearly 160 people showed up to our listening sessions.
On average, 50% of attendees were parents.
More than one-quarter were new to Chalkbeat.
Bureaus came away with more than 40 story ideas, drawing from the most pronounced areas of interest and biggest concerns of the parents and teachers they spoke with.

As for the information needs assessments, we received 452 responses over the course of those three months, 90% of the way to our overall target of 500. About 40% of respondents identified as people of color; like many news organizations, Chalkbeat is working to diversify readership and make sure we’re hearing from a representative sample of the communities we serve. While we’ve made progress, in part by partnering with local organizations on outreach, we have more work to do in this regard.

The top three topics of interest for survey respondents:

Curriculum and classroom instruction
School budgets and finance
Special education and students with disabilities

Many of these relate to additional topics parents indicated interest in across our bureau locations:

What’s working in schools when it comes to teaching methods, equity, and mental health
Transparency around decision-making, such as school finance, state and local legislation, and school board operations
Resources to help parents make decisions and advocate for their children
Learning trajectories for students not bound for college

What’s next

Our bureaus shared more details about what stood out to them during their listening sessions — read more from Tennessee, Colorado, and Newark. Now we’re starting the work of applying that input to our reporting. Our managing editors for local news, Eric Gorski and Carrie Melago, are working with bureaus to plot stories and projects that will cover some of these topics as they relate to local schools.

And along the way, it’s on us to show our work. On this page, we’ll be keeping track of the stories that emerge. We’ve already gotten started — see this school-tour guide from Colorado’s Melanie Asmar, and this report from Newark’s Patrick Wall and Devna Bose on the city’s failures to meet special education requirements. There’s more to come, so I hope you’ll read along and share your ideas when our next Listening Tour kicks into gear in 2020.

Following our 2019 Listening Tour, Chalkbeat bureaus will continue tackling topics raised during in-person listening sessions and responses to our online information needs assessment. See those articles inspired by community input here.

I’m Chalkbeat’s new audience engagement editor. Here’s how I think about community and impact.

2019-02-11T22:12:06+00:00

Technically my first day at Chalkbeat was January 7, but I hope you’ll forgive the delay in saying hello. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been meeting people left and right, bookmarking community organizations and movers-and-shakers in the seven locations where we operate, and getting up to speed on our audience engagement strategies. Now that I can catch my breath, I wanted to take a moment to share my own perspective on engagement and what I’m hoping to do at Chalkbeat.

A lot has changed since I started working in engagement six years ago, but plenty remains the same. Comment sections are still prone to devolving into petty fighting without rigorous moderation. News organizations are still sorting out which traffic metrics they pay attention to, and which ones define success. The role of “engagement editor” in newsrooms, unlike “City Hall reporter” or “editor in chief,” can still resemble an amorphous blob, containing as much or as little as an outlet cares to hear from its audience.

Chalkbeat lands on the upper end of the spectrum, and its engagement-centric approach is part of what drew me to work here. I first learned about Chalkbeat back in 2013, when I was engagement editor at Voice of San Diego.

What immediately stood out: Chalkbeat’s MORI system, which remains the most thoughtful approach I’ve seen for measuring impact in the communities a news outlet covers. This isn’t the case everywhere, but to me, and most importantly to Chalkbeat, engagement and impact are intertwined; journalists’ work doesn’t yield impact if readers aren’t part of the conversation. While growing our audience is important (have you told a friend about Chalkbeat yet? We’d appreciate the help!), and will be a significant part of my job, our bureaus are motivated by doing work that matters, that informs debate and spurs action that results in better schools — not necessarily work that will go viral.

Since then, Chalkbeat has grown to seven bureaus with national coverage on top of that, and there are plans to expand to even more cities around the country in the future. Though my career path had carried me away from mission-driven nonprofit newsrooms, I found myself checking back in on Chalkbeat.

I spent 2018 as a senior editor at The New Republic, focused on engagement; before that, I was assignment editor and managing editor for the website of The Atlantic. I’d spent three years at legacy institutions, and though I’d known going into those experiences that the audiences would be bigger, and the metaphorical walls surrounding the newsrooms higher, than they had been in the nonprofit world, I don’t think I appreciated how different the mindsets around engagement — and impact — would be.

In the last few weeks, I’ve heard about several Chalkbeat stories that came directly from community engagement. One in particular stands out in my mind: the story of Javion, a 16-year-old in Chicago’s public school system who reads at a second-grade level. Our reporter Adeshina Emmanuel learned about Javion’s difficulties during last year’s listening tour, a series of in-person events where Chalkbeat staff aimed to empower people in the community to share their own stories.

Here was the engagement I cared about, where journalists sought to report with and for communities, not just “on” them; here was the commitment to driving impact by working with our readers, aiming for results above and beyond a CNN chyron name-dropping our cover story or Donald Trump tweet-ranting against our work. Here was journalism as public service.

So what will I be doing at Chalkbeat? I’ll be making it easier for us to reach more people in our communities, in person and online. I’ll be fine-tuning our social media practices, establishing and maintaining partnerships with other media outlets and community organizations, and helping our bureaus pull off events that amplify diverse voices. Generally, I’ll be managing how we talk to and hear from our audience — which includes you.

As I get started, I’d love to hear from you. What do you want to see more of from Chalkbeat? What are you hoping to get out of the newsletters? If you live near one of our bureau locations (especially Indianapolis, where I’m currently based), I’d love your suggestions for potential partners: Who’s doing good work in your city to improve education and build a stronger sense of community? Let’s chat: cgreen@chalkbeat.org