The Education Show

The Associated Press education team sets annual themes and doesn’t do school culture wars stories, by and large — and that’s a good thing, at least according to me (and the Pulitzer Committee).

But sometimes the resulting stories still have both extraordinary depth and immediate timeliness.

That’s the case in a recent piece about one Atlanta parent’s struggles to keep her son enrolled in the same high school — despite a past eviction record and a stubborn lack of affordable housing in the area.

“We know that it’s bad because we hear about it from teachers and principals,” says AP education reporter Bianca Vázquez Toness about the team’s decision to focus on housing challenges that plague many families. “But people haven’t written about it through the eyes of kids and parents specifically.”

In this new interview, Toness reveals how she found and reported the story, the “resource deserts” that differentiate neighboring districts (and make parents so desperate to keep their kids in some districts), and what makes the AP education team different:

“We’ve been given permission to see education as not just things that happen in schools.”

Avoiding a narrow focus on schools isn’t easy for an education reporter to do, however — even when it’s encouraged. After we’d finished recording, Toness told me how, in reporting a previous story, she’d had to learn not to always ask a Los Angeles mother experiencing housing instability whether the son was going to school.

Watch the conversation above on Substack or via YouTube.

Read the unedited AI-generated transcript.

Listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Read the story & background information:

She wanted to keep her son in his school district. It was more challenging than it seemed

Takeaways from AP’s story on the links between eviction and school

Photo Essay: One single mom’s quest to find housing after an eviction

Getting the story: How an AP reporter chronicled a sensitive story about school and eviction

Other resources:

Evicted in CT: How one ninth-grader navigated new obstacles (CT Mirror)

Reading, Writing, Evicted (Oregonian)

Previously from The Grade

An interview with the AP team responsible for Pulitzer-recognized education coverage

Single-family housing and education

Student-re-engagement: the missing half of attendance and absenteeism coverage

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With a career that began with Teach For America and includes at least one early byline in the Valerie Strauss section of the Washington Post, Matt Barnum is one of the most interesting education journalist on the beat.

One of his earliest fulltime writing gigs was at The 74, following by a stint as a national education reporter for Chalkbeat. Now, with a Spencer Fellowship and now a book deal under his belt, Barnum has returned from two years as a K-12 national education reporter job at the Wall Street Journal to become the “Ideas” editor at Chalkbeat — a move that I think makes enormous sense for both Chalkbeat and Barnum.

In this new interview conducted just before Thanksgiving, Barnum compares his new role to being a Metro columnist — “news gathering with more of an analytical flair” — and discusses problem of education narratives that seem to overtake the evidence behind them. In some cases, he says, “the conventional wisdom has just been repeated, [and] the chain of custody of the actual evidence is not entirely clear.”

When it comes to the state of the education beat, Barnum seems more worried about dwindling newsrooms and less worried about journalism’s traditional story selection and framing. And he defends coverage of hot-button political controversies that may or may not directly or immediately affect schools and learning: “I think as a factual matter, there is a broader tent interest in some of these hot political USDE stories, including from perhaps non-traditional or marginally-attached news consumers.”

Watch or listen to the conversation above — or read the uncorrected AI-generated transcript.

Previously from The Grade:

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Way back in the 2000s and early 2010s, Democrats For Education Reform (DFER) played a major role on the education scene, pushing for high standards, charter schools, and old-school accountability.

However, DFER’s struggles were already becoming obvious nearly a decade ago, and while quasi-public charter schools may be less controversial than they once were, education reform has been in full retreat since then.

Former Providence, Rhode Island mayor Jorge Elorza aims to change all that. As the new head of DFER, Elorza is calling for Democrats to to rethink their traditional opposition to public funding of private school choice.

“There’s nothing inherently conservative or Republican about private school choice,” says Elorza in an interview conducted before last week’s elections.

So far, there are only a few high-profile figures who have publicly embraced this position: Elorza, Arne Duncan, and Rahm Emanuel. And last week’s election results may discourage blue-state politicians and candidates from reconsidering their views.

But private school choice is spreading, and high-quality, progressive-minded schools are already sprouting up in blue parts of red states, according to Elorza.

“I think that when harnessed in a very positive way with the right guardrails, [private school choice] can provide better options for families.”

Watch, listen, or read the transcript of the half-hour interview above.

Previously

Surprises a reporter experiences inside a newly-opened private school in Alabama

Who killed school reform?

A new home for center-left education politics?

Inside the Harper’s magazine story about teaching at an ESA-funded micro-school

The Sudden Rise and Ongoing Challenges of Democrats for Education Reform (AEI)

The Successful Failure of ED in ’08 (AEI)

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Danielle DuClos is one of just a handful of reporters who’ve focused repeated attention on the problem of school sexual misconduct.

Originally a Report for America corps member who wrote about school sexual assault at the Green Bay Gazette, she’s now a statewide investigative reporter at Wisconsin’s CapTimes who’s in the middle of a new series on school sexual misconduct called Dismissed.

In our recent conversation, DuClos describes the half-assed reporting and tracking of school sexual misconduct cases she found at the state level and among larger districts — including situations where districts told her that there were no cases until pointed to them.

Record-keeping and transparency are so bad that “school districts themselves don’t know” that they’ve had cases, says DuClos.

While the topic is dark and the work is challenging, school sexual misconduct is “reporting that should be part of every single education reporter’s beat,” says DuClos. “This should just be a records request that you put in every year to your school districts [asking them] ’What investigations have you conducted?’

Watch, listen to, or read the conversation above.

Previously from The Grade

What journalists can do to help prevent school sexual misconduct

Is K-12’s #MeToo moment finally here — & will journalism help play a role?

School secrets and sexual assault

One reporter’s efforts to end ‘passing the trash’ in California schools

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

For a while now, mainstream national education coverage has been focused on politics, culture war conflicts, and other high-controversy education-related topics.

And — given the current administration’s various efforts to revamp the US Department of Education and reshape state and local efforts — the coverage makes a certain amount of sense.

However, it’s still somewhat bracing to see the overwhelming preponderance of stories focused on U.S. Department of Education, gun violence, gender, religion, and technology among the roughly 1,500 pieces produced by 12 national news outlets over the course of a year, according to a new study from Bellwether.

“Fewer than one in 10 articles was focused on issues around teachers, around curriculum and instruction and extracurriculars and student academic outcomes,” says co-author Nora Weber in a recent interview (above). “A lot more of the news coverage was around political education coverage.”

If that’s not attention-grabbing enough, the report also finds that there’s not any obvious difference in terms of story selection between outlets with education teams (like the New York Times and Washington Post) and outlets without dedicated education sections that I know of (like CNN or Fox):

To some, the focus on school culture wars and politics is a feature, not a bug. Journalists are covering the news and going deep on topics their audiences want to know about.

To others — I find myself among them — this seems like an unfortunate circumstance. In particular, outlets with dedicated education teams should focus a more substantial portion of their efforts on their unique role and value, even if it means taking a hit when it comes to pageviews. Otherwise, the beat loses its identity and its unique value.

There is at least one obvious alternative model, though it isn’t included in the report: the Associated Press education team, which has avoided the gravitational pull of culture war coverage — and won Pulitzer attention in the process.

Featuring talented journalists and strong leadership, the AP education team shows how to win admiration from readers, funders, and colleagues without going all in on politics and culture wars coverage.

Previously from The Grade

Pulitzer judges recognize deeply collaborative, human-centered education coverage

Why the education beat should lean into ‘general-purpose’ news (& regain reader trust)

What happens when education reporters write about politics (and vice versa)?

Tabloid-style education news is all the rage

The case against covering school gun violence

How to cover school culture war stories?

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

Once fairly standard, in-school reporting has become something unusual on the education beat — victim of the ever-increasing obstacles set up by schools, leftover pandemic-era restrictions, and changed expectations among editors and reporters.

That’s why it’s so great to talk to reporters like Rebecca Griesbach, who recently got herself inside a new, controversial kind of school and wrote a great story about it for AL.com:

Above: Inside one new school cashing in on Alabama’s CHOOSE Act.

There’s no shortage of stories about private school choice these days. But Griesbach’s story about Peach City Academy features lots of additional details thanks to her firsthand reporting: a school leader who claims she’s not at all against public schools, a mix of students from a mix of local public schools as well as other private institutions, and an unexpected classroom discussion.

“They were talking about feminism, suicide, and all of these things that I don’t see when I’m in a public school classroom,” says Griesbach. “So that kind of shocked me.”

Griesbach admits she’s got it easier than someone covering just one or two districts. But that doesn’t mean that firsthand observation inside schools doesn’t have to happen. It’s essential to informing the public, whether the schools are traditional or otherwise. And it’s vivid content that readers want. If traditional reporters can’t or won’t provide it, someone else will.

Check out the interview above or read the automated transcript.

Previously from The Grade

Inside the Harper’s magazine story about teaching at an ESA-funded micro-school

How to report from inside a school when they won’t let you have access

Rethinking integration & reflecting on childhood experiences

Literacy, blue-state politics, & media reluctance

Covering choice in the Trump 2.0 era

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

Most of us who end up doing what I do probably don’t set out to become citizen journalists.

We’re just curious people who care about what’s true, and, when we stumble upon information that has been overlooked, we feel compelled to get the word out.

At least that’s how I ended up spending two weeks covering the story of Ian Roberts, the disgraced former Des Moines superintendent who turned out to have lied about pretty much everything.

When headlines first appeared about a school district superintendent being arrested as an illegal alien, the universal reaction was disbelief. Sensational headlines often mislead, but this time the stories offered no hint of a reasonable explanation.

The mystery of how Roberts rose so high intrigued me. I’m allergic to dishonesty, so once I realized I had a liar in my sights, I kept digging.

Though I’m a lawyer by training, many of my skills translate to investigative work —especially scanning large volumes of documents for key details.

I’m a mom, a civil liberties attorney, a former leftist — and now a citizen journalist.

Note: Read on for the rest of Powell’s essay about her experience, then watch the above interview for her additional thoughts.

Above: The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, and many other mainstream national news outlets would eventually cover the story.

The initial story broke on a Friday, while I was starting a weekend of shuttling kids to appointments and soccer games.

My first research was done on my phone between errands. I started with public sources, such as social media posts, court records, and school board documents. It was all there, available to anyone who looked with a critical eye. Yet no one had. Not school officials. Not state agencies. Not newspaper reporters.

No one had questioned the implausible parts of Roberts’ resume or his ever-shifting backstory. The fact that I found so many red flags so quickly says as much about the school districts that hired him as it does about Roberts himself.

It was all there, available to anyone who looked with a critical eye. Yet no one had. Not school officials. Not state agencies. Not newspaper reporters.

One of the first things that jumped out at me was that there were inconsistencies in year of birth. Someone — who appears to be Roberts himself — created a Wikipedia page for him on his birthday in 2014, entering his year of birth as 1978. Many other sources say 1973. But numerous legal documents I located consistently list his year of birth as 1970.

Then there are the extraordinary claims about degrees he earned. Roberts claimed to have earned a doctorate in education from Morgan State in 2007, and started styling himself as “Dr.” shortly thereafter. But his doctoral dissertation was from an online university from 2021. He has claimed a variety of degrees from prestigious universities, but upon closer examination, these turned out to be less intensive programs.

Ironically, the most colorful elements of his tale appear to be true. He did graduate from military officer school in Guyana and then went on to join the police force. Stunningly, in a self-published book, Roberts noted that his police unit was referred to as a “Death Squad.” He also was a standout runner in college in the United States and represented Guyana in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Above: The author first posted about Roberts on September 27th. You can read her posts about Roberts in chronological order.

This wasn’t my first viral story on X (Twitter). For example, earlier this year, I revealed that a Los Angeles immigrant-rights group involved in anti-ICE riots was receiving large amounts of state funding.

That story mostly circulated in conservative circles because legacy outlets had no appetite for criticizing a left-wing organization.

But losing a superintendent was too big for the Des Moines media to ignore.

At first, reactions split along partisan lines, with many on the left defending Roberts. As the facts emerged, that support faded, and the press began covering him more critically.

While chasing primary sources, I had little time to read the professional coverage. When I did, traditional news reports that I read were typically confirming things I’d posted days earlier, usually without crediting me.

Early on, The Des Moines Register mentioned me but didn’t bother to reach out or to independently verify my claims.

“Many have recirculated comments and observations by Laura Powell,” wrote the Register’s Lee Rood, who quoted a tweet from me about the abundance of inconsistencies in Roberts’ bio. “Powell poured over Roberts’ book, Wikipedia page, news articles, self-published book, LinkedIn page, military service, looking for errors and inconsistencies.”

But being credited was more the exception than the rule.

Above: At least one Des Moines Register article credited the author.

Later, thanks to a tip in my X inbox, I broke an exclusive story that Roberts had been served with a protective order in 2023, following an incident involving Roberts and his employer at a consulting firm. I’m certain it was a scoop because the sheriff’s office was surprised to discover it when I contacted them.

But when The Des Moines Register published their version, they presented it as if it were their own discovery, and ABC News later erroneously credited The Register for being the first to report the story.

Because I am not employed by a legacy outlet, my work received no acknowledgment.

I earn very little from my writing, but recognition matters because it helps me sustain this work. Treating my scoops as public property and ignoring the role of my reporting is indefensible.

Traditional journalists have access I don’t — they can get public officials to respond, and their records requests get priority while mine languish in the queue.

It’s worth asking whether it’s legal or fair for government agencies to favor credentialed reporters over citizens. The First Amendment protects freedom of the press; it doesn’t grant special privileges to an exclusive class.

One advantage I do have is community goodwill. Once my reporting took off, I was flooded with messages from Iowans thanking me for doing what their local media hadn’t. I also received tips from people who don’t trust the professional press. Some confirmed what I’d already found, while others were genuine scoops.

Once my reporting took off, I was flooded with messages from Iowans thanking me for doing what their local media hadn’t.

My work evolved from online searches to the old-fashioned, time-consuming task of building relationships with sources.

I also have to work harder to prove credibility. I post “receipts” — screenshots, clips, and documents — to back up everything I share. It slows me down and gives other reporters a roadmap to my sources.

And unlike them, I don’t cite anonymous sources in order to protect my credibility, so some parts of the story go underappreciated simply because I can’t attach a name.

Doing this work alone has its pitfalls. I have to move fast or risk being scooped, which increases the chance of mistakes.

Once, a law enforcement officer called angrily about my wording in a post. He was expecting newsroom precision from someone dictating tweets at red lights!

I have no editor, no legal team, no one to help me make judgment calls. I ended up deleting the post about the protective order after a party named in the public records asked me to, out of privacy concerns. It wasn’t an easy call, but I explained to my readers what I’d done, and it was the right decision.

Above: The author explains deleting a previous posting.

Roberts’ story fascinates because of his flamboyance — his social media depicts a carefully curated personal image — and because it’s rare for someone who has risen to such a high position in the education system to be exposed with falsified credentials.

But the real story isn’t about one man or one school district — it’s about the system that enabled him.

From public discussions, the indications were that the board wanted a Black superintendent, seemingly believing that appointing one would somehow solve the district’s racial disparities. So when a candidate appeared who checked every box, it seems they didn’t ask too many questions.

The consultants who helped the Des Moines school board hire Roberts work nationwide. The same flawed practices that failed in Iowa could fail anywhere.

The real story isn’t about one man or one school district — it’s about the system that enabled him.

In the end, the story got the national attention it deserved, thanks in part to my reporting. I achieved what I set out to do — expose the broken hiring process that let an unqualified candidate slip through.

But the saga also revealed the failures of the professional media. This story sat under the noses of local journalists, who parroted Roberts’ statements about his life as facts, without verifying or even questioning the glaring inconsistencies.

It’s an indictment not just of a school board, but also of a press corps that has forgotten how to be skeptical and is too lazy or cautious to dig unless someone hands them a map marking where the truth is buried.

Laura Powell is a California-based mother, lawyer, and a citizen journalist.

Previously from The Grade

How I unintentionally became an education reporter

Make room for non-traditional education journalism!?

Thankful for education journalism — traditional and otherwise

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

Last week, The Argument’s published a piece headlined ‘Illiteracy is a policy choice’ excoriating blue-state school systems that have let struggling students languish even as several red states have figured out how make dramatic improvements in teaching kids to read.

What makes this piece stand out is that, while The Argument is billed as a liberal outlet, it’s not hard to imagine the piece having been published The Free Press.

And, while acknowledging the media coverage that has been produced, it notes “saturation” coverage lavished on past pushes for education reform: “It still feels as if what’s taking place in the Deep South still has been grossly undersold,” writes journalist Kelsey Piper.

In this new interview, Piper describes her own experiences as a parent of a student enrolled in a local micro-school, explains how school reform might or might not fit in the “abundance” movement — and speculates why education journalists and traditional news outlets haven’t yet produced the saturation coverage that might be expected:

“I think a lot of people feel reluctant to write a story that makes the side they’re sympathetic to look bad,” says Piper, who adds that it takes a lot of proof for people to admit that Mississippi is relevant to what should be happening in other places. “They think of it as like somewhere else.”

Previously from The Grade

Who’s afraid of the Southern Surge?

How I missed the phonics story

What’s next for literacy coverage?

McLaren: Why reporting on literacy is so hard — and tips for making it easier

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

TikTok is the new Twitter, and reporter Olivia Krauth is one of the journalists who has perfected the craft of melding traditional journalism and video-first coverage.

I first met Krauth first when she and Mandy McLaren wrote a big piece about school integration efforts in Jefferson County Public Schools for the Courier Journal.

Since then, she switched to politics and left the paper. But her video-first journalism has grown only stronger.

Above: Some of Krauth’s most popular videos have been videos of protests or other news events.

There are obstacles to getting started, Krauth acknowledges — including an entirely understandable disinclination to put oneself on camera and the burden of keeping at it week after week.

But video-based reporting can be rewarding and instructive for local education reporters to try — even if it’s just posting footage from events, press conferences, and public testimony.

“I think there is a lot of room to at least try it,” says Krauth. “TikTok is something a lot easier that you can try out and do yourself and build into your existing engagement strategy.”

No commentary or on-camera presence is required!

Krauth and I also talk about why freelance reporters should start a Substack first (hers is called The Gallery Pass) while newsroom-based reporters should start with video, the importance of reporters adding context to the coverage, and the need to avoid amplifying misleading statements or phrases.

In a rush? Here’s a rough transcript.

Previously from The Grade

Why I finally joined TikTok (and you probably should, too)

Make room for non-traditional education journalism!?

Urgency, experimentation, and expansion at The Baltimore Banner

Mandy McLaren, the education beat's TikTok star

Public radio’s Deepa Fernandes on community-based solutions

Why most education reporters are sticking with Twitter

Remote reporting doesn't work, either.

Pulling back the curtain on desegregation in Louisville

Covering the debate on teaching race in schools

'Report what you know.' 4 key takeaways for education reporters covering protests

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe