by Richard Lee Colvin

Richard Lee Colvin is director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College, Columbia University. He joined the Institute in 2002 from the Los Angeles Times, where he had been writing about national education issues. He is married to Melissa C. Payton, also a journalist, and they have two children in public school in Ridgewood, N.J. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and of the University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s degree in journalism.

The Washington Post recently published a fascinating article that explored why, precisely, “math is hard” for many people. The piece, written by one of The Post’s education reporters, delved into both psychology and cutting-edge science, reporting that brain researchers are using neuro-imaging techniques to literally “watch” the brain as its owner puzzles over math problems. The technique has yielded important insights into how the brain handles the task of reading, insights that are beginning to influence instruction. The hope is that such research can bolster math education as well.

Beyond the article’s intriguing central question, I was struck by how much the writer had to know or be able to find out in order to effectively communicate the information to her readers. Different pedagogical approaches, developmental psychology, the hierarchical nature of math itself, history and gender studies all had to be considered. The writer also had to have an appreciation of the fact that it’s culturally acceptable in the U.S. for someone to admit publicly—as did a student quoted in the article—that, “I just think I’m not good in math.”

Education Journalism Deconstructed
Deconstructing newspaper articles and broadcast reports about education is an occupational hazard for me. I became the director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College, Columbia University, last May after more than 20 years of writing about education at three different newspapers, most recently the Los Angeles Times. The institute’s mission is to promote reporting about education that is “fair, accurate and insightful”; its main method of accomplishing that is to offer in-depth seminars on newsworthy issues for journalists who specialize in covering, supervising coverage of or editorializing about education. In 2003, for example, the institute offered eight seminars on topics that included testing, school choice, leadership in urban schools, the poor preparation of many high school graduates for college or the job market and the erosion of access to higher education.

During each seminar, I’m struck anew by how appreciative my journalistic colleagues are for the opportunity to learn. Their reaction, in part, reflects the fact that newspapers, most of which are highly profitable, spend only a pittance on professional development. A 2002 industry survey sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation revealed that the news industry invests less than half as much on training—based on percentage of payroll—than does the average U.S. company. The survey also found that a lack of training is journalists’ number-one source of job dissatisfaction and that eight-in-ten journalists want more.

But the journalists’ deep engagement at the seminars—asking astute questions from beginning to end—also shows how seriously they take their specialty. Journalists aren’t held in the highest esteem these days by many Americans but it would do critics well to see them in action as they wrestle with issues that lie close to the heart of the elusive promise that is public education.

We ask a lot of our public schools. We ask them to prepare graduates for the job market and for success in college—two paths that more and more these days look alike in terms of the skills they require. We want graduates to flourish in intangible ways, to gain an appreciation for art and music and competition and effort. We ask schools to help young people prepare to participate in this fragile experiment in self-regulation that we call democracy. If all that’s not enough, we believe that even as our society grows more divided economically, the schools can somehow overcome that fault and provide a springboard to opportunity for all.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act raises the stakes even further. Signed into law two years ago by President George W. Bush, the law prescribes a regimen of testing and accountability that’s breathtakingly detailed. In sum, it requires that schools be judged on how well all of their students learn, regardless of the color of their skin, the magnitude of their parents’ income, the language they speak at home or whether they cope with a disability of some sort. That goal is often espoused but rarely achieved. In fact, what’s termed the “achievement gap”—that aggregate difference in academic achievement that leaves African American and Latino students far behind their white and Asian American counterparts—has been growing, and not shrinking, for years.

If we’re asking all that of our schools, shouldn’t we also be asking a lot of the journalists who report on them? And what must be done to make sure they’re up to that task?

Covering Schools vs. Covering Education
Education writing started becoming a specialized task in American journalism around the middle of the century. With the advent of the G.I. Bill in 1944, military veterans began enrolling in college in record numbers. More students were going to high school instead of heading into factories. Suburbanization began. So did the civil rights movement and desegregation. The federal role in education expanded following the 1957 launch of Sputnik, which was seen, in part, as a failure of the American education system to keep us scientifically competitive.

Newspapers responded to those trends by improving their coverage of education. Large, influential papers such as The New York Times and the now-defunct New York Herald-Tribune were among the first to appoint education editors. Fred M. Hechinger, who served in that capacity of both papers and after whom the Hechinger Institute is named, was among the journalists who founded the Education Writers Association (EWA) in 1947, in order “to improve the reporting of education to the public.”

Today, many newspapers have education editors and cadres of reporters covering schools, particularly those seeking to boost circulation in the suburbs. But, as a wise editor told me once, there’s a big difference between covering schools and covering education. Many newspapers require their school reporters to churn out multiple stories each week, a process that results in superficial articles about school board conflicts and other quick features that provide little context to help readers understand how schools work or the pressures they face. Yet it is just such stories that explain the complex environment of schools that readers most want, according to work done by Public Agenda, the nonpartisan polling organization.

Steve Farkas, Public Agenda’s director of research, says the public wants help in evaluating the performance of schools and teachers and is far less interested in school board politics and personalities. A recent Public Agenda survey found that a plurality of Americans say that education is the community issue about which they most want to know more.

Are reporters up to that task? Some are. As I monitor coverage across the country, I see heartening examples of stories laying out complex issues in compelling ways. Another recent story in The Washington Post sensitively explored the dilemma of whether profoundly disabled students should be schooled in regular classrooms. The Chicago Tribune explored the nitty-gritty of state testing plans to uncover a widespread statistical practice that lessens the pressure to improve. The Wall Street Journal has examined the admissions practices of elite colleges.

But there’s a lot I don’t see. Rarely do I come across solid explorations of teaching and learning. What does good teaching look like? What should school leaders be doing to raise student achievement? What really lies behind the achievement gap? How can testing help focus the efforts of schools as well as students? Is the perceived problem of a lack of discipline in schools as bad in reality as it is in the minds of school critics? How is the growing phenomenon of school choice playing out for students? How can it be that 28% of college freshmen overall and 42% of those who enroll in community colleges have to take remedial classes? Are suburban schools as good as they’re touted to be? Are they good for all students or only the elite headed for top colleges?

In general, what I don’t see in education writing is the authoritativeness that comes from having a vast amount of knowledge. Lacking that firm base of knowledge, many stories seem naïve and built on the fragile architecture of pat, superficial quotes from educators or critics who point to a need for “more money” or “smaller classes” or private school vouchers and a crackdown on troublemakers as deceptively quick solutions to complex problems. For example, a story about testing might quote an advocate and a critic contradicting one another, with one saying it is a normal part of the learning process and the other calling it a crime. Such stories reduce the complexities of schooling to a he-said, she-said conflict that skates along the surface of the issue. They do nothing to further the public’s understanding or create pressure for improvement.

Knowledge and Change
There’s a lot that could be done to improve education journalism. But what it all adds up to is writing about education has to become a true specialty, much as covering science, business, sports, the arts or technology are all considered to be specialties, requiring deep knowledge of the domain.

Many of the journalists who specialize in those fields studied them in college or took specialized reporting classes in journalism school. But it’s rare for education writers to have formally studied education. And as far as I’ve been able to determine, no journalism schools today have classes that deal specifically in all you’d have to know to write in-depth stories about teaching and learning or the other central components of schooling. So, it would be useful if journalism schools, perhaps in conjunction with education schools, offered such classes.

Some might contend that education is not a bona fide field and that journalists should stay as far from the jargon-riddled halls of education schools as possible. Having taken some education classes myself, I do not agree. But even if it were true, I would argue that education journalists need to at least have a working knowledge of the competing pedagogical theories that struggle for dominance in education. They need to know something about history so as to understand the recurring cycles of change that keep the school wheels spinning but not moving forward. They need to know about the rapidly changing demographics of the school-age population. They need to know about cognition, motivation, human development, linguistics, and the interaction between poverty and learning. The list is long. And as we push our schools to better serve an ever more diverse group of students, it gets longer all the time.

In addition to formal classes, training seminars, such as those offered by Hechinger or EWA, can make a difference. We have good evidence that writers and editors who attend these professional events tend to stay on the beat longer. They feel respected as professionals, develop pride in their own expertise and want to use it on the job.

Knowledge alone isn’t enough, of course. All journalists, specialists or not, have to find ways to make their stories compelling through rich description, strong characters, jargon-free language and drama. So, attention to good writing and reporting, and investments in professional development to hone those skills, will remain paramount.

Newspaper managers have an important contribution to make. They can recognize the value of subject matter knowledge and promote journalists who work to develop it so that the education beat is no longer considered an entry-level or dead-end job. Rather than pulling the education writer into whatever story is breaking, they can turn elsewhere. They also can give reporters time to get into schools, to really see what’s happening, rather than having to rely on the arid, generalized descriptions of experts.

Newspaper owners, publishers and top editors play a role as well. They can pressure journalism schools to develop the necessary courses. When they hire an education editor or reporter, they can demand that the person have the requisite set of skills or experience. They can give prominent play to education coverage and make a commitment to invest in ongoing training.

It was just over 20 years ago that the U.S. was galvanized by A Nation at Risk, a report produced by the National Commission on Excellence in Education that warned the nation’s future was in jeopardy because of the mediocrity of its schools. The impact of that report, which touched off waves of reform that continue to wash over the schools, was surely due, in large measure, to attention from the press. If the No Child Left Behind legislation is to deliver on its promise of improved educational outcomes for all kids, the press must again contribute to the process by doing its job of monitoring progress, spotlighting problems, explaining research, and celebrating success.

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