The Education Show

I hadn’t seen Christine Pitts’ name in a while when I came across her recent Oregon Journalism Project (OJP) interview — part of an interesting new effort to rebuild accountability-oriented journalism in the state. In this new interview, the former NWEA and CRPE staffer talks about education coverage, the startling differences between teaching in North Carolina and Oregon, and her work with Open S...

One of the hardest things to do on the education beat is to cover private school choice in a way that isn’t narrow-minded, superficial, or simplistic. At Education Week, that difficult job has fallen to assistant managing editor Matthew Stone , who oversees policy and politics and school finance coverage — including private school choice. In this new interview, Stone describes how fast-moving the...

Now a statewide investigative reporter, Jess Clark has been an education journalist for more than a decade. In this new conversation, she describes how she came to report and produce a powerful new four-part audio podcast called The Girls — which tells the story of three young women who were abused by two football coaches and educators — and the education system that did little to protect them. Th...

There are lots of folks out there who say that they can help you become a better journalist, but Mike Reilley may be one of the originals. The force behind Journalist’s Toolbox , the University of Illinois at Chicago teacher has seen and done it all over the course of three decades. In this new interview, Reilley describes how he developed his site, partnered with SPJ, and then rebooted the effort...

The Alabama Daily News’ Trish Crain began as a blogger, motivated by her own experiences as a student — and frustrations about the education her children were receiving. For seven years, she wrote for Alabama School Connection, a blog-style forum. Then she got asked to write for AL.com — a big transition for someone with no training in journalism. More recently, Crain has been covering education f...

Covering teachers strikes is one of the most challenging — and exciting — things that education reporters do. That’s why The Grade has spent so much time analyzing strike coverage and talking to reporters about the ins and outs of the experience. In this new interview, veteran SF Chronicle education reporter Tucker describes what happened in last week’s San Francisco’s strike — and how she tries t...

There’s no shortage of non-journalists covering education these days, including parents, advocates, and foundation officers. But Georgetown’s Nora Gordon is the only economist and public policy professor I know of. It’s not that the 160,000-student Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) lacks traditional coverage. The Baltimore Banner’s Talia Richman, Bethesda Magazine’s Ashlyn Campbell, and — un...

There aren’t many mainstream education reporters that I know of who are focused solely on covering school choice, and — technically — Josh Snyder has other responsibilities. But the school choice program created in Arkansas’ 2023 LEARNS Act is a big part of Snyder’s locally-funded three-year gig, which he’s handled since last summer, so I’m counting him as one of them. And, given how rapidly schoo...

A former alt-weekly columnist and current Northeastern University professor, Dan Kennedy has long been thinking and writing about journalism via Media Nation . In this new interview, he observes that, while these are perilous times for journalism writ large, things are relatively good in the New England area he tracks most closely, including not only the Boston Globe but also MassLive — which rece...

In January 2022, Boston Mayor Wu appointed Brandon Cardet to the BPS School Committee with great enthusiasm. Four years later, Cardet is no longer on the board -- and looks deeply uncomfortable being asked “Why not?” Listen to the full discussion in the 1/21/26 episode of the Shah Foundation’s Last Night At School Committee . Recall that the lack of coverage of Cardet’s non-renewal was a source of...

If Vernée Wilkinson seems familiar to you, there’s a reason for that. The head of School Facts Boston has been interviewed numerous times, featured by the Boston Globe, and profiled here at The Grade. Like many other places, Boston schools are facing moves and mergers, as well as what Wilkinson politely calls “student outcome issues” in this new interview. And, while the Boston Globe and other out...

Corey DeAngelis and I first connected online way back before the pandemic, when he was watchdogging traditional news outlets for lazy coverage, winning corrections from outlets like the Washington Post, and pushing stories that were too hot for most mainstream news outlets to carry until they absolutely had to. (Think Elizabeth Warren sending one of her children to private school.) Fast forward to...

While several other education teams around the nation are downsizing, the Houston Chronicle education team remains one of the largest around. At the helm is former Houston Public Radio reporter Laura Isensee, replacing longtime editor Jennifer Radcliffe. Isensee has trained and mentored other reporters before, and she worked at the Miami Herald before moving to public radio. Her work for Houston P...

It’s always great to talk with students, parents, and educators who have had their lives depicted in the media, to get their thoughts about the experience of being a subject — good, bad, and mixed. So I was eager to speak with Doraian Givens, the former TM Landry student whose life was upended in 2018 when the school was exposed for giving falsified information to colleges and for inflicting physi...

You can watch the interview above (or on YouTube ), listen to it on Spotify or Apple , or read the transcript . In this new interview conducted over the weekend, former full-time education reporter Erica L. Green describes last week’s release of her new book (co-written with fellow New York Times reporter Katie Benner) as an occasionally overwhelming homecoming — “a culmination of so much of what...

I had the chance to speak with Ross Wilson, who heads the Boston-based Shah Foundation and cohosts a podcast called Last Night at School Committee, which describes itself as a “bite-sized summary of Boston School Committee meetings.” Now in its 7th year, the podcast is one of those things that you don’t realize you need until you hear it — and then wonder why they’re not a regular part of every bi...

Seven years ago, after a nationwide slew of social media hype and frothy media coverage about deeply impoverished kids from Louisiana getting into Ivy League colleges, the New York Times’ Katie Benner and Erica L. Green revealed that their courses, transcripts, and essays — but not their ACT scores — had been faked, and that the unregulated private school they’d attended had manipulated them and t...

A veteran of traditional newsrooms like the Boston Globe and Herald, Scott Van Voorhis is carving out a spot in the brave new world of nontraditional media. He’s got a successful four-year-old Substack called Contrarian Boston , which includes both original reporting and commentary. He’s hired David Mancuso to cover education policy. But that’s not all. He’s hosting the relaunch of GBH public tele...

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...

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 unde...

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 retrea...

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...

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 overwhel...

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...

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 h...