What is this course about?

"Course on Covering Schools Breaks New Ground," by Liz Willen, Hechinger Newsletter, 2007

Class of 2007

Covering Education is a journalism course rarely if ever taught in colleges around the country — a rather baffling statement. Education is a primary beat in every American news outlet from the small town paper to the metropolitan news conglomerate. Public schools are the most elementary democratic engines that drive communities financially, culturally, and ideologically. In more ways than one, the health and well being of a region is tied to the quality of its schools. It is not uncommon that more than half of a community’s budget is directed at its public schools. The general public cares deeply about its schools.

On a more theoretical plane, public education is considered government’s most important social policy—one Americans still believe represents the heart of our national values. We expect our schools not only to educate individual children, but to disseminate shared values, to close racial and economic gaps, and to level the playing field for all children in pursuit of that elusive American dream.

Ambivalence often takes hold when it comes time for local governments to carry out these lofty goals. It is one thing to preach educational equity, and quite another to make it happen. Despite a consensus on the ideological importance of universal public schooling, intense disagreement still dominates debates over the practical matters: how to teach, what to teach, how to organize districts, how to spend money, and how to monitor what happens in the classrooms. And today, more than ever, our public school system is under new pressures to educate all children for all purposes – as citizens, as workers, as leaders in their fields—and to do it in ways that are wholly different from past practices.

Education reporters find themselves tripping headlong into this baffling world dominated by managed tests and prescriptive reforms without a proper map. Our most common tendency is to pay close attention only to the top layer of public school government. But the days are past when school reporters can log in hours numbly observing school board meetings and parroting the latest superintendent’s announcement. The public today demands more sophisticated coverage, stories that explore the intersection of culture, race, child development, pedagogy, politics and data analysis.

This course is a collaboration between the Hechinger Institute on Media and Education at Teachers College, a resource institute for education journalism, and LynNell Hancock, associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. It is intended to offer students a foundation for making sense of the increasingly complex landscape of public education. It will provide historical context for public schooling in the United States, examine some of the pressing issues confronting educators and children, and offer students some basic tools needed to fairly assess the nation’s classrooms, such as how to read school data, understanding child development, education research, different teaching methods, and the art and ethics of interviewing children. Students should emerge from this course with a working knowledge of the various political and education arguments fueling public debate and the skills needed to cut through the polemics and write about them with clarity.

The course will be useful for students who are interested in writing about national affairs and social services with an investigative and a narrative flair. Any reporter who masters this beat, balancing daily news with vibrant, explanatory features, will be armed with the skills needed to tackle other complex journalistic assignments. Students will learn to write in a variety of media, from journals to news to op-eds and a magazine-length feature. We will rewrite and rewrite until the pieces are in publishable shape on our course Web site.

Funding Support

Besides the traditional seminar on Mondays, the course will also include some unique extras thanks to the financial and intellectual input of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College

Special Features

1. Partnership between Columbia J-School and New York Public Schools

A central component of this course will be the time students will spend on Tuesdays inside a New York City public school, understanding the students’ lives and the educators’ challenges, learning the intricacies of how the school operates from the boiler rooms to the classrooms. Reporters generally gather this kind of intelligence on the fly, aided by an occasional quick visit to a school. And even these drop-in visits are becoming increasingly more onerous to negotiate in New York City. If a key goal of the education journalist is to place teachers and children into meaningful context and at center stage in their stories, then in-depth knowledge of the day to day life of one school will provide them with an invaluable frame of reference—one that will be useful in any future beat in any city or country.

With this in mind, the teachers and principals at the Julia Richman Education Complex on East 67th Street have agreed to enter into a partnership with Columbia Journalism School. The Julia Richman High School was once an example of the worst kind of school the city could offer students -- a sprawling 3,000-seat school known more for its violence and failure than for education. In 1993, long before the current wave of small school transformations, the city emptied Julia Richman and reopened it soon thereafter as a center for six separate schools serving no more than 300 students apiece, pre-kindergarten through high school. Each school is autonomous, and yet works in concert with the others to make the building gel as a coherent whole. The schools are Urban Academy, the anchor high school; Talented Unlimited, a performance art high school; Ella Baker for pre-k through 8th graders; Vanguard High for special needs students; Manhattan International High School for new immigrants; and P226 a middle school for autistic children. The schools share a student health clinic, an infant-toddler center, a theatre, gym and art studio.

Each school will accept two or three Columbia J-School students, each of whom will spend one day a week in the school for the entire semester. The students will work out their course of observation and study with each principal and teacher. Students will be encouraged to consider their lab school as a second day of seminar, and to scout for sources outside the Julia Richman school for stories they will publish on our school Web site. Each student will also be encouraged to find ways to participate in the school on their own time, either as a writing coach, a newspaper editor, or a teaching assistant.

As the course gains some traction we will add more schools to the partnership in order to increase the variety. This year P.S. 24, a dual language elementary school in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, has agreed to accept a student with a keen interest in bilingual education.

2. Online Resource Library: Finally, the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia’s Teachers College is in the midst of collecting resources for education reporters and journalism instructors that will be available to our students. The collection will include sections from the essential canon of education books, key documents and best-practice works of journalism on a variety of issues from a variety of media. It will also include documentary films, broadcast news programs and video snapshots inside classrooms that can be used to teach interviewing techniques and different teaching practices. The library will be a fluid work in progress, reorganizing and rebuilding over the years. In addition, our J-School students will have the opportunity to benefit from the vast resources at the Hechinger Institute, a 10-year-old professional development organization for education reporters. The plan is for the library to eventually be available to any college or university throughout the nation interested in teaching education reporting.

Who teaches it?

LynNell Hancock
Linda Perlstein