One could say that the Brookings Institution’s latest survey on public attitudes about education news reporting offers, well, something. At least we now know that 76 percent of residents surveyed by the think tank in the Northeastern states were more-interested in getting news about student academic performance than their counterparts in the rest of the country. Or that education reform was just 4.7 percent of all national news coverage on education surveyed. Or that we know that 60 percent of parents and those who don’t have children get their news from the local paper — and that between 38 percent and 40 percent of those surveyed felt that they didn’t get enough news coverage on education issues. At least editors and media executives have some sense of what could be the focus of their energies.
But as with the other reports on education reporting Brookings has developed on behalf of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it spends more time complaining about the “lack of coverage on essential education issues” than offering anything substantive or useful for reporters at any level of coverage to consider.
It focuses on shaming national media outlets, even though the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NPR, The American Spectator, the Los Angeles Times and yes, Dropout Nation have stepped up over the past few years with tremendous, critically-acclaimed (if not always perfect) coverage of the battles over reforming American public education. The report doesn’t bother to suggest any solutions such as that these outlets move to data-driven coverage of education issues as done by the L.A. Times last year in its series on teacher quality in Los Angeles Unified elementary schools, or that editors could bolster coverage of education even more by considering the role it plays in other national issues such as foreign trade, the nation’s current (and long-term) economic woes, national defense and immigration. This is understandable. It is just a survey. But Brookings is using the survey as a jumping off point for its media analysis. And it could have used the survey as a jumping off point for a much-deeper discussion about education news coverage than what it offered.
The survey does even less for local reporters and editorialists — especially those working on the education beat. After all, neither the survey nor the other reports on education news coverage put out by Brookings has fully dealt with the reality that for most education beat reporters, discussions about the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act are secondary to daily coverage of school board hearings, school bus safety and local budget cuts. Save for such moments as when a mayor runs his own slate for school board (or tries to take over the district), or when a dropout factory is put into turnaround as required by No Child, the reporters don’t get to touch on national or even state education policy discussions. Why? For one the demand from editors is strictly local; a reporter has to go out of his way to localize national topics — and do so while covering the bread-and-butter. The other reason is a matter of capacity; a beat reporter at a local weekly such as the Dunwoody Crier (one of the first places where I cut my proverbial teeth in the reporting game) doesn’t have the experience and hasn’t gotten any training on education issues.
Offer local reporters a few resources, and help them get over the typical reporter’s fear of numbers and analysis, and they can do a better job of tying national discussions and the role of policy in shaping school decisions into their reporting. Work with reporters and writers who generally don’t cover education such as a Dave Weigel of Slate or the folks at Politico and you can expand the range of coverage of education. Encourage more data-driven reporting and you will see more Jason Songs writing the kind of tough, analytical stories needed on the education beat.
Essentially, this report is a wasted opportunity for Brookings (and, by extension, the Gates Foundation) to elevate education news coverage. But it doesn’t have to remain that way. Here’s a few steps Brookings and Gates could actually take in getting the kind of national and local education news coverage they deem important:
- Publish a series of white papers on issues related to important issues in school reform and how they relate to local issues. Particularly for local reporters, such information is helpful in digging deep into the policy discussions that school districts try to avoid dealing with in their own operations.
- Develop reports that focus on the intersection between education and other national issues: This publication and its editor has done so from the very beginning. So has the Hechinger Institute, for which I have written a report. It isn’t that hard for an organization with the capacity of Brookings to do so in a tutorial form.
- Conduct a series of seminars and Webinars on how reporters can use data in analyzing school and teacher performance. The Webinar format can be particularly appealing, especially since budget cuts have made it prohibitive for local reporters to take trips to Nashville or to the Beltway for a few days on the corporate dime.
- Launch a network of regional education news services: These operations can serve as models of how to make national education issues local.
These steps would be more helpful than another round of surveys and reports. And there’s no reason why Brookings can’t make this a reality. Brookings has done great work on other areas of education policy and discussions. It can — and should — do better in analyzing and improving the quality of education news.