From our host, Dale Penn

We asked Dale Penn and Kristin Gorski, hosts of our education News Hunt, for their input on certain trends in coverage we noticed in last week's top education stories, as well as their overall impressions of this project. Below is the full text of Dale's remarks; Kristin's can be found on her personal blog, Write Now is Good.

It was a pleasure co-hosting this topic with Kristin.  I do feel I have gained a much keener insight into the issues in education than I expected at the outset.  You were a great help submitting stories and reviewing religiously all week.

I consciously looked for education stories that were national in nature, and (as you point out) they all seemed to be opinion (or NYT or WAPO).  I believe the reason is this:  Education (with the exception of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Head Start, Pell Grants, tax credits, student loans and other Federal programs) is for the most part a function of local school boards, and the State governments.  That's where the majority of the funding comes from and that's where the education journalists are stationed. Consequently, the news about what is happening in schools tends to end up as local or state level stories.  The opinion pieces were generally related to, or in response to, the stimulus which is a national conversation.

I sorted through literally hundreds of local school stories that were merely announcements, award recognitions or stories that had no implications beyond the local level to come up with the ones I submitted.  

I believe you will find that the news stories listed below actually do have national implications, even if they don't jump out at first glance.  For instance the first story on Finland's education system ('Finland's education system offers lessons for Dallas') deals with the a national approach to education (Finland's) vs. a local approach to education (Dallas/U.S.).  The story begins with the sentence: "HELSINKI, Finland – This is the land where no child is left behind" (as opposed to the U.S. where we have a national law that aims for NCLB reality but misses the mark). 

The story on Miami-Dade schools ('Miami-Dade schools can yank book on Cuba') is really a story about first amendment rights.  This book banning case is still working its way through the courts and could well end up before the US Supreme Court to determine if local school boards have the right to ban books based on community sensitivity to a subject (i.e., today's Cuba is shown in a positive light in a child's book and this is counter to everything many (most?) Miami Cubans believe and have taught their children about the evils of Cuba under Castro.)  

Another example is the story from the Aurora Beacon News ('School study cites 'achievement gap'').  As I mentioned in my review, this story echos a story from NYC.  Demographics impact the funding for local school districts.  If a school is in an impoverished area, with a high immigrant population, standardized test scores will be impacted and funding will decline, ultimately leading to possible closure of the schools.  This is not in the strictest sense a local/state issue, even though the story sites a local/state example ...

The big national news last week was the stimulus, and while it had an education component that popped up here and there, the components of the stimulus are in such flux that the education piece pretty much got buried in the reporting.  There was nothing concrete to report.  Obama hasn't had a chance to tackle NCLB reform.  The Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, hasn't gotten to issues of policy yet and is still talking in campaign speak - which is to be expected given the short time he has been in the position.  So the dearth of high quality journalism on a national level also may have been caused by timing to some degree.  The opinion stories listed are born from discussions about anticipated education reform under the stimulus and the new Administration.

I took to heart the focus of this week's collaboration with Ashoka and looked for stories about early childhood to lifelong learning, global literacy and digital learning.  These were difficult stories to find.  Stories of women being trained in India, and fathers being coached in India to support their daughters' desire to learn were micro-stories pointing to a much larger and often not emphasized macro regional problem.  Hopefully these stories, if read, provided a sense of the dire straights global literacy is in in developing countries.  We need to continue to develop media sources for these topics.