The Term Knowledge?
The knowledge that would benefit reporters in their work is nearly without limits, stretching over a breadth that ranges from methods of teaching to school law and encompassing the curricula of the nation's schools and universities.
Education reporters should strive to know:
1.Choice and privatization of schools
Reporters should understand that giving parents more choices in where their children learn is one of the most visible and political fallouts from the reform movement, yet still peripheral in terms of affecting student achievement. Fifteen years ago, home schooling was considered radical, charter schools were nonexistent and choice among public schools was rare. Today, conservative and libertarian groups want to use market forces to improve schools by giving parents more choices. Most of these groups support giving parents government vouchers, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002, so they can also shop among private and parochial schools, a proposal firmly resisted by teacher unions and the education establishment. Private companies, such as Edison Schools Inc., are emerging to run public schools for profit. Again, while new choices in schools are dramatic, so far they have had mixed results and affected only a fraction of the nation's 47 million public school students
2.Racial and ethnic dynamics
Education reporters already know that most of the nation's social tensions are reflected in the schools. Nowhere is this more evident than in issues of race and ethnic diversity. Reporters need to have a good grasp of how schools served as the battleground for desegregation, beginning with the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, followed by the civil rights movement, desegregation, busing, bilingual education and, most recently, resegregation and the achievement gap that still leaves many minority groups learning less than their white peers. At the university level, affirmative action to give minority groups more access to higher education has been challenged in Florida, Georgia, Michigan and Washington, though courts have supported the use of racial preferences in admission decisions. These are among the most complex and sensitive issues in education, and reporters must know them well.
5.The Big Picture
Good education reporters have a solid grasp of what has happened in U.S. education from the nation's earliest days
4.Accountability and Reform
The nation's schools are in the middle of a reform movement that began in 1983 after a presidential commission released A Nation at Risk, a small report that jarred the nation out of complacency by declaring its schools were suffocating under a "rising tide of mediocrity" that threatened the nation's economy and security. Reform is an important part of the big picture. Most of the initiatives we see today - charter schools, vouchers, an end to social promotion, performance standards and so forth - all are part of the unfolding reform movement. This era may well mark one of the most dramatic shifts in public education in American history. Reporters need to understand that education is in the midst of this great change, which is one reason educators are so stressed. This is as much an economic movement as it is an educational one. The conventional wisdom argues that we need the world's top schools to sustain a prosperous economy in a knowledge-based global market. Reporters should understand that this effort to build a healthy economy with higher education standards is the larger narrative unfolding behind their educational stories much as the war on terrorism is the larger narrative behind many if not most international stories.
5.Standards and testing
At the core of reform since 1983 is the drive to set standards that define what students should know and be able to do at various levels of education and then measure whether they meet standards with tests or work samples. Reporters need to understand that implicit in the move to standards is a dramatic shift in school structure from a focus on credits, or the time students spend in school, to standards, or the results of their schooling. Most schools, however, are still holding on to credits, creating an incompatible dual system. Reporters should know how standards in their districts and states compare to those elsewhere. They will be writing in the coming years about whether standards or the old credit-based system prevail.
Because most states are using tests to measure whether students meet standards, testing has become a major issue in education. Many educators complain there already is too much emphasis and time spent on testing at the expense of good instruction, and these debates will only get hotter as President George W. Bush's administration carries out federal mandates for testing. But tests vary widely in their quality and purposes and some are better and more sensible than others. Reporters should know, for example, the difference between norm-referenced and criterion-based tests. The fact is, reporters and the public can now much more quickly identify the proportion of students who are failing to meet standards in a given school, district or state, thanks to testing. This means schools can no longer hide behind school-wide test averages.
6.Poverty and achievement
American schools have never been very good at teaching poor children. Now, when they are under pressure to ensure that all children, not just some, reach high standards, educating the poor and giving them access to universities has become perhaps the single biggest challenge for American schools. There's a complex set of reasons why poor children as a group fare poorly in schools, such as low expectations, low-quality teachers, tracking, old textbooks and home problems. Educators often will say or act as though poor children cannot be expected to learn as much as their more affluent peers because of their difficult home lives. But this is like doctors saying they cannot help people who are too sick. Reporters need to understand why poor children often fall behind in schools, and they should become familiar with schools that successfully teach poor kids. The nation will never reach its education goals until all schools learn how to help disadvantaged children succeed.
7.Curriculum and textbook debates
Ongoing battles over how best to teach reading, writing, science, history and other subjects ebb and flow in the nation's schools. They often reflect political divisions between conservative and liberal, traditional and progressive. Textbooks, being market-driven, try to find compromises, which often results in books that are dull and unfocused and that mention some topics to make sales but omit others to avoid controversy. Reporters need to cover these debates, but also remind readers how these battles distort educational content and undermine the quality of education.
8.The teaching profession
As with everything else in education, the way teachers are trained, the way they work and the unions they belong to are all being questioned and changed. Education reporters are expected to keep on top of these changes and write about them as they unfold. Schools of education, under fire for being irrelevant and out of touch with modern reforms, are revamping the way they train teachers as states change the way they certify them. Unions are becoming more involved in reform and other professional issues to retain their credibility as political leaders look for ways to quickly fire bad teachers. A variety of groups, such as the National Center for Teacher Quality, have emerged to improve teaching. The National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, still in its infancy, has developed a rigorous national certification process designed to identify top teachers and eventually raise the status of the profession. Researchers continue to debate whether there truly is a teacher shortage or just a problem with teacher turnover.
Higher education reporters need to follow ongoing debates at the university level about the second-class status of schools of education, the time professors should devote to research, the merits of tenure, the representation of women and minorities on faculty, the use of graduate assistants and faculty productivity.
9.School Leadership
School board members and administrators at every level are feeling the heat of the accountability movement, which partly explains the high turnover of superintendents and a growing shortage of qualified principals or school board candidates. This is another volatile front that education reporters need to follow without becoming consumed or misled. While school leaders, for example, insist there is a principal shortage, the fact is there are plenty of trained principals. The question is whether they have been trained for today's schools. The shortage is in principals trained to be instructional leaders, which schools now demand, as opposed to managers of facilities, buses and order. At the university level, higher education reporters will need to follow college presidents, boards and faculties, which wield more power than public school teachers in creating curriculum and academic rules.
10.High and Middle Schools
Education reporters should know the American high school has never worked very well for a large proportion of students. Before World War II, less than half of all students finished high school. But the world has changed, and students who drop out of high school can expect a life of poverty. So high schools must change if they are going to serve all students, and so far, most are resisting. For example, a growing body of research shows that smaller, more personal high schools work better for more teens, yet school leaders keep building large, impersonal high schools that are sure to fail, on average, one in four kids. Middle schools also tend to be too big and alienating for too many students. Education reporters need to understand these failures as well as the successes of the rare small, innovative middle and high schools, many of which make school more relevant by connecting learning to careers.
11.Separation of Church and State and School Law
Education reporters frequently are called upon to write about controversies over the role of religion in the schools. These will include, for example, debates about textbooks, school prayer, religious holidays, Boy Scout recruiting and religious classes. Reporters should be familiar with the basic First Amendment rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court that draw a clear line between talking about religion in school and promoting it. Reporters also will be called upon to write about other legal issues in schools, such as mandatory drug testing, school dress codes, school discipline and other Fourth Amendment privacy issues. They need to have legal sources, both conservative and liberal, to call upon when controversies erupt along the boundaries separating church and state or public institutions and private lives.
12.School Finance
Reporters cannot write about public education without understanding how schools get and spend their money. Nearly all are supported by some combination of local property taxes, state taxes and federal grants. Reporters can expect to write about financial inequities among districts or even schools. Education writers need to know what studies show about the complex relationships between money and student achievement, the proportion of money spent on teacher salaries and administration, and other details on the flow of money through the complex corridors of education. They also need to know how to keep money issues in perspective. Budgets and spending stories can consume reporters and distract them from what is happening in the classroom. Money is a primary concern for administrators and teacher unions, but it usually is not as important as issues of quality to readers, parents and students. And reporters need to remember that most readers do not have children in public schools. Money takes on new dimensions at the university level, where the costs of tuition and fees and financial aid are major forces affecting student access and equity.
13.The Federal Role
Education historically has been a local issue, governed by local school boards and supported by local property taxes, and local reporters could largely ignore most of what happened at the federal level. But that began to change in the 1980s, when the U.S. Department of Education became a cabinet-level agency. By the end of that decade, the nation was showing more concern for national outcomes than local school control - a development the late Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, called "an absolute, historic watershed in the history of American education." The federal role has continued to grow since, most recently with the George W. Bush administration's successful push for annual testing. The federal government is now spending more than $44.4 billion a year, mostly on remedial programs for disadvantaged children and for special education. No more can local reporters ignore its influence. At the university level, the federal government plays important roles in sponsoring research and providing low-income students access to higher education through grants and loans.
14.Special Education
Special education is probably the least reported or understood area of education by journalists, yet it is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Special education, which receives heavy federal support, affects more than 10 percent of the nation's public school children and commands as much as 25 to 30 percent of some district budgets. New federal test requirements will require inclusion of special education students. Reporters need to know about special education, and they need to write about it.
15.Technology and education
Education reporters should know how the computer, the Internet and other technologies are shaping the curriculum and the way students learn. So far, technology has had a peripheral role in most public schools, with studies showing it has little effect on student achievement. Still, many educators see technology as a potentially powerful teaching tool that is still denied many poor children who often attend schools that are not wired for the Internet. What's more, the modern business world expects young people to graduate from our schools knowing how to use computers. Technology has become even more important at the university level, where courses are increasingly available online.
16.Learning theory and instructional practices
Education writers should have some basic knowledge about major thinkers on learning, such as Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who identified stages of the child's mental growth; Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori, who developed a teaching method that stresses child initiative and self reliance; and John Dewey, the American philosopher and psychologist who emphasized learning through activities rather than formal curricula, later called progressive education. Writers also should know how the teaching of these educators have influenced leading modern theorists. These include Theodore Sizer, who organized the Coalition of Essential Schools, with its emphasis on learning for understanding and cultivating habits of mind; E.D. Hirsch, the founder of the Core Knowledge curriculum, focused on the goal of ensuring all students learn a common body of knowledge; and Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor who argues that humans have multiple intelligences, such as mathematical, musical or interpersonal. Educators continue to debate the validity of all of these theories.
17.Early childhood education
Education reporters must understand that much of what happens in schools begins before children ever reach school. They should know that studies show that children who show up for kindergarten ready - that is with adequate exposure at home to language and books - have much brighter prospects of thriving in school. They should also know about brain research, which increasingly shows that children have a heightened capacity to absorb knowledge in their early years. Preschool education remains a window of opportunity largely lost among American children. Surveys show that most American kids continue to get poor to mediocre preschool care, if any care at all, an issue education writers need to keep in the public light.
