Why I Became an Education Journalist

My education career has been a series of love affairs and breakups. My first love was classroom teaching, and I took a job right out of college teaching 7th and 10th grade English literature and coaching sports at a boys’ prep school in Los Angeles. 

I had thought I might eventually want to be a school head, but I quickly realized that I was unlikely to enjoy fundraising or board meddling or the feeling that the kids I was teaching weren’t particularly needful. 

My second love was public policy, which I pursued after HGSE. I worked for Policy Studies Associates, led by HGSE alumna Brenda Turnbull, Ed.D.’78. I had envisioned working for the Senate education committee or in the White House, but I eventually became frustrated with the endless internal battles and the hypocrisy around prioritizing kids. 

My third career as an education journalist has lasted the longest, been the most satisfying — and perhaps also the most demoralizing. 

I hadn’t grown up wanting to be a journalist or paying much attention to the news. Even as an adult working in the field, I barely skimmed the headlines and rarely learned much from the stories I read. But I could see journalism’s importance in terms of informing the field and the public. I knew that I would find it intellectually stimulating. I had no idea how difficult it would be. 

One of the things I’ve most enjoyed is how entrepreneurial switching to journalism has forced me to be. Finding interesting story ideas was never hard but selling them to magazine editors was an ongoing source of frustration. Here and there, I wrote for a slew of different outlets — Slate, The Atlantic, etc. — but my strong suit turned out to be starting education- themed blogs and newsletters that people were willing to pay for, including This Week in Education, District 299 (about Chicago schools), and LA School Report. I applied for a handful of journalism fellowships, got one at Columbia’s journalism school, and turned it into a book about a group of teachers trying to rescue a struggling LAUSD high school. Then, years ago, I came up with an idea for my current project, an effort to help improve education news coverage, and persuaded foundations to support it. 

What’s it like, covering education? At its best, it’s an opportunity to keep learning about an endeavor that’s important and fascinating. You get to call anyone you want and ask them questions. You get to visit classrooms and schools. You get to try to explain a topic or place that might seem boring or complicated to non-educators in a way that’s appealing and insightful. 

However, there’s also a fundamental passiveness to being a writer. You’re informing your readers, sure, and occasionally your work can have real-world effects. But you’re not directly helping anyone. For all its good intentions, journalism is often superficial, extractive, and deeply misleading to its readers. It’s become both more tabloid in its approach, and more ivory tower. It’s lost its traditional funding sources and much of its prestige. 

I’ve lately begun worrying about whether the coverage is actually helpful. It’s not so much the occasional inaccuracies that are a problem. It’s the tendency to focus on shiny new things (like new technology) rather than ongoing stories about topics that affect large numbers of kids or schools, the tendency to tell stories from the district or school perspective (rather than the kids and parents), and most of all, the tendency to amplify fears with dramatic anecdotes and statistics rather than giving readers context. So many things that win attention from the media these days — school gun violence, private school choice, school deportation raids — are grossly exaggerated and seem driven by ideological or economic fears. That’s why there’s so much focus on culture war issues and politics. 

To paraphrase LCD Soundsystem: Journalism, I love you. But you’re bringing me down. 

My latest reflection is that educators and education journalism is this way in part because education journalists have been sold stories that go much deeper than how we teach kids to read. 

The first story we’ve been told is that education is critically important to individual and societal success — a belief in the power of schools and social mobility that may once have been true but is increasingly less so in the present. 

The second story is that journalists and journalism are the good guys — that the coverage they produce is beneficial to the people and communities being covered rather than reinforcing inequalities. Again, this may not be as often the case as it once was or as we were led to believe. 

If so, then educators and education journalists are going to have to dig deep to understand these myths and revamp the way we do things going forward. For my own part, I’m working on a new podcast that will feature honest attempts to wrestle with issues, as well as a book on the rise and fall of the 90’s and 00’s school reform movement.

You can find Alexander Russo's work online at The Grade or follow him at @alexanderrusso