
One of the most eagerly anticipated sessions at EWA’s Higher Education Seminar is Scott Jaschik's look ahead into the world of higher education. He's one of three co-founders of Inside Higher Ed, and he’s a highly sought after expert on postsecondary education. Host and Public Editor Kavitha Cardoza turns over EWA Radio to Scott this week for his list of top stories he thinks reporters should keep an eye on this year. Heads up, it includes affirmative action, mental health and TikTok!
Jan 31, 2023
27 min

About 70% or more incarcerated Americans can't read at the fourth-grade level. This means they would struggle to understand a lunch menu, a ticket stub or a street sign. Oregon law requires that the majority of these prisoners take classes. But, while reporting for the Statesman Journal, Natalie Pate discovered there were more than 1,200 prisoners on a waitlist as of June 2022. Nearly half of incarcerated people in Oregon who qualify as low-level readers — those who read below an eighth-grade level — have never been enrolled in classes, Natalie found. Providing funding and access to prison education isn’t a top priority in the state as illustrated by the Department of Corrections’ budget. Natalie spent hours inside prisons speaking with incarcerated adults about their education as children and heard why they wanted to learn to read and write. She pored over research papers and government documents to understand how poor literacy, dropout rates and crime intersect. Additionally, she spoke with experts about how – and why – the system must improve. READ MORE: 9 Lessons a Reporter Learned Covering Prison Education
Jan 17, 2023
38 min

COVID-19 caused an unprecedented disruption in children’s learning. Even though schools reopened, we are still dealing with the effects, such as academic gaps, mental health challenges and behavioral issues. The federal government has poured billions of dollars into states to help children catch up. A syndicated columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aisha Sultan frequently covers education and parenting. She also directed and executive produced the independent documentary “Education, Interrupted.” The film is about 30-year-old Tyra Johnson, a single mother of three children who lives in one of the poorest ZIP codes in the country. Aisha followed Tyra through the pandemic and filmed the challenges Tyra faced trying to educate her children at home. The resulting documentary, which was also an EWA Reporting Fellowship project, premiered at the Saint Louis International Film Festival and aired on Nine PBS in St Louis. In this week’s episode, we chat with Aisha about the differences between print and visual languages, the emotional toll of reporting on educational inequality and what she wishes she had known before she started making films.
Jan 10, 2023
32 min

Several states saw record-breaking temperatures this year. Schools across the country – including in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, and San Diego – closed because of excessive heat. In Columbus, Ohio, teachers went on strike demanding air conditioning in their classrooms. Students being uncomfortably hot has been linked to poor outcomes in their health, learning and test scores. Education Week reporters Madeline Will and Arianna Prothero partnered to cover these issues. Through reporting and original surveys, they examined how students’ learning, physical well-being, mental health, and post-graduation futures are affected by the changing climate. They also investigated how climate change is taught in schools and how students feel about the world they’re inheriting. Additionally, the Education Week team looked into which student-led efforts are making a difference. In this week’s episode, Kavitha Cardoza chats with Madeline and Arianna about their EWA Reporting Fellowship project on climate change and education. They explain why climate change is “fundamentally a local story” and how mental health is part of the discussion. In addition to sharing several resources, Madeline and Arianna discuss why their assumptions changed after speaking to students.
Dec 20, 2022
24 min

Being a cub reporter on the education beat can feel overwhelming at times: People talk in acronyms you don't understand; there's a ton of complicated research to wade through, and everyone has an opinion on what you should cover! In this week’s EWA Radio episode, Kavitha Cardoza chats with Kyra Miles, who recently finished her first year as a reporter at WBHM, the NPR affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama. Kyra was also a 2021 EWA Awards finalist for Audio Storytelling (Smaller Newsroom). She reported on the story after just three months on the job. Kyra explains how she created a supportive community as a young, Black reporter and how she centers student voices. Additionally, she shares the worst part of being an education journalist!
Dec 13, 2022
19 min

Rural students are homeless in about the same proportion as their urban counterparts, but as Samantha Shapiro found in her story for The New York Times Magazine, they often have far less of a support system. In many cases, schools offer the only help available. Shapiro, an EWA Reporting Fellow, wrote “Young and Homeless in Rural America.” She introduced readers to several families experiencing homelessness and school personnel trying valiantly to help. Her piece shows the heavy burdens placed on school districts and why much more help is needed. In this EWA Radio episode, Public Editor Kavitha Cardoza chats with Shapiro about how she got interested in reporting on homelessness. Additionally, Shapiro explains how she set aside her emotions while reporting and details "hopeful endings" in bleak stories.
Nov 29, 2022
25 min

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful to colleagues in the education community – past and present –for supporting me. I’m especially grateful to editors who talked me through half-coherent ideas and shaped them into something meaningful, who acted as sounding boards, and were my advocates. Daarel Burnette and Andrew Ujifusa are both longtime education reporters. They’re two of the most accomplished journalists I know and two of the nicest. They also recently transitioned to being editors. Daarel is senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Andrew is Chalkbeat’s story editor. I’m thrilled to welcome them to EWA Radio. In this week’s episode, we chat about how they try to be different from some of their previous editors, why school boards are “the most intimate form of democracy” and why they stay in education journalism. They also explain why they’re hopeful about the future.
Nov 22, 2022
29 min

Some Hasidic Jewish boys in New York were denied basic education in reading, math and social studies, a New York Times investigation found. These students also received harsh physical punishments and experienced textbook censorship in Hasidic boys’ schools. Brian Rosenthal* and Eliza Shapiro of The New York Times spent more than a year investigating these religious schools. They read thousands of documents (Many translated from Yiddish), interviewed almost 300 people, and analyzed millions of rows of data about Hasidic schools. Their dogged reporting found that these boys are not simply falling behind. “They are suffering from levels of educational deprivation not seen anywhere else in New York. Only nine schools in the state had less than 1% of students testing at grade level in 2019, all of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.” Rosenthal talks about the work that went into the piece, “In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools, Flush With Public Money.” He also shares what he thinks about when covering communities he’s not a part of, how he deals with criticism and why he's not done with this story. * EWA members may remember Rosenthal as the 2017 recipient of the Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting for “Denied: How Texas Keeps Tens of Thousands of Children Out of Special Education.” Rosenthal wrote the piece when he was at the Houston Chronicle.
Nov 1, 2022
30 min

Evan Mandery, an award-winning author of eight books, talks to EWA Public Editor Kavitha Cardoza about the staggering inequality in "Ivy-plus" higher education institutions. In his latest book, “Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us,” Mandery argues that colleges like Harvard, Yale and Princeton have deep, structural problems that help develop and maintain an “apartheid education system" that close off opportunities to low-income students, he explains. Mandery says elite colleges being a force for good is a myth. He writes, “It’s as misleading as those television commercials from Shell and other energy giants that advertise their commitment to clean energy alternatives – not a lie exactly, but fundamentally misleading.” Additionally, Mandery talks about the shocking statistics that made him realize things were far worse than he thought. He also explains why he no longer goes to his Harvard reunions and why he’s hopeful things can change.
Oct 25, 2022
25 min

A school board president breaks his gavel while trying to keep order, police officers escort parents out of public meetings and librarians called "pedophile groomers” for stocking certain books. Those were just a few of the scenarios Hannah Dellinger and Alejandro Serrano encountered while reporting on book bans in Texas schools for the Houston Chronicle. Through a combination of data and shoe-leather reporting, they discovered that the push to ban certain books was the result of partisan politics, rather than a “parental rights” movement, changing what was the accepted narrative. Dellinger and Serrano’s investigation involved sending public records requests to nearly 600 school districts that teach more than 90% of Texas’ more than 5 million students. They found there were at least 2,080 book reviews of more than 880 unique titles since the 2018-19 school year. Their reporting resulted in more than 25 stories and an interactive database. Both reporters chat with Public Editor Kavitha Cardoza about how school board meetings are no longer “boring,” how they kept track of thousands of documents and what their one, and only, disagreement was about.
Oct 11, 2022
24 min
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