Media

Brookings, Ed Media, and Missed Opps

Eduflack Media, Parents, polls

They’re back!  The good folks over at Brookings Institution have returned with their third study on the United States and how it covers education issues in the media.  If you’ll recall, in 2009 we learned that only 1.4 percent of national news coverage in the dear ol’ U.S. of A was about education issues.  Last year, the trio of Darrell West, Russ Whitehurst, and E.J. Dionne came back for a return engagement to tell us how key leaders are seeing the future of education media.

First off, the people seem to care most about the issues that are pretty much getting the most coverage these days.  Teacher performance (73 percent).  Student academic performance (71 percent).  School crime or violence (69 percent).  School finance and school reform (66 percent).  It is just shocking!  The most important education policy issues for those polled are those issues they constantly hear about from President Obama, EdSec Duncan, governors, and the mainstream media that still covers K-12 issues.
Who do they get their information from?  Family and friends is tops, at 75 percent.  Then comes daily newspapers (60 percent), school publications (56 percent), local television (54 percent), community groups (42 percent), national television (38 percent), Internet sites (37 percent), radio (33 percent), and school Facebook or MySpace sites (14 percent).  (Who knew we were even still using MySpace??)  Of those sources, family and friends were deemed the most highly regarded (62 percent), with radio coming in at 24 percent, Facebook at 12 percent, and just 7 percent regarding those phone texts as valuable.
This is all important data, as it helps flesh out the picture of how one successfully informs stakeholders — namely parents, as far as this survey is concerned — about developments in local and national education.  But it also raises some concerns:
* Do we really believe this is a true representative sample of Main Street USA?  Setting aside the concerns of telephone polling and who has land lines these days, just take a look at the numbers, take a look at the school communities you know, and compare.  Are we really getting local education information from daily newspapers and local television stations?  
* Does this even provide us an apples/apples comparison?  I look at the first bucket — “the areas they wanted more coverage of their local schools,” and teacher performance comes in first.  Then we ask them how they are getting news, and we are scoring things like texts?  Who texts about a complex issue like teacher evaluations?
* When asked how to improve communications, the most popular response was more printed newsletters.  Second was more information through the Internet (despite it ranking seventh in preferred sources).  Seems we really don’t know what we want, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, Brookings didn’t offer up some recommendations on what to do with this data.  Instead, it concluded its report with the following:

Although Americans feel reasonably well-informed about schools and do not sense a decline in the amount of information available to them, they do want more information than they are getting, especially on the most basic educational questions: teacher performance, student academic achievement, curricula, finances, and reform efforts. They are also concerned about violence in the schools. To a remarkable degree, they still rely on daily newspapers for educational information, and that is true even among young Americans who are more open to newer technologies. This points to an opportunity for newspapers eager to expand their readership among the young. Education blogs on newspaper websites are a growing and vital source of education news. Expanding and building on them would be helpful to the education policy debate, and good for newspapapers.

But Brookings’ loss is Eduflack’s gain.  Let me offer us a few observations/suggestions:
  1. We need to define what “news” is.  The first set of questions address high-brow policy discussions related to ESEA and other national debates.  But the news source information seems to focus on “information,” not “news.”  There is a big difference between learning about teacher incentives and knowing how the girls’ soccer team did.  But those are lumped into the same question as equals.
  2. We need to separate discussion of education policy issues from local school issues.  Here, respondents were focused on the policy issues driven by the mainstream media.  But their answers regarding media sources reflect what they are hearing about schools in their local community.  How many of us have family and friends who can talk about teacher performance issues?  And what printed newsletter is going to enlighten us on that issue?  We need better data on the separation of the two issues.  And quite frankly, knowing how people learn about their local schools and their concerns regarding those local schools is far more valuable.
  3. While the information regarding what 18-29 year olds think about these topics is interesting, how many 20-year-olds really care about what is happening at their local schools?  Along similar lines, how many really care about student academic performance information?   
  4. We need data on “who” is providing the information to the sources in question.  Is it earned media from news organizations?  School-generated print and web information?  Community-generated blogs or radio programs?  All information is not created equal.  Are people looking for more fact-based, trusted news, or are they looking for the snarky, the provacative, or that that simply relates back to them and their families?  
  5. Finally, the big issue is SO WHAT?  What do we do with this data?  Is it a problem of information not being out there, or people not knowing where to look?  Is the information folks are not finding in their local newspapers available on the Internet?  Is the data people want from printed newsletters available on school web or Facebook sites?  We need both educated and informed customers of education information.  We need to understand what they need, information wise, and then help them see where to find it.   
Ultimately, the data provided by Brookings makes for lovely water cooler or cocktail party chatter for those in ed policy circles, but it does very little, if anything, to help advance improving communications in the education arena.  
UPDATE: Apparently, the report’s authors have said a second document, focusing on reccs from the telephone survey, is in development.  But in these days of instant gratification, who waits to deliver reccs??

Moving Good Ideas to Real Results

Eduflack High School, Marketing, Media, PR, reading, STEM, Teacher Education

Late March is always fun because it means the start of the K-12 education conference gauntlet.  This weekend, Eduflack is out at ASCD’s 2011 Annual Conference in San Francisco.  On Saturday, I’ll be leading a session entitled: “Moving Good Ideas to Real Results: Public Engagement and School Improvement.”

The session will focus on a lot of what I write about here on this blog.  Advocacy.  Social marketing.  Changing both thought and action when it comes to school improvement.  Along the way, I’ll use specific examples from the field, including my own experiences in “changing the game” when it comes to reading instruction, teacher preparation, STEM, high school improvement, and turnaround schools.
If you’re out in the land of cable cars, Ghirardelli chocolate, and the World Champion Giants this Saturday morning, stop by the 8 a.m. session at the Moscone Center, rooms 250 and 262.  If you’re not, and you want more info, just drop me a line and I’ll give you the Cliffnotes version.

Those “Disengaged, Lazy Whiner” Students

Eduflack accountability, Media, teachers

Hollywood does a pretty good job of depicting the ideal teacher.  Such an educator instantly connects with even the most struggling of students, seeing past his or her faults and quickly converting the student into valedictorian/doctor/Broadway star or general success of one’s choice.  Long hours and incredible patience are always involved.

But if recent events up in Pennsylvania are any indication, some teachers aren’t quite following the Mr. Holland’s Opus/Stand and Deliver/Lean on Me model.  Reports out of the Philadelphia area have a Central Bucks East High School teacher suspended for calling out her students on a blog (which is no longer available).
What did Natalie Munroe, the teacher in question, say?  Did she talk about struggling students or the challenges of high-stakes testing?  Did she worry about classes that were too hard or out-of-date books?  Did she demand smaller class sizes or better-paid teachers?  No, not quite.
According to the Associated Press, the 10th through 12th grade noted on her blog:
“My students are out of control.  They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners.  They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”
Or how about this highlight:
“Kids!  They are disobedient, disrespectful oafs.  Noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS.”
We don’t even hear such criticism from Sue Sylvester on GLEE these days.
Obviously, Munroe has every right to think what she thinks.  And for those of us playing catch up on her tale, we are just starting to fill in the blanks and learn the story.  Teachers’ jobs are incredibly stressful, and we should expect that such sentiments will surface, particularly after a bad day or a bad series of days.
But aren’t those the instances where screaming into a pillow may be the best approach?  As a high school teacher, one has to realize that students will read your blog, check out your Facebook page, and generally know your e-life.  Perhaps Munroe’s intention was for students to see these posts.  A little tough love now could turn around students’ approach to the classroom in the future.  Or maybe she just got frustrated.  Regardless, is this really the way she now wants her career defined publicly, full of rants?
What can we learn from this?  If anything, instances like this demonstrate the need for a code of conduct on how educators use new media and social media.  The last thing we need is a complete overreaction, with administrators saying that teachers can no longer blog because of the possibility of something like this happening.  Teachers make terrific bloggers, and I am constantly learning from those practitioners who are posting their experiences.  We shouldn’t shut down those educators out of fear of a few screamers joining in the fun.

The Edu-Pundit is Back!

Eduflack Media, YouTube

At the end of 2010, Eduflack unveiled his first attempt at both video and intentional humor with the release of I Wanna Be an Edu-Pundit.  The YouTube video chronicles a business “leader” who decides he just has to jump into the education game as a pundit and advocate.

This week, we offer up part two of the video series, Edu-Pundit’s TV Debut.  In his public coming out as a bona fide “pundit,” our hero offers up his own idea for education reform — the Selective K-12 Movement.
What happens next?  It all depends on whether people watch part two or not.  Stay tuned …
    

Are We Still Waiting for Superman?

Eduflack Achievement gap, charter schools, Media, Parents

Back at the start of the fall, the ed reform community was all atwitter about the movie documentary, Waiting for Superman.  Throughout the spring and summer, we had special previews of the movie for reform-minded audiences.  The national release of the movie in September brought effusive articles in national publications on the movie, its message, and the impact it would have on public education throughout the United States.  It seemed everyone was waiting for Superman.

But now that we are a few months from the theatrical release, where exactly are we?  Reviewers on IMdB gave the movie a 7.4 out of 10.  Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 4.1 out of 5, with 86 percent of those who saw it liking it.  But so far it has taken in just over $6 million in ticket sales, making it the 147th most popular movie of 2010.  And it is 20th on the all-time documentary list, currently earning about one-quarter of what An Inconvenient Truth earned at the box office.  At its widest release, it was showing at 330 movie theaters around the country.
We know it was popular in East Coast anchors (and reform cities) like New York and Washington, DC.  But is the movie having the sort of rhetorical and advocacy impact so many expected just three months ago?
Recent media coverage on Superman focuses on whether it is gaining Oscar buzz, not whether it is impacting our public schools.  The “status quoers” who were aghast when Superman first came out are now trying to direct educator attention to movies such as Race to Nowhere.  And while the movie’s producers continue to try drive advocacy through its website, the biggest recent news seems to be the $15 gift card you can get for your school if you buy the Waiting for Superman book at Border’s Books.
It all begs the question, are we still Waiting for Superman?  Is a movie with so much promise or hype (depending on your perspective) having the sort of impact promised during those advance screenings and the sophisticated social media campaigns to drive folks to the theaters?
Back in September, Eduflack questioned whether Superman could deliver on the promise, and move us from a state of awareness (which Superman does a great job of) to one of action.  It isn’t enough to visit a website or to click on a web box to read how important it is to write elected officials.  Change needs goals.  Change needs specific assignments and tactics.  Change needs tick lists to measure progress.  And change needs clear asks that voices from across the country are asking for in pitch-perfect unison.  That’s the only way you reform a system that is so invested in maintaining the status quo.
Perhaps it was too much for us to expect a movie to do all of that.  But there is still the opportunity for someone to harness the interest in Superman and put it to use in a real, honest-to-goodness, social advocacy campaign.  The problems identified in Superman remain.  They won’t be fixed overnight. 

What Are We “Waiting” For?

Eduflack Achievement gap, Media

This is one of those weeks that will just be abuzz with talk of education and school improvement.  The much-anticipated documentary, Waiting for Superman, is finally out in theaters, drawing good reviews and real attention from a wide range of stakeholders.  And yesterday, NBC kicked off its Education Nation effort, as it tries to leverage all of its television properties and sponsorships to provide a week of education-apalooza.

Both of these are interesting events, but they raise even more interesting questions.  Will Waiting for Superman play in Middle America?  Will Superman’s buzz continue after the reviews are done with?  Will NBC continue to focus on education issues after the week-long fest is completed?  And most importantly, what comes next?

Don’t get me wrong, both Superman and Education Nation play important roles in raising public awareness of education reform issues.  The buzz around the movie will undoubtedly draw in more than just the typical Kool-Aid drinkers.  And NBC’s commitment of airtime will be hard to avoid (though not entirely impossible).  But then what?  What happens once these two “events” are completed?  

One of the biggest challenges in education communications is moving from awareness to action.  It is (relatively) easy to share information and disseminate the latest news.  It is far more difficult to take that information sharing and transform it into a sense of urgency that generates specific activities and measureable outcomes.  

Superman’s producers are encouraging viewers to “take action” and “join the debate.”  But once you’ve submitted your contact information or sent a form letter to a policymaker, what comes next?  If we buy the movie’s premise and agree that our public schools are a scourge on this nation, what specifically can we do fix the problem?  It is easy to cast blame, but much harder to move solutions forward.  We need questions to ask teachers, principals, and politicians.  We need specific asks, be they operational or instructional, that we should demand in our schools.  And we the yardsticks to measure progress in our schools.

What comes next is an even more difficult question for NBC.  Right now, Education Nation is focused on the current week.  It’s about the Summit and the Teacher Town Hall and building on yesterday’s Meet the Press segment.  But after

Brookings declared that only 1.4 percent of national news is focused on education, is NBC committed to up its game?  Once the week has wrapped up and the Learning Plaza has been shuttered, will NBC provide an education news story on every NBC Nightly News?  Will we see a weekly segment?  Or will we simply move on to the next “big” idea?

I don’t mean to rain on the edu-parade, but we have seen far too many times efforts that stir up the hornets’ nests and point out the problems and failures of our public schools.  Unfortunately, we don’t get much talk of solutions and work plans coming out of that finger pointing.  As a result, the problems we talk about today are the same problems we talked about a decade ago and we talked about three decades ago. 

Waiting for Superman and Education Nation serve as two potentially valuable levers for school improvement.  The challenge before us is how we take advantage of the opportunity and take some real forward steps as a result of it. Otherwise, it is just another opportunity squandered as student achievement remains stagnant and the achievement gap remains a major concern.
   

Exercising Twitter Caution

Eduflack Media

Every few months, we seem to hear about the potential damage that social networking sites like Facebook can bring down on our schools, particularly teachers who share too much information about their personal lives with students (or even former students).  Each school year brings new rules and new oversight for how educators and students engage over the Internet (with many a decisionmaker hoping we could go back to the good ol’ days before our schools had electricity).

At the same time, we are exploring ways to broaden the reach of other social networking tools like Twitter.  At the start of the new academic year, my own school district is now using Twitter (as well as text messages) to share school information with the local community.  Instantaneous news and information for those who happen to be watching their Tweet feeds.
But what happens when Twitter gets out of control?  Last week, The Washington Post suspended one of its sports columnists because of an “experiment” he decided to run on Twitter.  In an effort to show that Twitter doesn’t meet the same journalistic standards as other media, Mike Wise posted a “rumor” to his Twitter account, with an attribution that simply said “I’ve heard” without naming a source.  The “story” was picked up and repeated by numerous respected media outlets (none of which contacted Wise).  The next day, the Post suspended Wise for a month, and its ombudsman offered up this analysis of the entire situation.
So it begs the question — does the same thing happen in education policy-focused Tweets?  We’ve all seen how items are retweeted with bad links.  We are a relatively small community (by Twitter standards) that feeds off itself.  We trust individuals who post something, without determining its legitimacy.  If it is a piece of information that helps our cause or aligns with our thinking or interest, we move it forward.  And there is no check, no verification, utterly no responsibility to it at all.  It is the beauty of citizen journalism.  Through our blogs and our tweets, we can say anything.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad thing.  More information coming from more resources is a good thing.  But we cannot forget the need to verify what we are hearing.  Over the years, we’ve learned that Wikipedia is not infallible.  Those names on Twitter we like are still capable of being incorrect, or believing in a source that might need a second look.  In the words of Ronald Reagan, when we use Twitter for education information, we need to trust, but verify.
When Mike Wise tweeted what he tweeted, it made sense to those who followed him.  So why would education be different?  As we all started to see names of Race to the Top winning states coming across Twitter hours before the US Department of Education was to release the winning names, we believed what came across.  We retweeted and crossposted so that the 10 winners were known more than an hour before ED released them.  That day, Twitter was a powerful tool, yes.  But what stops some (particularly those less well known) from tossing out other names?  And what prevents others from pushing those names out?
Personally, I’d love to try what Mike Wise did, and see what makes its way across the eduspace.  Who wouldn’t want to read and retweet some of the following:
* Arne Duncan retiring at the end of the year, to be replaced by TN’s Phil Bredesen, I hear
* After her wedding, Rhee is headed west to work for Gates Foundation, I hear
* ED officials are putting off ESEA reauth until 2012, I hear
* $100M in remaining RttT $ to be distributed to 10 districts, I hear
* NAESP, NASSP, NMSA merge to create mega-association, I hear
* Gates putting $500M into early childhood ed, I hear
Not a lick of truth to any of these (that I know of), but if I posted any of those to my @Eduflack Twitter account, they would likely get attention.  And they would likely be retweeted.  Believe it or not, some trust my Twitter feed.  And adding the “I hear” gives me a little deniability when it never comes true.  But that doesn’t mean the damage wouldn’t be done.  The chum would still be in the water.  
Twitter is now reporting 145 million registered users.  Many of those are well meaning, well informed individuals.  But some …
It is up to those of us who play in this sandbox to tell the difference.  Trust, but verify.

Data in Education Storytelling

Eduflack Media, NCLB

How do we use data to better tell the local story?  That was the big question Eduflack was asked over the weekend speaking at the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media’s Harold W. McGraw Hr. Seminar for Reporters New to the Education Beat.

For those who don’t know (and you really should), the Hechinger Institute is a terrific outfit being run out of Teachers College, Columbia University.  Back in May, Eduflack wrote about Hechinger’s new efforts in education reporting.  But at its core, Hechinger is about supporting members of the education media, providing the technical assistance and support necessary to support a strong and effective cadre of education reporters across the nation.
In talking with a terrific group of new education reporters (though not necessarily new to reporting) about how they can use education to localize stories, it begs an important question — what can those of us who engage with the education media to do the same.  And for this question, Eduflack has a top five list to guide the discussion:
1) Personalize the story — The most effective stories we can tell are those that are personal.  The individual who is affected by a new policy.  The student who has succeeded under a new curriculum.  The teacher who is raising student achievement scores.  We all like to hear a story.  Facts and figures and data can then be used to help fortify the story.  Trying to pitch a story on teacher incentives?  Paint a picture of that real, individual teacher who can be a case study.  Depict the teacher and her classroom.  Then strengthen the piece with the data, the state test scores and related data points that demonstrate teacher achievement, both for the individual and for the school/district in particular.
2) Know your data sources — There is more to the tale of the tape than simply student test scores on the state assessment.  In offering up a policy story, know which data sources to direct to.  What can we find at the national level?  What can we find at the state level?  What can we find at the local level? 
3) Capture the continuum — Once you identify the data sources, know how they connect and support each other.  If you’re pitching a state or local education story, be able to show the data that substantiates the pitch from the local level all the way up to the national level.  The data shows it works, and the continuum shows it works on a large or a small scale.
4) Acknowledge not all data is created equal — For the last decade, reporters have been hounded with “data.”  Since NCLB, everyone has “research” proving their point.  Unfortunately, much of the third-party “research” circulated out there is little more than marketing collateral for those promoting the policy.  There is good research, and there is bad research.  Reporters ultimately have to distinguish between the two.  But if you are selling bad or squishy data to a reporter, you lose credibility very quickly.  Want to tell an effective story, do so with the strongest data possible.
5) Think beyond the data — Data helps sell the story, but most of the time, it isn’t the story itself.  Long gone is the era when education media would write full stories on the latest research study to cross their desks.  Too much research on too many topics just makes such an approach untenable.  Instead, more and more reporters are looking for good data to enhance stories on the key themes they are covering.  So be prepared to position specific studies on how it can impact the discussion of teacher quality or turnaround schools or a host of other issues that reporters are being asked to cover.  While the data may not be the headline, it can definitely serve as a foundation for a good education news article.

Cutting the Ed Media Out of the Process?

Eduflack edReformer, Media

Your favorite Eduflack has another guestblog over at edReformer.  The topic: disintermediation.  At last week’s Education Writers Association conference, there was a great deal of talk of disintermediation, which carries the applicable definition of cutting the educaiton media out of the ed policy debate by focusing on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other direct and unfiltered ways to deliver information to key stakeholder audiences.

You can find my full blogpost here.  And don’t forget to keep checking out new content at edReformer. 

The Future of Education Media

Eduflack Media

What is the future of education journalism?  For the past several years, we have been hearing how national and regional newspapers have either dramatically reduced or downright eliminated their education news teams (with the most recent being the Associated Press’ plans to no longer have a single national K-12 education reporter, and instead distribute education responsibilities across a team of six great reporters who already have other responsibilities).

A reduced education reporter pool undoubtedly leads to reduced education coverage.  Last year, at a time when all in the education sector were abuzz about Race to the Top, i3, teacher quality, teacher layoffs, and general education reform, Brookings released its Invisible report, finding that only 1.4 percent of the national news in the first three quarters of 2009 was about education.  (A caveat, though, there are many who raise questions about Brookings’ methodology, particularly its decision that “education reporting” only counted if it was on the front page of the A section of a newspaper.  By the same measure, sports also didn’t score highly, but we all know that virtually every newspaper in the country has an entire daily section dedicated to athletics.)
Earlier this week, Brookings released a follow-up to Invisible, Re-Imagining Education Journalism.  This latest report provides some very interesting insights as to the future of education journalism, including a look at how news is delivered (news aggregators, blogs, etc.) and alternative business models (subsidized content, public support, etc.)  Eduflack waded into a similar discussion a little more than a year ago.
Such discussions are not merely academic.  Case in point — the launch of the Hechinger Report.  For those who have not yet checked it out this week, it is definitely worth your time.  A product of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College Columbia University and the brainchild of Hechinger leader and former LA Times ed reporter Richard Lee Colvin, the Hechinger Report is the future of education media TODAY.  In its first week, Hechinger is offering original news articles, opinion pieces, analyses, and blogs.  It is focusing content on the full educational spectrum — early childhood education, K-12, community colleges, and higher education.  And it is doing it with real, professional journalists (as opposed to citizen journalists like Eduflack).
News outlets are free to use Hechinger content, as long as they credit Hechinger.  And Team Colvin is also working with national news outlets to use the experienced Hechinger team to supplement existing education news coverage, particularly when it comes to investigative pieces.  
While it too early to see the full impact Hechinger Report may have on education news and education policy, the potential couldn’t be greater.  By tapping into experienced education journalists, Hechinger offers a level of quality and knowledge that is unmatched (particularly in the education space).  By taking the time to investigate, analyze, and generally look at issues at greater length, they are filling a role that is unfilled by newspapers that are just looking for eight-inch stories on the latest school board meeting.  And by pushing out a significant amount of high-quality content, they are reminding all of us of the relevance of good education news coverage.
Personally, I think Colvin is really onto something here.  While Hechinger Report may never become an education AP (and it is not intended to become so), it does stand a real chance of becoming an education-focused ProPublica.  It’s not looking to replace existing coverage; it is focused on enhancing and supplementing current work.  It makes a publication’s education coverage better, providing richer analysis and exploration than a daily newspaper grind may allow.  And no pressure, I believe that means the Pulitzer for investigative journalism is due to Hechinger in 2013 or 2014 by ProPublica’s measure then.  
If we are serious about focusing more attention on education improvement, we must broaden the dialogue and expand the discussion on the key issues of the day.  And that happens by supporting efforts like Hechinger Report.  Go ahead, steal Hechinger’s content.  I’m sure Colvin won’t mind!