EWA Radio
159 episodes - English - Latest episode: 26 days ago - ★★★★★ - 23 ratingsEWA, the professional organization dedicated to improving the quality and quantity of education coverage in the media, hosts regular interviews and panel discussions with journalists and education professionals.
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Episodes
Revisiting America’s Reading Wars
June 08, 2022 17:00 - 29 minutes - 67 MBFor decades, millions of children have been taught to read using a popular method that’s out of step with the scientific research on how our brains really learn. Amid pushback and criticism – including from researchers, parents, and education journalists – that’s starting to change. Dana Goldstein, national correspondent for The New York Times, shares the latest from her reporting on the growing pushback to the widely used “balanced literacy” approach advocated by Lucy Calkins, a chari...
Can the Latino College Gap Be Solved?
May 17, 2022 20:00 - 28 minutes - 66 MBFor San Antonio student Javier Hernandez, the difference between fulfilling his dream of attending a four-year university hundreds of miles from home and opting for a lower-cost local community college was an unexpected bill for a family funeral. In her five-part series “The Enduring Gap,” Texas Public Radio’s Camille Phillips explored which support systems and services make the biggest difference for Latinx and other students who face barriers to educational success. Phillips gleaned fascin...
‘Unlevel Playing Fields’ for Girls’ Sports
May 03, 2022 20:30 - 22 minutes - 51.6 MBTitle IX prohibits gender-based discrimination in school programs that receive federal funding – but how fairly is the law being applied, especially when it comes to girls’ high school sports? A reporting team of nearly two dozen student journalists at the University of Maryland, College Park, set out to answer that question in a wide-ranging project. Kara Newhouse, a longtime education reporter who is completing a master’s degree in data journalism, spent seven months analyzing the federal ...
The Revolving Door to the Superintendent’s Office
April 12, 2022 20:27 - 22 minutes - 51 MBGood superintendents can be hard to find, and even harder to keep. That’s proving to be the case In Boston. Brenda Cassellius is stepping down this summer after less than three years at the helm. James Vaznis, who has covered the schools beat for The Boston Globe since 2008, shares insights on how the leadership churn impacts students, families, and staff. Amid the challenges facing the city’s schools: helping high-need students catch up on learning time lost during the height of the COVID-1...
The Hopes and Fears of Teenagers
March 29, 2022 20:00 - 24 minutes - 56.6 MB“People can't tell me what they're going to college for. But they put themselves in thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of debt—that doesn't sound like it makes any sense. That's like buying a car and not knowing how to drive.” That’s just one of the answers Rebecca Koenig of EdSurge got from teenagers on the cusp of adulthood by asking a deceptively simple question: What are your hopes and fears? Koenig’s new project sheds surprising light on the too-frequent disconnect betwe...
What’s Next for School Police?
March 15, 2022 20:00 - 32 minutes - 73.3 MBIn the early months of the pandemic, many districts were rethinking their policies and practices around campus safety. Now, with buildings reopened and some educators reporting a rise in bad behavior, the conversation is once again shifting to how to best keep children safe, and what role – if any – school police should have on campus. Corey Mitchell of the Center for Public Integrity shares insights from covering racial, gender, and economic inequality in education. How did the killing of...
When Public Schools Require Ethnic Studies
March 01, 2022 22:00 - 31 minutes - 71.2 MBIn a handful of states, students are learning about race and racism, and how it impacts their lives, their learning, and their future opportunities through ethnic studies courses. The class, most often found in high schools, is now required for every public school student in California. It’s also an integral part of the curriculum in districts in at least 10 other states, including Austin, Albuquerque, Denver, and Seattle. In a cover story for The Boston Globe Magazine, education journalist ...
Inside a Critical Race Theory Class
February 15, 2022 21:30 - 27 minutes - 51 MBConservatives around the country are protesting what they claim is the teaching of a formerly obscure legal theory - Critical Race Theory - to America’s schoolchildren and undergraduates. While of course CRT isn’t in the formal second or even eleventh grade curriculum, reporter Molly Minta of Mississippi Today and Open Campus asked herself: what are they afraid of? So she took her readers inside the state’s only dedicated Critical Race Theory class to find out what it would really be like ...
Schools Are Open. But Where Are the Students?
February 08, 2022 23:00 - 27 minutes - 62.9 MBMost school districts have returned to in-person learning, but enrollment numbers have taken a hit – and so have daily attendance rates. Chronic absenteeism – typically defined as missing at least 15 days of school – takes a heavy toll on students' academic progress, and can also decrease a district's state funding. Lily Altavena of The Detroit Free Press puts Michigan’s numbers in national context, shares insights into why chronically absent students were a problem for many districts even b...
Miguel Cardona’s First Year
February 01, 2022 21:00 - 30 minutes - 70.6 MBPresident Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona, is marking his first year in office. And what a year it has been – not just for the federal agency but for schools, educators, students, and families. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Eric Kelderman and Education Week’s Andrew Ujifusa look at the highs and lows of Cardona’s first year at the helm of the federal agency. How has Cardona fared as a crisis manager amid the COVID-19 pandemic, including his role facilitating how states spen...
P-12 Education’s Big Stories to Follow in 2022
January 11, 2022 21:00 - 24 minutes - 57 MBHow many days of instruction have students really lost amid the pandemic, and what's the impact? How are districts tracking and reporting COVID-19 infection rates among students and staff? Who’s making sure the services districts invest in to help struggling students recover academically are high quality and grounded in research? Erin Richards, who previously spent 15 years covering public schools for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, shares story ideas for reporters in 2022. In addition to CO...
New Year, New Higher Ed Stories
January 04, 2022 21:00 - 26 minutes - 61.7 MBThis will be a momentous year for higher education - as colleges attempt to recover from COVID shutdowns, student loan bills come due again, and big changes come to admissions offices. What will college look like this year? How are institutions planning to spend billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief funds? And how bad a hit are overall enrollment numbers going to take in the third year of the pandemic? Delece Smith-Barrow, education editor for Politico, shares some of the top priori...
The Nation’s Reading Problem
December 14, 2021 21:00 - 25 minutes - 59.1 MBWhen it comes to reading, America’s students are struggling. And the pandemic has only made a tough situation harder for those kids who were already most at risk of falling behind. Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report – who coordinated a reporting project with five other newsrooms – explains how the pandemic shutdown exacerbated the nation's literacy crisis. She also probes the mystery behind a pre-COVID slide in reading achievement, and discusses new research that found one of the most wide...
$100K in Debt for a $50K Job
November 30, 2021 22:00 - 24 minutes - 56 MBThe Wall Street Journal’s investigations team is tackling the student loan debt crisis from multiple angles, including digging into questionable recruiting and loan practices by top schools. Case in point: the University of Southern California’s online graduate program in social work. It charged $115,000 for a master’s last year. The school offered very little grant aid, so the many students who couldn’t afford that high tuition were encouraged to borrow. The median debt of recent graduat...
School Librarian Stories Are Overdue
November 16, 2021 21:00 - 24 minutes - 55.9 MBIn districts from Boston to Seattle, school librarians are wearing multiple hats these days, from helping teachers with the tech side of remote learning to working with high-need students who lost academic ground during the pandemic shutdown. Librarians are also fending off budget cuts that threaten their positions, and responding to a surge in demands that reading materials about topics like race, racism, and gender identity be removed from the shelves. Kara Yorio, news editor for the Schoo...
What Happened to $190 Billion in School COVID-19 Funds?
November 02, 2021 20:00 - 27 minutes - 63.5 MBCongress allocated nearly $200 billion to help schools mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they have until 2024 to spend all the funds. But a new investigation by ProPublica found that there’s been minimal tracking by education officials as to how districts have so far allocated the funding. Reporter Annie Waldman and Reporting Fellow Bianca Fortis dug into the data from 16,000 provisional reports from state agencies and determined half the money was spent on programs, servic...
When School Board Meetings Become Battlegrounds
October 19, 2021 20:00 - 26 minutes - 60.2 MBAcross the nation, school boards find themselves on the front lines for debates over COVID-19 mask mandates and teaching about racism. Heated exchanges during public comment periods have expanded to public protests, threats of violence, and a surge in conservative slates of candidates running for school board seats. In Iowa, Des Moines Register reporters Samantha Hernandez and Melody Mercado are closely covering all angles of the story. How politicized were Des Moines area school boards befo...
The Real Story Behind Teacher Shortages
October 05, 2021 20:00 - 24 minutes - 56.7 MBAcross the country, school districts are grappling with staffing shortages that are making it tough to recover from the disruptions of the COVD-19 pandemic. Matt Barnum, a national reporter at Chalkbeat, shares insights on the current landscape for school staffing, and debunks some of the often-repeated – but unsubstantiated – assumptions about what might be driving what appears to be a growing crisis. What were some of the preexisting issues around teacher shortages that have been exacerbat...
How Rural Schools Get Left Behind
September 21, 2021 20:00 - 33 minutes - 76.3 MBWriting for The New York Times Magazine, veteran education journalist Casey Parks takes readers deep inside the struggles of a rural school district in the Mississippi delta that is poised for a state takeover. She also profiles Harvey Ellington, a 16-year-old Black student with big college dreams but few opportunities for advanced learning in his cash-strapped and understaffed high school. What does a rural school's teacher shortage look like from a student’s perspective? Where can repo...
Home Ec’s 'Secret History'
August 24, 2021 20:00 - 24 minutes - 33.1 MBOften overlooked and misunderstood, home economics is about far more than learning to bake cakes or sew lopsided oven mitts, argues education journalist Danielle Dreilinger. She discusses her new book, “The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live." Dreilinger explores the fascinating -- and largely forgotten -- origins of home ec, including how it became a staple of the K-12 curriculum, and opened the door to higher edu...
Student Pays High Price for Reporting Teacher's Misconduct
July 13, 2021 20:00 - 27 minutes - 38.3 MBFor Madisyn Slater, a senior at Blake High School in Tampa, Florida, there was little question that popular biology teacher Tiffany Johnson crossed the line with students. Slater’s decision to report Johnson’s sexual comments and other inappropriate behavior led to the student -- not the teacher -- facing a school district investigation. Bethany Barnes of The Tampa Bay Times shares how she used an extensive digital paper trail to tell the story, and to take readers deep inside the lives of S...
What Is Critical Race Theory?
July 07, 2021 16:04 - 24 minutes - 33.7 MBThe Tulsa Race Massacre’s centennial has recently drawn headlines nationwide, but most Americans – including many educated in Oklahoma public schools – never previously learned about the tragic episode. Nuria Martinez-Keel, a Tulsa-born education reporter for The Oklahoman, shares what Sooner State’s students are now being taught about the killings and destruction perpetrated by a white mob in a Black neighborhood in 1921. Why has the anniversary taken on renewed significance amid a growin...
What You Need to Know About HBCUs
June 29, 2021 20:35 - 29 minutes - 41.1 MBWhile only 3 percent of the nation’s undergraduates attend Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), they produce almost 20 percent of the nation’s Black college graduates. And they contribute 25 percent of Black STEM graduates, as well as countless doctors, lawyers, and political leaders. As The Houston Chronicle’s Brittany Britto found in reporting her new series, HBCUs are making these important contributions despite a long and ugly history of underfunding, especially in the L...
Rethinking ‘Town & Gown’
June 22, 2021 20:00 - 22 minutes - 30.8 MBAs both municipal and higher education leaders tried to fend of COVID-19, the two camps sometimes found themselves at cross-purposes when it came to fiscal and public health challenges, reports Sara Hebel, co-founder of Open Campus. How has the pandemic redefined longstanding relationships among postsecondary institutions and their surrounding communities? Where is the data on how much colleges actually contribute to local coffers, and what’s the true price of their tax exemptions? What happ...
Lessons From the Educational Equity Beat
June 15, 2021 20:00 - 22 minutes - 30.2 MBFrom an inside look at a 12-year-old struggling with remote learning to revealing that districts had wrongly forced parents to sign away their children’s rights to special education services, The Boston Globe’s Bianca Vázquez Toness put the spotlight on families whose educational experiences were most disrupted by the pandemic. In this year’s EWA Awards, Vázquez Toness was named the nation’s top education beat reporter, with the judges citing her track record for richly detailed stories that...
Teaching the Tulsa Race Massacre
June 07, 2021 20:49 - 24 minutes - 33.7 MBThe Tulsa Race Massacre’s centennial has recently drawn headlines nationwide, but most Americans – including many educated in Oklahoma public schools – never previously learned about the tragic episode. Nuria Martinez-Keel, a Tulsa-born education reporter for The Oklahoman, shares what Sooner State’s students are now being taught about the killings and destruction perpetrated by a white mob in a Black neighborhood in 1921. Why has the anniversary taken on renewed significance amid a growin...
The Billion-Dollar School Safety Boondoggle
May 25, 2021 20:00 - 27 minutes - 38 MBAmerica’s gun violence crisis is leaving its mark on multiple generations of young people, who don’t need to be victims or even direct witnesses to shootings to suffer lasting harm. That’s the big takeaway from Children Under Fire: An American Crisis, a new book by The Washington Post’s John Woodrow Cox. Why are school districts spending billions to turn campuses into fortresses, despite a lack of evidence of effectiveness? What’s been the psychological toll for millions of students who ha...
Racism at VMI
May 18, 2021 20:00 - 25 minutes - 35 MBThe impact of reporter Ian Shapira’s deep dive into the troubled culture at the nation’s oldest state-support military college was seismic: within days, the Virginia Military Institute’s leader had resigned, and Gov. Ralph Northam pledged an independent investigation. Shapira won the Hechinger Grand Prize in this year’s National Awards for Education Reporting for his stories on VMI, which detailed a culture and climate that venerated the Confederacy and too often tolerated racist language an...
How Kids Think
May 11, 2021 20:00 - 28 minutes - 39.2 MBHow do adolescents learn to make healthy choices? When does the desire for status and respect most influence the teenage brain? The answers are evolving as neuroscientists learn more about what drives human behavior. Lydia Denworth, a contributing editor to Scientific American and an EWA Reporting Fellow, explains why some researchers advocate for viewing adolescence not as a “dark and stormy” time but as a window of opportunity for young people to develop habits and behaviors that will serv...
No School, No Work, No Chance
April 27, 2021 20:00 - 23 minutes - 32.1 MBThe only federal program intended to help disconnected young adults find meaningful job training has turned into a $1.7 billion boondoggle. That’s the big takeaway from a new investigation by Anne S. Kim of Washington Monthly. The Job Corps’ residential model has remained largely unchanged since its inception in the 1960s. Kim argues that the program is now ill-equipped to meet the needs of the population it is intended to serve: young people ages 16-24 who are already facing challenges incl...
Children, Schools and Guns
April 20, 2021 20:00 - 27 minutes - 38 MBAmerica’s gun violence crisis is leaving its mark on multiple generations of young people, who don’t need to be victims or even direct witnesses to shootings to suffer lasting harm. That’s the big takeaway from Children Under Fire; An American Crisis, a new book by The Washington Post’s John Woodrow Cox. Why are school districts spending billions to turn campuses into fortresses, despite a lack of evidence of effectiveness? What’s been the psychological toll for millions of students who have...
The Billions of Dollars in Hidden Student Loan Debt
April 13, 2021 20:30 - 25 minutes - 35.5 MBThe impact of America’s $1.5 trillion in student loan debt makes a lot of headlines. But one team of reporters dug into a little-known corner of the student debt market and discovered a pattern of rule-evading and abuses that is destroying the educational opportunities and careers of tens of thousands of Americans. Sarah Butrymowicz and Meredith Kolodner of The Hechinger Report’s investigations team share insights from their new series, “Hidden Debt,” which looks at the how, why and devastat...
Let’s Talk About Teachers’ Unions
March 30, 2021 22:00 - 27 minutes - 37.7 MBThe growing clout of teachers’ unions is becoming one of the nation’s most attention-getting education stories. Before the pandemic, successful “Red for Ed” unionized teacher strikes and demonstrations won long overdue funding increases for schools and pay raises for instructional staff. And since COVID-19, teachers unions have become key players in decisions such as when and how schools will reopen. Howard Blume of The Los Angeles Times has covered teachers unions for two decades, and wat...
When the Child Care Gap Is a Chasm
March 09, 2021 21:00 - 27 minutes - 37.9 MBIn many communities, the demand for reliable, affordable child care has long outstripped the number of available spots. The coronavirus pandemic has only worsened the shortage, and many mothers have left the workforce to stay with their young children. In central Washington, the situation is taking a bite out of the local economy, and putting young learners at risk of falling behind, reports Janelle Retka of the Yakima Herald-Republic in a new series – The Growth Gap. Retka, an EWA Reporting...
A Busing Program's Troubled Legacy
March 02, 2021 21:13 - 28 minutes - 39.3 MBCan busing Black students to schools outside of their immediate neighborhoods make public education more equitable? How can reporters better cover the history of such desegregation efforts, and the impact on young people, families, and communities? Reporters Olivia Krauth and Mandy McLaren share insights from their in-depth series into the longstanding busing program in Jefferson County, Kentucky, which was ordered by a court to desegregate its schools in 1975. sing extensive historical re...
Oregon’s ‘Class of 2025:’ Meet the Middle Schoolers
February 16, 2021 21:00 - 28 minutes - 38.5 MBImagine keeping tabs on the same group of students and families for nearly a decade -- Oregon Public Broadcasting has done it, and plans to keep going through the next four years. OPB editor Rob Manning and education reporter Elizabeth Miller share stories from the cast in this project, which is supported in part by an EWA Reporting Fellowship. Among the surprising plot twists: a big jump in screen time is changing how kids communicate and build friendships, and some Black students say they ...
Why More Men are Missing Out on College
February 09, 2021 21:00 - 30 minutes - 41.9 MBCOVID-19 is remaking the college landscape, especially when it comes to who’s pursuing - and who’s pausing - on higher education. New data shows the decline in enrollment is seven times as large for men as for women. That’s exacerbating an already existing gender gap, and it could have serious long-term consequences for men’s career paths, says Jon Marcus, higher education editor for The Hechinger Report. He also discusses the impact of the coronavirus on rural colleges, special challenges f...
Who’s Tracking Student Learning Loss?
January 26, 2021 21:00 - 27 minutes - 37.3 MBAmid the COVID-19 pandemic, states are largely leaving it up to individual districts to decide how to track how much -- or little -- of the standard school curriculum are K-12 students learning during the pandemic. One reporter surveyed her state and discovered that many communities aren’t even trying to find out. Joy Resmovits of The Seattle Times offers insights, tips, and questions to ask of state and local education officials when looking at student learning loss amid the COVID-19 pandem...
Who Is Miguel Cardona?
January 19, 2021 21:00 - 28 minutes - 39.3 MBConnecticut education commissioner Miguel Cardona has surged into the national spotlight as President-elect Joe Biden's nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Education. Connecticut Mirror education reporters Jacqueline Rabe Thomas and Adria Watson share insights from covering Cardona’s two-year tenure as the Nutmeg State's top education official, and his years in his hometown of Meriden, where he spent the bulk of his career as a classroom teacher, principal, and administrator. What's been ...
New Year, New Education Stories to Watch
January 05, 2021 21:00 - 31 minutes - 43.6 MBStudent absenteeism, budgetary struggles, and sharp drops in college enrollment are likely to be some of the big stories on the K-12 and higher education beats as the pandemic continues in 2021. Daarel Burnette II, an editor at Education Week, and Sara Hebel, the co-founder of the nonprofit higher education news site Open Campus, share story ideas and tips for innovative coverage. Why should education reporters focus on how K-12 schools keep tabs on students, especially as pandemic-driven re...
‘Targeted:’ Sheriff Secretly Used School Records to Profile Students
December 15, 2020 21:00 - 25 minutes - 35 MBIn Pasco County, Florida, the sheriff’s department used students’ school records, including their grades and information about their family lives, to identify them as potential troublemakers. School officials say they knew nothing about this longstanding practice -- until the Tampa Bay Times’ investigation broke the story wide open. Kathleen McGrory, the deputy investigations editor, and Neil Bedi, who reports and analyzes data, discuss how they structured the project, and what they learned....
Learning to Read on Zoom
December 08, 2020 21:00 - 24 minutes - 33.1 MBHow do you capture both the experience of a young student learning to read remotely, and the challenges for their teacher on the other side of the screen? Education reporter Perry Stein masterfully weaves it together -- both the compelling story of one family and a teacher, plus the bigger picture of teaching and learning in the pandemic -- in a new article for The Washington Post. Her article focuses on a class of second graders that has fallen behind in its reading skills, after their bric...
When Schools Get Hacked
December 01, 2020 21:00 - 27 minutes - 37.8 MBAcross the country, increasingly aggressive hackers are breaking into school computer systems and holding sensitive student information for ransom. Education leaders often quietly pay big bucks to regain control of their networks. Tawnell Hobbs of The Wall Street Journal is tracking this growing trend, which takes on even more significance given how reliant schools and colleges have become on remote learning in the COVID-19 pandemic. What factors make education institutions especially vulner...
No Sports. No Band. No Fun. (And Less Learning?)
November 17, 2020 21:00 - 23 minutes - 32.3 MBFrom basketball to band, debate club to dance teams, the coronavirus pandemic has curtailed extracurricular activities for many of the nation’s K-12 students. That could have a long-term impact on student enthusiasm for school overall, experts warn. Longtime education journalist Greg Toppo, writing for The 74, looks at how educators are working to keep kids connected to school, and the research showing a strong link between extracurricular participation and academic achievement. While COVID-...
Science! (in Education Reporting)
November 10, 2020 21:00 - 24 minutes - 33.8 MBHow can education reporters do a better job of incorporating science into their coverage of students and schools, especially as the evolving research around COVID-19 dominates discussions about how and when to reopen campuses? What’s known about the relative health risks to students and staff, and what are some examples of responsible coverage of this ongoing debate? Hannah Furfaro of The Seattle Times’ Education Lab offers tips for digging into a scientific study, including making sense of ...
COVID-19 College
November 03, 2020 17:15 - 25 minutes - 35.1 MBWho takes a cross-country reporting road trip in the midst of a pandemic? NPR’s Elissa Nadworny decided it was the only way to find out for herself what life is really like on college campuses these days, and how students, faculty and administrators are dealing with a new world of logistical challenges. Nadworny, who covers higher education, has visited more than a dozen campuses in eight states so far. What’s at stake for postsecondary institutions that opted to let students return to campu...
Biden v. Trump: Their Education Plans
October 26, 2020 14:47 - 27 minutes - 38.3 MBWhat would a second term for President Donald Trump mean for K-12 and postsecondary education? And conversely, what might change if Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins the election? Lauren Camera of U.S. News & World Report and Michael Stratford of Politico Pro break down the candidates’ education policy priorities and share insights from covering their campaigns. Did Trump keep his 2016 promise to make school choice a top policy priority? What are the prospects of his recent pledge to require...
Battling for ‘The Souls of Black Girls’
October 20, 2020 20:00 - 30 minutes - 41.7 MBWhen it comes to school discipline, Black girls often receive harsher treatment than whites, including referrals to enforcement. That’s the conclusion from a new analysis of federal education data by Erica Green and her colleagues at The New York Times. The project was a deeply personal one for Green, who spent two years digging into how racial and gender biases devastate the emotional well-being and academic trajectories of Black girls. How did The Times use data mining to find new insights...
On the Road With NPR's Higher Ed Reporter
October 13, 2020 20:00 - 25 minutes - 35.1 MBWho takes a cross-country reporting road trip in the midst of a pandemic? NPR’s Elissa Nadworny decided it was the only way to find out for herself what life is really like on college campuses these days, and how students, faculty and administrators are dealing with a new world of logistical challenges. Nadworny, who covers higher education, has visited more than a dozen campuses in eight states so far. What’s at stake for postsecondary institutions that opted to let students return to campu...
‘Left Behind’ By Remote Learning
October 06, 2020 20:00 - 25 minutes - 35.2 MBWas the decision to close schools and send students home for remote learning influenced more by politics than the science of what would keep kids safe? That’s the central argument made by ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis in a new story co-published with The New Yorker. MacGillis, who tells the story in part through the experiences of a 12-year-old in his hometown of Baltimore, shows how vulnerable Black, brown, and poor children are most likely to face long-term consequences for lost learn...