Contest Winner Tips: A State's Effort to Win Race to the Top

Editor's note: EWA will post tips and advice from first-prize winners of EWA's National Awards for Education Reporting. This report comes from Rena Havner Phillips of the Mobile Press-Register, who won the small market series category. 

 Alabama's Race to the Bottom

This series of stories started with a phone call: "Gov. Bob Riley would like to speak with you tomorrow."

The next day, the governor called and gave me an exclusive: He wanted to bring charter schools to Alabama. He knew this would mean a big battle with the state's teachers union. But having charter schools was the only way, he said, that the state would be able to compete for federal dollars in the Race to the Top competition.

Alabama was (and still is) one of 11 states that does not allow charter schools. And while it's true that having charter schools could have added some points to Alabama's application, I dug deeper over the course of about a year and found, in the end, that even if Alabama had charter schools, it still would have come in second-to-last place among applicants.

Along the way, I wrote stories and blog entries introducing our readers to the concept of charter schools, visiting one just over the Florida state line. I discovered that the head of the state's teachers union had a big say in what went into Alabama's application for Race to the Top.

Paul Hubbert of the Alabama Education Association literally read a draft and told the state what to take out of the application for the first round, and the state complied. The second go-around, the state did not take the union's advice, left in some "reform" measures such as incentive pay, and was docked points for not having teacher support. The politics were fascinating.

My tips:

• Have good, professional relationships with your sources so that they'll want to talk to you and give you the exclusive information. But still be ready to challenge them.  I was glad to break the news when the governor's office called me. But I left room for folks to challenge his assertion that Alabama had to have charter schools to win the money. That was only worth 40 points out of 500.
• Do the research. I read - or at least scanned - every page of Alabama's applications (about 200 pages each) for the first and second rounds of Race to the Top, and noted the differences. I was pregnant, so I took the applications with me to read as I waited for doctor's appointments, thus avoiding newsroom distractions. When the judges' comments were made available, I read them, too, to find out why Alabama didn't win.
• Question the information that's out there. There are so many studies about the pros and cons of charter schools that it's hard to know what to believe. I contacted EWA's (former) public editor Linda Perlstein for help and was so glad that I did. She gave me tips on which studies to use and which ones could be ignored due to bias. That helped tremendously.
• If you can't fit it in the paper, blog it. The editors weren't always interested in printing blow-by-blow stories on which states were getting Race to the Top money and which ones weren't, so I put much of it on our education blog.