Tips from EWA Contest: Investigating Charter Schools

EWA has asked the first-place winners of the 2011 National Awards for Education Reporting to share  tips and advice with their colleagues based on their experience. Several have graciously responded and over the next week or so, we will publish their observations.

John Hechinger, Bloomberg News, Beat Reporting, Large Market Print:

Last year, my editors Jonathan Kaufman, Lisa Wolfson and I decided that charter schools -- lauded by Democrats and Republicans alike as a way to reform public education -- were ripe for a more skeptical examination. Much reporting had focused on heroic principals who had managed to turn around individual schools. Our goal was a deeper look at what I had heard were the downsides of the movement: online schools with poor academic results; discrimination against students with disabilities; charter schools catering to wealthy parents and racially segregated programs.

The main pieces in our beat-reporting submission include the following stories:

• Online charter schools
• Students with disabilities
• Wealthy charters
• Segregation

Here are some beat-reporting tips that helped produce our submission:

1.  Back up your reporting with data, so you aren't relying on anecdote. In the case of charter schools, federal and state education departments keep voluminous records on enrollment, spending, test scores and demographics that can help you evaluate charter schools' academic and financial results.

2.  Look for the intersection between business and education. School districts have many dealings with private companies that can be fodder for stories. My piece on online charter schools relied on filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission because K12 is a publicly traded corporation. Pennsylvania's education department also had valuable records about charter-school spending and test results.

3. Use court and administrative filings to find examples of conflict. Special education, in particular, often leads to administrative proceedings and litigation that can be valuable for documenting articles. Those records formed the heart of the piece on New Orleans. Court records are public; administrative proceedings require the cooperation of families.

4.  Spend time with families and in classrooms. The online schools piece benefited from time spent in a family's basement. The article on segregated schools resulted from days on the ground in schools, yielding detail that gave readers a feeling for entirely single-race schools. That kind of reporting requires a substantial investment of time -- days or even weeks of phone calls and visits -- to find the right children, families and classrooms to tell these stories.

5. Try to pick a theme early in the year to focus your reporting. That decision forces you to concentrate your efforts and delve deeply into a single subject, so you don't get caught up entirely in day-to-day coverage. This can be a challenge on a busy news beat. It can help to choose a subject that is already generating news, and you are covering anyway.