My misguided six-year foray into ‘social justice journalism’ (2016-2022)

To get past the current education stalemate, journalists, practitioners, and parents need to rethink prior positions and efforts — starting with our own. I’ll go first.

I’ve always been skeptical about the practical and political feasibility of school integration — as well as the value of focusing on it as a school reform priority.

That much should be clear from all the writing and commentary I’ve done on the topic, including Some Questions About This American Life’s ‘The Problem We All Live With’ and Questioning 70 years of integration. (More links below)

But at the same time, I was for several years deeply convinced that the lack of racial diversity among education journalists was a core problem — that newsrooms needed to be integrated as much or more than schools — and that I should try and do something about it.

Some of my pieces from that era start with 2016’s Just how white is education journalism? all the way to 2022’s Racial diversity in education news? Two steps forward, one step back.

Only now am I realizing how misguided my efforts were, how much they contradicted my skepticism around school diversity, and how deeply rooted they were in my personal desire to avoid being seen as racist.

Above: Selfie at SXSW 2018

Part of my misgivings about school integration came from my own family’s short-lived experiment sending my older sister to a Chicago Public School during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The teachers were absent and ever-changing. The academics were lackluster. It didn’t seem like things were going to get better anytime soon. So it was off to private progressive schools for the Russo kids.

Even at the height of its Nikole Hannah-Jones-fueled popularity, I had uncomfortable doubts about the viability of widespsread deseg efforts. I knew that they’d worked for a time, in the places they’d been tried in the South, but not in Chicago or New York City or Boston. And the efforts hadn’t been all that durable, legally and politically.

Eventually, I found that I wasn’t the only one with questions. The work of activists, journalists, and academics like Lurie Daniels Favor, Farrah Stockman, Megan Ming Francis, Matt Delmont, and Sonya Horsford were enormously helpful to my understanding.

The work of activists, journalists, and academics like Lurie Daniels Favor, Farrah Stockman, Megan Ming Francis, Matt Delmont, and Sonya Horsford were enormously helpful to my understanding.

And yet, at the same time, I was pushing for what can only be called newsroom integration, without much self-examination — and without making the obvious connection to school integration.

For six years, 2016-2022, I produced an annual report on racial diversity on education teams and at education outlets — a cumbersome, uncomfortable process for everyone involved. I reported on everyone’s racial demographics, their progress (or lack thereof), and if they declined to participate.

During all those years, I waved off friends’ questions about other forms of diversity that might be just as important as race. I rolled my eyes at the suggestion that the numbers involved were too small to be meaningful. I experienced the resistance against sharing this information from newsrooms as a sign I was on the right track. I put the annual diversity snapshot in all my foundation reports and in all my proposals. I touted The Objective at every opportunity.

Above: Racial diversity in education news? Two steps forward, one step back (2022)

To be fair, I wasn’t the only one concerned about racial diversity in the news. Hannah-Jones was calling out the lack of diversity on the education beat whenever she spoke in front of journalists, which I wrote about in Fear, complicity, and guilt get in the way of covering school segregation and Lack Of Diversity Skews School Coverage. There were also large national efforts to document and improve newsroom representation. The education beat was and is still very white.

I lamented when my efforts to support newsroom diversity occasionally had the opposite of the intended effect. But I did not rethink the possibility that socioeconomic and viewpoint diversity in the newsroom are just as important as race — or that the annual reports were unhelpful, ineffective, and probably fueled as much by a subconscious desire to avoid being seen as racist as anything else. I only stopped when it became clear that people weren’t going to share their numbers with me any longer.

Above: Education journalism is losing the talented journalists from diverse backgrounds that it desperately needs (2020).

Looking back, part of what happened was I was simply failing to put school diversity and newsroom diversity together. Subconsciously, it seems clear that I was also trying to protect myself against the accusation of being racist. I was, in short, just another white liberal trying to do something helpful and to avoid getting called out. But in the process, I was at best wasting a lot of peoples’ time and at worst pointing them in the wrong direction.

After all, it was during this time that I was asking uncomfortable questions about Nikole Hannah-Jones’ work and school integration coverage writ large. It was during this time that my 2020 piece about the troubling layoffs of minority journalists was critiqued and corrected (for having identified education journalists based on social media posts without interviewing them). It was during this time I was struggling to increase the number of minority journalists I worked with and whose voices appeared in The Grade. It was also during this time that I took the highly uncomfortable position of arguing in favor of school reopening.

And so, while I eventually stopped putting out the annual diversity report in 2022, I continued worrying at some low level about how my work would be perceived. I killed a controversial column about race and schools written by Freddie deBoer — who promptly wrote about it. I didn’t do much writing about the debate over disproportionate discipline. I interviewed Steven Wilson about the “lost decade” of social justice education, during which school reform was deemed racist, but didn’t follow up much.

Even when it became clear over the past year or two that there was a widespread reckoning over what’s become called “Woke 1,” I didn’t connect that re-examination with the need to re-examine my own work. Even when it became clear that lack of diversity was not at all at the core of what is ailing traditional journalism, I forged ahead.

Even when it became clear over the past year or two that there was a widespread reckoning over what’s become called “Woke 1,” I didn’t connect that re-examination with the need to re-examine my own work.

I’m not exactly sure what caused the penny to finally drop. Perhaps it was the appearance of folks like former charter school head Steven Wilson and former social justice activist Sabrina Stevens warning us against the excesses of the social justice approach. Perhaps it was the recent return of Nikole Hannah-Jones on the scene. Maybe it’s all the EMDR?

But I’m pretty clear that, while increased racial diversity would greatly benefit education news and schools, neither should it be the narrow focus of my or anyone else’s efforts.

For schools, the answers lie in a renewed focus on improving instruction, a return to some form of meaningful accountability, and a rethinking of past positions opposed to parental choice and classroom order.

For journalism, what’s really needed is for traditional coverage to make room for non-traditional approaches that are proving so much more engaging and popular than what most established newsrooms are offering.

If anything’s going to get better, we’re going to have to rethink our previous positions and efforts.

Previously from The Grade

Racial diversity in education news? Two steps forward, one step back (2022)

A white parent’s perspective on coverage of Black schools (2021)

Nice white journalist (featuring Chana Joffe-Walt)

Some Questions About This American Life’s School Integration Story

Covering communities that are not your own; a reporter reflects (Lee Romney)

Rethinking integration in Louisville (featuring the CJ’s Krista Johnson)

New book exposes flaws in media coverage of Northern integration efforts (featuring Matt Delmont)

‘America to Me’ highlights the need to deepen school integration coverage