In this week’s newsletter:
📌 The ever-widening edtech backlash
📌 The conservative anger that national reporters keep missing
📌 The New York Times fails to credit another outlet (again)
📌 “Teachers win wars.”
📌 AI-assisted education coverage (secret bonus section for paid subscribers!)
EVER-WIDENING TECH BACKLASH
The big education story of the week:
The big education story of the week is the widening backlash against technology in schools, which started with cellphones and now includes other devices and software.
The backlash started with school cellphone bans. The handful of states that haven’t already enacted them are under pressure to enact them (Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune). States with existing bans are strengthening them (Louisville Public Media, Wisconsin Public Radio).
Now, a growing number of lawmakers are holding hearings, parent groups are expressing concerns (C-SPAN, K12-Dive, EdWeek). Five states are already weighing further limits and bans on classroom technology — especially in the earlier grades (K-12 Dive, News from the States). Various experts and reports have urged caution against overuse of AI (The 74, EdSurge). At least one district leader has proposed ending the iPad epidemic in schools (Baltimore Banner).
However, a cellphone ban recently failed in South Dakota (Searchlight), many districts have decided that they have to embrace AI (NYT, Gothamist), and past concerns about computers in the classroom have often failed to stem the tide of enthusiasm (The Atlantic). So don’t hold your breath.
Other big education stories of the week include growing pressure on lawmakers on to support private school choice (Washington Post, EdWeek, Fox News), the murder conviction of a parent in the Apalachee school shooting (USA Today, NYT), and the effects of diminishing school vaccination rates (NYT, Colorado Sun, SF Chronicle).
OVERHEATED CLASS, ABUSE ALLEGATIONS AND TEACHER STRIKES
The best education journalism of the week:
🏆 Tracking a year of heat inside one Milwaukee classroom
It’s always great seeing local newsrooms doing something both simple and creative — in this case, documenting high temperatures in Milwaukee classrooms by giving teachers automated thermometers. The result is clearly presented in the accompanying data visualizations from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Rory Linnane, which shows in the absence of air conditioning temperatures in one classroom spiked as high as 87 degrees and regularly hit the high 70s.
See also: Maryland spent $1B renovating Baltimore schools. Fixing the heat could add millions.
🏆 A Bay Area teacher was accused of abuse — then the case fell apart. Now he’s suing for millions
This carefully reported story including never-before-released documents from the San Francisco Chronicle’s Jill Tucker shows how one school failed to confirm even the most basic details after a student accused a popular teacher of abuse. Tucker shows all the missed opportunities for a different outcome — including how the failure of the investigation may have let another genuinely abusive school employee slip through the cracks.
🏆 Wave of California teacher strikes ‘is no coincidence’
Regular readers of The Grade probably noticed the surge in threatened and actual teacher strikes across California. This story from Carolyn Jones of CalMatters explains how the teacher’s union lined up contracts to expire at the same time — creating a surge of interest and potential strikes. It’s a clear, helpful explainer about the union strategy to maximize its bargaining power as well as the potential limits to its success, including flagging school budgets.
Other stories we liked include Families turn to states for civil rights support as Trump dismantles the Education Department (AP), Recreational marijuana is legal all over—which is a big problem for high school administrators trying to keep it off campus (Wall Street Journal) and When they became moms, these teachers were left with few options. Some quit (USA TODAY).
Longform & Newsletters: This week’s most-enjoyed Substacks, features, and essays include It Was a Tough February for New York’s Fanciest 5-Year-Olds (New York Magazine), Bring Back the Try-Hard by Tim Daly, Colorado may have saved your state from banning bilingual education by Tara Garcia Mathewson and Is a new teacher better off in Mississippi than in New York? by Matt Yglesias.
EPSTEIN IN THE CLASSROOM
Above: Then a Dalton math and science teacher, Jeffrey Epstein smirks in a wide-collared shirt.
While it’s easy to think of Jeffrey Epstein as a uniquely awful person, sexual misconduct against children is widespread — even in schools. And in this week’s column, Epstein in the classroom, I urge educators and journalists to use the current scandal as an opportunity to take the issue more seriously.
Not yet convinced? Check out this new interview with Kentucky CIR investigative reporter Jess Clark about her new four-part podcast series, The Girls. “I wonder if people are finally waking up to the fact that our society as a whole has a problem with how we view teenage girls,” she says.
(Indeed, a handful of states — including California, New York, and Texas — have now started making schools financially responsible, which could be a game-changer.)
You can watch or read the Jess Clark interview on Substack or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple. And you can find all of The Grade’s interviews, columns, and essays about sexual misconduct in schools on this topic page.
ICYMI: I also spoke this week to Mike Reilley about productivity tools that can help modernize the education beat.
From last week’s secret bonus section: “I’m heartened to see a handful of school voucher stories like the New York Times’ recent How Texas School Vouchers Could Make Child Care More Affordable that go beyond the typical focus on conservative politics and potential costs and explore unexpected outcomes.”
PEOPLE, EVENTS, & MORE
Above: A scene from Mr. Nobody, an Oscar-nominated documentary about school-based propaganda in Putin’s Russia.
📰 People & Jobs: Former BuzzFeed education reporter and Washington Post staffer Molly Hensley-Clancy is joining ProPublica to cover higher education. New York Times’ local education reporter Troy Closson was featured in A.I. in New York Schools: What Lies Ahead? The mystery man behind last week’s much-read unHerd article about i-Ready, John Allen Wooden, is also the person behind Screen Time Tales, a picture book series “where Mother Goose meets Black Mirror.” Liz Willen of the Hechinger Report posted a rare in-person gathering of the staff.
Ashley McBride and Callie Rhoades of Oaklandside won the Free Speech and Open Government Award from the First Amendment Coalition for their coverage of a drinking water crisis in Oakland schools. The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay shared her experience receiving an award for her education reporting from the Newswomen’s Club of New York — her colleagues Meredith Kolodner, Marina Villeneuve and Sarah Carr were also honored.
📰 Episodes: As a Seattle high school student journalist, Isolde Raftery covered an allegation that a teacher at her high school was abusing children. Now she’s part of the team producing the new KUOW podcast Adults in the Room about what happened. A new documentary covers the transformation of New College in Florida into a conservative bastion. And the latest episode of former EdSource head Louis Freedberg’s podcast covers the Trump administration’s attempt at expanding vouchers.
📰 Credit where credit’s due: Reflecting last week’s controversy over a racist comment made on Zoom — and the DOE’s subsequent decision to keep the school open — the West Side Rag’s Gus Saltonstall noted that his outlet was the first to report the abhorrent remarks and told us that the reason why was that they’d been covering the possibility of multiple schools getting closed. “Without that prior work, we might have missed the moment.” He says that about half of the outlets credited the outlet appropriately for the initial scoop — but not the NYT, which “was a bit disappointing.”
📰 Numbers: A new Gallup poll showed that 71% of public school teachers have at least one other job. But many of these are teaching-related jobs such as coaching or running afterschool programs, while only a third of teachers have a second job unrelated to teaching. A new report from the Arizona auditor shows that 52.1 cents of every $1 was used directly on instruction. Only about 1% of students skip a grade, even when they are a year ahead academically. In a study of nearly four thousand teacher misconduct cases, roughly a quarter were sexual in nature. Another study showed that about 1 in 5 teachers who left a school were “counseled out” or encouraged to leave without being formally dismissed. And EdWeek has all the numbers on teacher job satisfaction, state-by-state.
📰 Quotes
“The anger among conservatives over school vouchers in Texas is impossible to miss. And yet national reporters keep missing it.”
“What if there was no longer demand for public education? Would we just let public schools all wither away?”
“It’s as if we were all just wandering aimlessly, the only goal being to get out.”
“One of the most misguided TED talks ever.”
“They knew after all that this place is a school. For several years this has no longer been a missile base.”
📰 Events: With the Oscars coming up a week from Sunday, now is a good time to check out “Mr. Nobody,” a documentary by a former Russian teacher who showed how his school was becoming a propaganda factory as the war in Ukraine escalated.
This year’s NICAR began yesterday — and there’s a good contingent of EWA folks gathering in Indianapolis. Headed to SXSW EDU next week? Check out this cheat sheet from The 74. Chalkbeat’s ideas editor Matt Barnum and others will speak about whether college is still worth it on March 16.
KICKER
Always save the best for last.
“Ya know what kind of professional development I wouldn't mind as a teacher? Basic copy machine repair”
That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading!
With research and writing from Abraham Kenmore.