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Taking a Closer Look at Education News alexanderrusso.substack.com

4D AGO

Covering the edtech backlash in Lower Merion and other parts of the country

The last time I got the chance to speak with AP data guru Sharon Lurye was a couple of years ago when she and others on the education team were finalists for a Pulitzer. These days, Lurye is hard at work on both data-driven stories like last week’s massive piece on the Education Scorecard and field-based stories like her coverage of the debate in Lower Merion, Pa. about whether schools should roll back some of the reliance on edtech and whether parents should be able to keep their right to opt out. In this new conversation, Lurye talks about the national importance of the edtech story, its origins as part of the school cellphone ban movement, the importance of in-person reporting — especially when opinions are divided and emotions are high — the value and limitations of AI tools for reporting, and her generally positive experience pitching and appearing in a camera-facing social video in support of the story. Despite a bit of technical difficulties about halfway through, Lurye shared an enormous amount of information about covering a difficult topic. Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple. Some interview highlights: “It’s not necessarily [that] 600 parents are going to opt out, but they want to at least have the right to do so.” “To be fair to the school system, they’ve already started changing things and they are in the midst of trying to rewrite its technology policies..” “If it was just one school district locally in Pennsylvania, that probably wouldn’t be something our team would cover.... But I really did think that it was representative of something that we’re seeing nationwide. And so that’s why I was interested in it.” “The great thing that I got when I was there in person was that even though there were over 100 parents there that were like overwhelmingly on kind of one side of the issue, I also got the other side of the issue because there were two high school students, Mia and Elliot, who showed up who said, look, this anti-tech backlash has already had an impact on us and an unintended consequences…” “It’s my favorite thing is to be out there in person, especially when I get to interview students. That’s my favorite thing about the job. And I set it as a personal goal for myself that I try and do that once a quarter — an actual in-person story.” “I am working on tools for the AP that help to where we’re using AI to help cover school board meetings and things like that…. But still being there in person was important… For this one, even with those tools, it’s still better if you’re there in person if you can be. And it’s also important because it helps you build the sources.” “I wanted to kind of push myself to try to learn more about social video because again, I’m usually the one kind of just not on camera. I’m the one with dealing with the spreadsheets, not the one in the spotlight. But I realized that’s where a lot of people get their news. So I made it a goal at the beginning of the year that I would like try to do this. And at first, that was a little bit nervous. But it was good. It turned out to not be too difficult. I only had to take about like five minutes of footage total, because it’s only a minute long video.” “I pitched [the social media clip] because I figured like, you know, I figured the meeting might get dramatic… I figured this would be good for social video because I would be there on the scene. There was a specific event happening where I could say ‘I’m here in front of Lower Merion School District.’ It doesn’t make sense to do it for every story, but something where it’s either something that needs to be explained or something where you can be there.” “Honestly, I have to say, even though there was some tension at this meeting, I felt like the people on all sides agreed on like 95 % of stuff. Like they basically agreed we should have like minimal screen time for the younger grades. And everybody agrees that you you still have to teach kids about technology… The disagreement was in that remaining 5% … I think there is a lot of room for agreement. Previously from The Grade How to cover ed tech hysteria (featuring Holly Korbey) AI HYPE VS. CHROMEBOOK REMORSE: WHO WILL WIN? Pulitzer judges recognize deeply collaborative, human-centered education coverage Thankful for education journalism: 2025 Get full access to Alexander Russo's The Grade at alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

38 min
6D AGO

Think like a newsroom & other lessons from New Haven

If you know education journalism, you probably know about the New Haven Independent, which has a long history of publishing high-quality coverage and hiring all-star reporters like Aliyya Swaby and Christopher Peak. Longtime Independent editor Paul Bass now runs the Online Journalism Project, which published the Independent and other publications. In this new interview, Bass shares insights and experiences about the education beat, local coverage, and finding innovative new ways to get accurate information in front of readers who want it. “One thing we’ve learned the last 20 years of local journalism is that what we’re trying to preserve is the showing up, covering, thinking — getting everyone in the conversation. It’s not the format.” Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple. Some key quotes: THE VALUE OF TALKING TO THE ‘BAD GUY’ “I felt for the [teacher accused of hitting a kid] and the videos are interesting. He wasn’t blameless, but the way he’s dealt with was very interesting and he felt he got justice in the end. He liked being heard.” BEING TOUGH, BEING FAIR “The people I’ve had the best relationships with are often the people I’ve written the toughest articles about. If you listen to people and they feel they get a fair shake, it improves your reporting.” NO VILLAINS, NO HEROES “Sometimes people do something terrible, but it’s not usually villains and heroes. It’s usually, we’re all trying to figure it out and based on day-to-day experience of what we cover, we adjust to what we think, and we try to figure it out.” BROADCAST RADIO WAS NOT THE ANSWER “We started a bilingual FM community radio station ten years ago, and we were wrong. We thought it’d be like people driving their car listening to radio. As you know, and you’re filming this podcast, radio is now 90 % of the time consumed visually, not live.” SHARE EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE “We have a Facebook page, we have an Instagram page, and our radio stuff goes on about eight platforms, including Twitch.” FINDING DIFFERENT CHANNELS “As a local news site that wants to incorporate education as your beat, incorporate it into different ways of delivering it. So like what we do radio, you’re going to call it podcasting, incorporate people you deal with either as hosts of interviews or being interviewed, and then merge the media.” JOURNALISM IS NOT A FORMAT “One thing we’ve learned the last 20 years of local journalism is that what we’re trying to preserve is the showing up, covering, thinking — getting everyone in the conversation. It’s not the format.” THINK LIKE A NEWSROOM, NOT A PUBLICATION “You’re actually a newsroom, you’re not a publication. You’re using all platforms as much as you can when appropriate to reach people where they are in different ways and link them back… Go where people are, and be everywhere.” THE NEED FOR INFORMED OPINION “In the 80s and 90s, the radical thing you did was critique the way the local paper covered the school board and the city council. And then I thought the radical thing to do starting in the mid-2000’s was actually show up to the school board and see if they’ll tell you what happened. Because they weren’t doing that anymore, and that your opinion no longer mattered because so many people can weigh in on the comments.” COMMENTS ARE THE NEW OP-EDS “I saw commenters as the new op-ed people times 20. And you normally had 15, 20 people in community who showed, who would comment regularly on every article, and they became the new op-ed.” CAMERA-FACING VIDEO “I used to go to my compost heap and pretend that was our newsroom and I was pulling old stories out and commenting. And that became the once a week. As a non-profit, we couldn’t do editorials to endorse candidates. So I thought it was good.” THE ROLE OF COMMENTARY “I felt the opinionated reporting wasn’t important anymore, but I [thought] commentary thought should be on video where it had personality and point of view that wrapped up the news opinionated way. So I pulled stories out of the compost with props and said ‘This is the news through the view of our assignment desk,’ recycling the stories. That became, as you saw in the last president’s election, one of the brilliant moves by the Trump administration was to understand the advent of influencers as the way people got their information in an opinionated way.” NOT FOR OR AGAINST OPINION “I don’t think there’s a rule that you have to do opinion and not do opinion. I think what’s important is caring and being genuine. For some people, being genuine is to be opinionated. They tell you what their opinion is. You got to engage with people. “ STORY CHOICE IS AN OPINION “Of course, Chalkbeat is still doing opinion. They’re deciding these issues are important to cover and these people are worth talking to. So they’re just not saying their opinion is important, which I agree with — our opinions aren’t important.” OPEN YOUR MIND “We need to be open to very many different ways of presenting information and perspective and not worry about the old categories. Just remember our mission is to show up to care, listen and think and get everybody in.” KEEP IT TIGHT AND HAVE FUN “I think the thing I’m doing with the opinion thing there, you gotta be tight. You gotta have fun. If you’re not having fun, they won’t be having fun. When you’re about serious stuff like life and death and people’s reputations, of course you’d be serious. You’d be a little more playful when you talk about issues. But I think you gotta cut it down. “ OLD PEOPLE AND YOUTUBE “The people who now watch those videos, used to be that was early adopter and then people got into YouTube. It’s now 80 year old people from my shul who that’s the way they find out about local news in New Haven and it’s fun and they chuckle. And what they’re getting out of it is the information.” IN PRAISE OF THE NYT’S HOMEPAGE VIDEO “You know, my favorite thing to watch, which is not a fun thing. The New York Times homepage, they’ll get a reporter like David Sanger, someone coming up big story. They will do such a well edited explainer of a major story in a minute. They do the thing, they don’t go over two minutes… They have really sophisticated graphics and editing, but it’s still the person’s voice and I get a lot out it. Even though I’m reading all the stories in the Times, I get a lot out of that two minute explainer.” AI IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR BEING THERE IN PERSON “You know what’s even worse in my opinion? The way that reputable news organizations are using AI to analyze recordings of meetings to tell you what’s important…What a reporter does is show up and watch and listen. And while those summaries are very good in telling you what the main topics were and what was said, you have to be there and think and know your part to know that what someone told you on the side of the meeting or one person brought up at the public comment section of the Board of Ed for three minutes was actually the story.” “WERE NOT ROBOTS” “There is no substitute for showing up. We’re not robots. There are some functions for robots, but we can get to real estate journalism too, which is the most important. Being a robot makes you miss the whole community and has no role in local journalism.” A NEW OUTLET TO CHECK OUT “I love the Jersey City Times. Just full disclosure, that’s one of the sites we help. Roughly 300,000 people live there. It’s grown 20 % in 10 years. It’s going to grow another 20%. It’s two inches from Manhattan… Everyone from Jared Kushner to every other developer in New York is putting 50 story skyscrapers up while fighting with people to preserve parks and views. Education is huge there. They have a really good education reporter there, Sarah Komar, who I would recommend you put on your show at some point.” Previously from The Grade Scrappy local outlet shows how to excel at in-school reporting (New Haven) Lessons from a serial education news entrepreneur (Alan Gottlieb) Literacy, blue-state politics, & media reluctance (Kelsey Piper) Get full access to Alexander Russo's The Grade at alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

29 min
MAY 7

How the Banner won Pulitzer recognition for 'Missing the bus'

Earlier this week, the Banner won Pulitzer recognition for ‘Missing the bus,’ a multipart investigation into Baltimore’s particularly ineffective school transportation setup. As the series reveals, the problem isn’t lazy kids complaining about the same challenges that have faced schools nationwide. The combination of widespread choice, lack of yellow bus service after 5th grade, and lack of vision created a singularly woeful situation comparable. For the record, The Grade picked the first story in the series as Best of the Week when it came out. In this new interview, education editor Rachel Mull and reporter Liz Bowie describe what it was like the moment the Pulitzer recognition as a local reporting finalist was revealed, how the series came to be, and the massive effort it took to pull it off. “Liz showed up at the mall. She showed up at bus stops. She sat in cafeterias,” says editor Mull about Bowie’s efforts. “She spent hours upon hours trying to find students who had the most compelling stories.” “It was very much a work in progress for a long time,” says reporter Bowie, who repeatedly praises the work of data editor Greg Morton and his team. “It was a very long, arduous journey.” Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple. Some other key quotes from the interview: “There was high anxiety for a little while wondering, ‘Is it true? Is it not true? Could this be the most embarrassing moment of our lives?’” “The former editor of the Banner, Kimi Yoshino was interviewing me for the job and I pitched the story… The problem was that we didn’t get to it for about a year after we launched.” “I had seen little snippets of the problem as I was reporting on City schools that went back years. It’s really been a problem for about 15 to 20 years. I remember talking to a principal about something and he said, ‘Can you walk down the hall with me? If I’m standing with my kids, the MTA buses are more likely to stop and pick them up.’” “This was not a new idea to any of us. It was one of those ‘in plain sight’ stories. And I think when when we realized like how big it was — was when data got involved, when we started to see in hard numbers, how often buses were late — it started to click that this is really a systemic issue. This is not just an inconvenience.” “This was heaviest, the worst story I’ve ever worked on. It was the hardest… [But] I kept at it until I found what I needed.” “The journey [to school] that folks are talking about from 30, 40 years ago is just not comparable to the journey students are making now.” “There are a lot of things in Baltimore that I think many of us take for granted, like, ‘This is just how it is.’ And what we have seen [is that] some of our most impactful work [is] just sort of taking ourselves out of Baltimore and thinking ‘You know, people in other cities would never think that this is acceptable. So why do we?’” Previously from The Grade How the pandemic response destroyed the learning culture in one Baltimore high school. Virtual school was bad. What happened afterward was even worse. By and large, media outlets looked the other way. Urgency, experimentation, and expansion at The Baltimore Banner The Banner’s fast-growing education team is rethinking regional assignments and focusing on stories that convert readers into subscribers. Finding Tristan An interview with Jessica Calefati and Lee Sanderlin, two of the Baltimore Banner reporters who helped find Baltimore’s long-missing nine year-old — and what comes next. Pulitzer judges recognize the AP’s deeply collaborative, human-centered education coverage Members of the Associated Press education team describe how they conquered doubts, difficulties, and seeming disinterest to produce their Pulitzer-recognized series. Get full access to Alexander Russo's The Grade at alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

30 min
MAY 6

How to cover ed tech hysteria

In case you hadn’t noticed, last year’s wave of school cellphone bans has turned into a widespread reconsideration of all things related to technology. Screen time, 1:1 devices, YouTube, social media, AI, and educational software programs like I-Ready and IXL are all getting a turn in the barrel. “We’re at this place where parents and teachers and school leaders are all starting to say, ‘Okay, we’ve had enough digital learning,’” says The Bell Ringer’s Holly Korbey in a new interview. “‘This is too much.’” But is the outrage warranted? How to tell what needs rolling back and what’s actually helping kids? That’s the hard part for parents, educators, and reporters. Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple. Korbey’s focus is on the promise and peril of digital learning programs. But she’s also familiar with parents’ concerns about kids’ school-assigned devices being used for decidedly non-educational purposes (like watching March Madness). Asked about the state of news coverage of the current reckoning, Korbey thinks we have a long way to go. “I think that we’re missing asking some big questions because of these kind of more sensationalist stories that are spreading about kids watching YouTube,” she says. “That’s bad, but it’s unclear how much that’s happening.” “In my opinion, there need to be more stories looking at how are students using the digital platforms,” she says. “Is it 10 minutes at the end of a math class to get some extra practice on that concept you just learned? Or is it providing the main instruction?” In some places, Korbey says, schools are using digital learning platforms as the central instructional approach. “I want to read more stories about schools that are using digital for Tier 1 instruction” — and how well it’s serving students. Are students learning on digital platforms? How well do the learning apps work for students? And — bottom line — What are they learning? It’s not so much how much time is being spent but rather what’s it being spent on. “That’s the kind of detail I want to read,” says Korbey, who thinks that the New York Times would be great at diving in deep on this. “I think it’s really crucial at this moment that parents get some hardcore information about what is being used, when it’s being used, and what is the role of the teacher in how it’s being used,” says Korbey. “And that is something that we can do through reporting.” Instead, Korbey says she’s seen more coverage that’s somewhat sensationalistic — that focus on parent emotions or outrageous anecdotes or conflict. Related reading The Practice Problem (Education Next 2025) How to teach kids who flip between book and screen (MIT Technology Review 2023) What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong (New Yorker 2014) Material Question: Annals of Innovation (New Yorker 2014) The Innovation Administration (The American Prospect 2009) Previously from The Grade AltSchool, media hype, & the innovation dilemma (2015) A ‘national reckoning’ for ed tech Why LAUSD matters Rethinking Chromebooks in Kansas AI hype vs. Chromebook remorse How to cover AI in schools The growing edtech opt-out movement Get full access to Alexander Russo's The Grade at alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

29 min
MAY 6

The importance of specialization — & scoops

According to Gintautas “Gin” Dumcius, journalism’s current era features a lot of different ways for folks to get the news — as well as a lot of dubious information. The newsletter he launched and now runs, called MASSterlist, is tightly focused on “people, politics, and power” in the state. In this new interview, Dumcius talks about the need for any reporter or publication to know precisely who their audience is: “If you look at the publications that are doing well, they very much know who their audience is,” says Dumcius — focusing narrowly and obsessively covering the target topic. He cites Punchbowl and Semafor as examples. For successful outlets, the core question has got to be “what is the market — who is the audience that they’re trying to serve?” The rest — advertisers, subscribers — is easy. One other thing that hasn’t changed is the importance of scoops. “Scoops draw people in. It’s news that they can’t get anywhere else.” Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple. Previously from The Grade How to cover state ballot initiatives Praise & criticism for coverage of MA’s $41M charter school ballot initiative The ‘Northern nosedive’ in the news (Boston Globe and New Bedford Light) Literacy, blue-state politics, & media reluctance (Kelsey Piper) Get full access to Alexander Russo's The Grade at alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

36 min
MAY 4

Don't mess with Morgan Polikoff

If you hadn’t seen or heard much of USC education professor Morgan Polikoff lately, you’re not alone. He’s off Twitter (for now) and on sabbatical. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have anything to say, and a recent Kelsey Piper rant in The Argument about the lamentable state of education research generated a sharp rebuke from Polikoff: Ill-Informed Essays About Education Research are Weak and Sloppy. Why? In this new interview, Polikoff says that ed research has improved substantially over the past two decades and suggests that slamming qualitative research is a lazy response. “Education isn’t like giving people a pill,” says Polikoff. “If people don’t implement it, then it doesn’t matter.” He doesn’t argue that there isn’t bad research out there — some of it quite popular — or that some percentage of education research isn’t ideologically committed. He just doesn’t think it’s so bad as some of us may think. He also reveals what he’s working on (a second book hopefully coming out in 2027), describes what it’s like to be among the least politically liberal members of the USC education faculty (occasionally fraught), and explains why he hasn’t returned to Twitter yet (he deleted his account and would have to start from scratch). Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple. Previously from The Grade Literacy, blue-state politics, & media reluctance (Kelsey Piper 2025) Why most education reporters are sticking with Twitter — for now Latest NYT School Data Visualization Dumbs Down Test Results (Sean Reynolds 2017) States and districts fight back, the rise of citizen journalists, & cellphone ban research Get full access to Alexander Russo's The Grade at alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

37 min
APR 29

Coverage lessons from NPR's Cory Turner

With a dozen years on the beat under his belt, Cory Turner is one of the most experienced national education reporters out there, and in this new interview he’s generous enough to share his thoughts about covering two important education stories: the Biden-era student debt relief effort and the present-day explosion of school choice. His most recent major piece is a deep dive into school choice in Iowa, including a universal $8,000 per child allocation that doesn’t necessarily go straight from the public school system to private school but still creates a potentially enormous financial burden for the state. “It’s not necessarily hurting the public schools” in direct financial terms, says Turner about what he found in Iowa. “But it is essentially putting the state and its general fund on the hook for a new stream of funding.” Asked about his coverage of the Biden-era student debt relief effort, Turner reminds us that the effort’s questionable legality and usefulness were known and reported from the start — by him, at least — and that the Biden effort shouldn’t be confused with pre-existing Congressionally-approved loan forgiveness and income-contingent repayment programs that had preceded debt relief. Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple. While I neglected to ask him whether the questionable politics of debt relief — now much-discussed among Democratic pundits — were also known and reported at the time, Turner has lots of interesting things to say about journalistic fairness, bringing context into coverage, and the importance of focusing on what seems most important rather than what might generate the most interest in a given moment. “I think one of the things that still I still grapple with is holding multiple truths in my hands at once — and helping listeners and readers do the same,” says Turner. “I do get a little tired of the overly politicized rhetoric today where borrowers who were hurt don’t even want to talk publicly anymore because the public’s like, ‘boo hoo.’ It can be true that the system sucked and someone got hurt and it’s set them back and also that you you didn’t go to college and you didn’t feel like you could borrow this money. It’s both true.” As for the federal school choice law, “there’s not one way to do it. There are actually more and less thoughtful ways of rolling out, let’s say a private school voucher or an education savings account program.” Previously from The Grade Tough jobs: covering private school choice in 2026 (EdWeek’s Matt Stone) Full-time reporting on school choice (Josh Snyder of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette) ‘We are the media now,’ says school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis Inside the Harper’s magazine story about teaching at an ESA-funded micro-school (Chandler Fritz) The Democratic case for private school choice (DFER head Jorge Elorza) ‘We could have been a lot louder,’ says NPR’s Anya Kamenetz Claudio Sanchez looks back: Lessons from 30 years covering education for NPR (2019) Get full access to Alexander Russo's The Grade at alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

39 min
APR 27

Why homeschooling coverage misses the mark

Stefan Merrill Block started writing “Homeschooled” — a memoir of the five years he spent at home after his mother pulled him out of school — as a healing exercise after his mother’s death. He thought it might generate material for a fourth novel. But after writing down hundreds of pages of memories, something else came out: “When I was reading my own story as a reader, I started to find that I had profound empathy for this kid in a way that I had never quite had empathy for myself,” he told me in this new interview. “And I was rooting for him and feeling sad for him and worried for him.” The result of these written memories is a book that is troubling, often funny — and deeply personal. For the years he was at home, Block had few contacts with anyone his own age and minimal formal instruction. At one point to improve his handwriting his mother made him walk on all fours for months. But in this new interview, Block talked more about something he discovered only after the events of the book: the world of former homeschoolers who are advocating for better oversight. “I get emails from readers all the time who had, you know — not the same situation because of course every homeschool is different — but felt sort of unseen and unwitnessed in their own peculiar home education environments,” he said. “The sense of connection that I feel with these people is just immense.” Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple. I am also a former homeschooler, which in my case was almost entirely a positive experience. It’s this huge range of possible outcomes in home education that makes reporting on it so tricky — when journalists even try. “I have felt over the last 15 years that I have been trying to write something on the subject of homeschooling, a real resistance from traditional mainstream journalism to accept those stories or to cover those stories,” Block said. “I think that there has recently been a change in the culture.” But the best coverage, he contends, is still from the groups of former homeschoolers. For reporters looking to improve homeschooling coverage, Block wants to see journalists talk directly to children or former homeschoolers and not cover the story solely as one of parental choice. He also wants to see more coverage of the laws around home education. Listen to our full conversation for more on the stereotypes of homeschooling, why Block thinks few reporters are getting it right, and the kind of policy-focused coverage he wants to see. Previously from The Grade Covering private school choice in the Trump 2.0 era Covering school choice during the 2024 campaign season ProPublica’s Eli Hager on covering choice in a new era Inside the Harper’s magazine story about teaching at an ESA-funded micro-school Get full access to Alexander Russo's The Grade at alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

27 min

Taking a Closer Look at Education News alexanderrusso.substack.com

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Alexander Russo's The Grade
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

44
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Clean
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The Education Show