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Evidence-Based Practice
VUE Number 6, Winter 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Data, Observations, and Tough Questions: A Journalist's Evidence of School Quality
By Dale Mezzacappa
Education Reporter, Philadelphia Inquirer
> Author's Biography
Using research and their own techniques for gathering information, journalists are becoming sophisticated in determining whether school practices are effective. And they are providing readers with a better understanding of what "best practice" is – and what it isn't.
The first time I stepped into a classroom as an education reporter was in late 1986, when I had just been appointed to cover the Philadelphia schools. I was writing a story about the district's new policy of giving report cards to kindergarten students.
It was my first story on the beat. I hadn't had time to read research studies on education so I could get ideas for my vast assignment — covering a major urban school district with some 200,000 students and 250 schools.
I was, however, the mother of a three-year-old. And the report-card policy was causing a buzz in preschool circles. I plunged into the story asking the questions a mother would. How will this affect what students do all day? What will they be evaluated on? Will it put pressure on them? Does this signal a more academic focus?
I trusted my instincts to know what a good kindergarten classroom looked like: activity corners; pictures, letters, words, and shapes everywhere; plenty of books; and no desks in rows. I had my ideas, as well, about what a kindergarten report card should consist of: lots of commentary, developmental checklists, and, most definitely, no letter grades.
As it turned out, before ever taking the assignment, I had absorbed the consensus of the best research on early childhood education.
Eighteen years later, asked to reflect on how education reporters use research to inform our reporting on best practices in schools, I find it somewhat difficult to give a straightforward answer.We use research constantly, but one could also argue that we don't use it enough. Sometimes we use it well, and sometimes we don't. And we do our work in a climate that disparages much education research as politically slanted or not sufficiently rigorous.
Because we write for the general reader, education journalists help shape opinion and understanding about the real issues and obstacles in education reform. Bad teaching? Misguided curriculum? Inequitable distribution of resources? Concentrated poverty? Our own conclusions about these and other issues are shaped by our understanding of the professional research, yes, but also by our life experiences and our reporting. Combined, these three sources of evidence give us a pretty good sense of what works.
Using the Tools of the Trade
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I work, the editors and reporters on the SMASH (science, medicine, aging, and social health) desk meet weekly to go over journal articles and plan coverage that is based on what the articles say. The education reporters, who have gone back and forth from working for regional and city editors to being organized under a single education editor, donŐt do that.
This is partly because education research doesn't have the weightiness of a New England Journal of Medicine or Journal of the American Medical Association. (It remains to be seen whether the current effort to make educational research more “scientific” through the Institute of Education Sciences — the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education — will succeed in creating an authoritative voice for research or devolve into politics, and how this change will affect journalists’ work.) Our relationship to and use of research is much more ad hoc, partially because it is driven by the practices and policies of the school districts we cover. But it is multifaceted and always evolving and gaining sophistication.
Archives
Evidence-Based Practice
VUE Number 6, Winter 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Data, Observations, and Tough Questions: A Journalist's Evidence of School Quality
By Dale Mezzacappa
Education Reporter, Philadelphia Inquirer
> Author's Biography
Using research and their own techniques for gathering information, journalists are becoming sophisticated in determining whether school practices are effective. And they are providing readers with a better understanding of what "best practice" is – and what it isn't.
The first time I stepped into a classroom as an education reporter was in late 1986, when I had just been appointed to cover the Philadelphia schools. I was writing a story about the district's new policy of giving report cards to kindergarten students.
It was my first story on the beat. I hadn't had time to read research studies on education so I could get ideas for my vast assignment — covering a major urban school district with some 200,000 students and 250 schools.
I was, however, the mother of a three-year-old. And the report-card policy was causing a buzz in preschool circles. I plunged into the story asking the questions a mother would. How will this affect what students do all day? What will they be evaluated on? Will it put pressure on them? Does this signal a more academic focus?
I trusted my instincts to know what a good kindergarten classroom looked like: activity corners; pictures, letters, words, and shapes everywhere; plenty of books; and no desks in rows. I had my ideas, as well, about what a kindergarten report card should consist of: lots of commentary, developmental checklists, and, most definitely, no letter grades.
As it turned out, before ever taking the assignment, I had absorbed the consensus of the best research on early childhood education.
Eighteen years later, asked to reflect on how education reporters use research to inform our reporting on best practices in schools, I find it somewhat difficult to give a straightforward answer.We use research constantly, but one could also argue that we don't use it enough. Sometimes we use it well, and sometimes we don't. And we do our work in a climate that disparages much education research as politically slanted or not sufficiently rigorous.
Because we write for the general reader, education journalists help shape opinion and understanding about the real issues and obstacles in education reform. Bad teaching? Misguided curriculum? Inequitable distribution of resources? Concentrated poverty? Our own conclusions about these and other issues are shaped by our understanding of the professional research, yes, but also by our life experiences and our reporting. Combined, these three sources of evidence give us a pretty good sense of what works.
Using the Tools of the Trade
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I work, the editors and reporters on the SMASH (science, medicine, aging, and social health) desk meet weekly to go over journal articles and plan coverage that is based on what the articles say. The education reporters, who have gone back and forth from working for regional and city editors to being organized under a single education editor, donŐt do that.
This is partly because education research doesn't have the weightiness of a New England Journal of Medicine or Journal of the American Medical Association. (It remains to be seen whether the current effort to make educational research more “scientific” through the Institute of Education Sciences — the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education — will succeed in creating an authoritative voice for research or devolve into politics, and how this change will affect journalists’ work.) Our relationship to and use of research is much more ad hoc, partially because it is driven by the practices and policies of the school districts we cover. But it is multifaceted and always evolving and gaining sophistication.
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