May 2012
2 posts
Education reporting allows one to go inside schools to learn how a new generation thinks about the world. I was frequently inspired by the enthusiasm students brought to their education and the questions they would ask me. This semester, I enjoyed speaking to students, teachers and administrators to gain their perspectives. I focused on technology in schools and was able to observe students and...
My experience covering education was almost uniformly positive, although I think a lot of that was due to getting lucky with the topics and individuals I chose to write about. I didn’t encounter too many resistant sources. The administrators, teachers, and students at my embed school—the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science—were all happy to talk with me throughout the semester, as...
When I think back on my semester as an education reporter, I can’t help but cringe slightly at how little I knew about the world I was covering. Standardized tests, graduation rates, charter schools; they were almost like living entities that sucked you in and left you with nothing but fancy terminology. With every challenge came new frustrations, whether it was access to schools or busy...
April 2012
2 posts
WatchI brought a story about this in the week I was responsible for news aggregation. Here’s The Daily Show’s take on it. It’s simultaneously funny and damning.
-Eddie Small
March 2012
3 posts
In Harlem, When An After-school Fight Involved a Gun and Me
My suburban Canadian heart is still slightly racing just after my first encounter with a gun today.
Since moving to Harlem in August, I thought I’ve seen or heard it all, from a nasty car accident to a police takedown that involved 10-15 squad cars to a drunk woman who pulled her pants down to have sex in the alley across my...
How Not To Be An Education Reporter
Soon after New York City’s Department of Education released its teacher evaluation reports, many teachers on the list faced public scrutiny. Instead of assessing the quality of the data in the reports, the New York Post decided to go after individual teachers according to Edwize. Without reviewing the reports for mistakes, the Post publicly lambasted one...
February 2012
6 posts
2 tags
From India to Queens
Why I Am An Education Reporter
Last week I was observing a high school classroom in Queens during a community after-school program. The teenagers were boisterous – hyped to be out of school for the day and chowing down on free snacks. When it was time to circle up for a session on sex-ed, they sauntered down the hallway to their own internal beat, oblivious to the “hurry along” requests of the...
“It is a greater work to educate a child, in the true and larger sense of the...”
– William Ellery Channing (1817-1901), poet 