LEADING A BEAT
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"…sources close to the search process told KPCC." Want a loyal community of returning readers and listeners? Get plugged-in and get out-front on stories that matter.
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OWNING BIG STORIES
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"Seattle teachers union members will go on strike for the first time since 1985 on Wednesday, a move that cancels what was supposed to be the first regular day of classes for the roughly 53,000 students in Washington's largest school district." There was no shortage of coverage of the strike — it made national news. But stakeholders gravitated to KPLU's coverage because of its commitment to the details of contract talks instead of the broad-strokes-high-drama of the negotiations:
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"Ref Rodriguez is having a bad year. He was charged with three felonies. He's at the center of a separate financial scandal. He has faced regular, repeated calls to resign from the Los Angeles Unified School Board … and on Friday, Rodriguez appeared ready to admit [he] had done what [he's] been accused of doing." This was the political yarn of 2017-18 in L.A. education, and it's still unspooling. Unanswered questions still abound about his political money-laundering scheme. I spent much of the last year trying to answer them while keeping readers abreast of a big, unruly story…
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BUILDING AN AUDIENCE
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"Almost as quickly as Georgie Stevens signed into her online ISTEP+ exam, the testing website kicked her out. 'It said, "Get off and get back on," there's something wrong with it,' the Bloomington fifth grader remembers. 'So I did.' Then the site booted her out again. And again." When computer problems ground online testing to a halt in hundreds of Indiana schools on April 29 and April 30, 2013, I was the first to post a story that would soon be on front pages statewide. It was a galvanizing moment between StateImpact and its target audience of active parents and teachers. We worked every angle:
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DATA-DRIVEN JOURNALISM
After studying last year's A-F rating data, a StateImpact analysis has identified 165 schools across the state … that saw higher final grades than they would have if [state officials] hadn't tweaked the formula roughly six weeks before releasing 2012's results. |
Vaccination rates in California schools reached an all-time high last school year, but … a KPCC analysis of recently-released vaccination rate data shows … one subset of public schools still appears to be lagging behind: charter schools. —Why are California charter schools' vaccination rates so much worse than district-run schools? Aug. 2017
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The Associated Press's findings do shed fresh light on where to find racially homogenous schools across California. In fact, put the AP's data on a map, and it shows pockets of racially isolated schools spread south and east of downtown Los Angeles… |
MORE OF MY WORK
Supporters of a sweeping plan to reduce K-12 class sizes in Washington public schools cheered its passage in November … Yet Initiative 1351 has landed with a thud in Olympia … and the budget Gov. Jay Inslee released Thursday only covers a portion of it. |
Budgets are hard enough to read when everyone agrees what the numbers on the pages mean. But in L.A. Unified, two very different narratives have emerged… Either (1) LAUSD is hurtling toward bankruptcy … or (2) happy days are here, let's enjoy it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ |
The move touched off a bizarre scene as Ritz and her staff filed out of the meeting room, the web stream of the meeting stopped and workers carted audiovisual equipment out of the room as frustrated State Board members kept their seats, remaining to discuss what to do next. |
