Journalists Advocate School Coverage

Education reporters for the New York Times and the Boston Globe said last night that Harvard and other schools and universities need journalists in order to explain complex issues to their students, parents and teachers.

The session at the Graduate School of Education gave a behind-the-scenes look at how three reporters cover institutions and shape debate over educational policy.

Anand Vaishnav of the Globe, Beth Potier of the Harvard Gazette and the Times’ Karen Arenson came to the education beat from different backgrounds in journalism.

But the three agreed that putting the complex ideas of academia into accessible terms made their work especially important.

“I want to tell Globe readers, ‘You don’t know about this. Let me tell you what it means.’ That’s what our job is,” Vaishnav said.

But the job goes well beyond explanation, the reporters agreed, and discussions of policy can sometimes make the journalist’s job tougher.

Arenson, the Times’ beat writer for higher education, took as an example a story she wrote recently profiling black males in New York City’s colleges.

“They’re rare, and there are real problems keeping them there,” she said.

In her investigation into the matter, Arenson found herself engaging in discourses with academic administrators as to how to fix the problem. Those discussions made it difficult to maintain a professional focus.

“You do have interesting discussions, and that’s part of the fun of the beat,” Arenson said. “It’s a fine line that we walk. We’re very definitely not there to tell [educators] how to do things.”

Vaishnav faced a slightly different issue when he wrote a story about recent budget cuts that have devastated rural public schools in the Northeast. He didn’t discuss policy directly but made parents aware of policy changes—which spurred many to write to their local school board members.

“When schools don’t have a lot, it hurts a lot more when you take a little away,” he said of his study of the Gateway Regional School District in western Massachusetts, which was forced to eliminate two schools due to cuts.

“I didn’t want a lot of [budget] spreadsheets,” Vaishnav said. “What I wanted to portray to readers was, if these budget cuts happen, how will the picture [of my local schools] I see be different?”

Potier, who works in the Harvard News Office and writes for its weekly publication about University goings-on, said she had different concerns when writing a story about Professor of Economics Caroline M. Hoxby’s campaign to promote charter schools. Where the other reporters stressed the need for balance, she focuses more simply on getting Harvard educators’ views across.

“At the news office, we’re charged with using our access to get a better story,” Potier said. “My main audience is the Harvard faculty and staff...I didn’t really need to show the other side.”

According to J.D. LaRock ’95, who introduced the speakers, the discussion was meant to introduce the Education School to an important aspect of educational policy-making.

“People in education often have a one-sided impression of the media,” LaRock said. “This session helped elucidate the thought processes that reporters go through, and helped Ed School students see that reporters care about the same things they do.”