Chalkbeat has always been an engagement-minded newsroom. It’s baked into our core values: “We put down roots in the communities we cover and work with our readers as well as for them” (emphasis mine). That means that in the seven communities we cover (with more to come), we count on residents as more than sources or passive readers — our work wouldn’t happen without them.

Under normal circumstances, we experiment with new platforms and formats to reach our audience where they are. We involve readers throughout our reporting process, seeking out their ideas and questions, inviting their contributions and feedback throughout. We’ve done that through editorial “callouts” in our stories and on social media, meeting regularly with our Reader Advisory Board, using SMS to reach communities without access to Wi-Fi, and regularly holding local events to build trust with folks in person.

The outbreak of COVID-19 forced us to adapt. It also, fortunately, coincided with the growth of our engagement team from a one-woman shop to three women strong. (Susan Gonzalez, our new social media strategist, wasn’t even fully onboarded before we all shifted to working from home full-time!) That added capacity allowed us to meet the increased needs from our reporting teams — and from our communities. Here’s how Chalkbeat’s engagement work has evolved to accommodate the new reality that’s upended the schools we cover and the communities we live in.

IRL → virtual

The shift toward holding events online instead of in person was technically easy. Our distributed newsroom is plenty familiar with Zoom — it’s how we’ve held daily stand-ups, all-team meetings, and one-on-one check-ins for years. But would we be able to replicate digitally the human connection with our communities?

Our goal with our first virtual event in Chicago was to give parents space to hear guidance from educators and to share experiences with each other as everyone began preparing for remote learning. We partnered with teacher groups — Educators 4 Excellence, Golden Apple, and TeachPlus — to identify a handful of top-notch local educators who could participate in a panel with Bureau Chief Cassie Walker Burke. Parents and educators registered for the free event via Eventbrite so we had a clear idea of who would be there, and could communicate with registrants more efficiently than relying on a Facebook Event page, for example.

We assigned roles in advance: Caroline Bauman, our community engagement strategist, would introduce the panelists and wrap things up toward the end, Cassie would moderate the conversation, and I’d keep an eye on the chat to pass any attendee questions to Cassie via text.

About 55 people joined the lunchtime call, and we all left having learned something. Zoom’s chat function was active throughout, with parents and teachers sharing resources for furthering children’s learning during this unexpected time at home. The clearest message from our panel was one of grace — educators told parents in attendance to focus on the time with their kids rather than nailing every academic achievement. We couldn’t have asked for a better moderator than Cassie, who, as a mother of four, brought a personal connection to the conversation. As the panel and subsequent Q&A wrapped up, relieved and grateful messages from attendees poured into the chat.

We realized how lucky we’d been not to fall victim to Zoombombing, especially as other journalism organizations came under attack, despite their best efforts. Our hope for the coming months is to hold virtual events in all our markets. Before we do that, though, we’re making sure the tool we use to host these conversations is as secure as possible.

Call and response

Reader callouts — using Google forms to pose a question or prompt to readers and letting their responses help guide our coverage — have helped fuel Chalkbeat’s reporting for a while now. COVID-19 presented entirely new circumstances for this work, because suddenly all of our communities were bracing for the same development — the destabilizing closures of school buildings — and unsure of what to expect next. It was a unique moment to take the pulse of readers.

As COVID-19 began to spread in the U.S., our first coronavirus-specific callout in early March asked readers how their schools were responding to the situation. Then, as districts mobilized with plans for remote learning, we published a second callout asking how school closures were affecting them. In a little under a month, we received more than 1,000 responses to our callouts, and Caroline sorted, organized, and distributed them to bureaus so reporters could reach out.

As a result of readers’ input, we published well-sourced stories on the fate of high school milestones and students’ aggravations during remote learning, plus a handy FAQ answering reader questions.

Teaming up

Our coverage during this time could only benefit from collaborating — both with outside media partners and across our bureaus.

Joining forces with WNYC not only expanded the audience and potential impact of our New York bureau’s work, but it also meant we had more reporters to follow up with willing respondents to our shared survey. And when several of our bureaus worked to create and maintain maps of meal distribution sites for students and families, other local media partners were happy to embed or share those maps to make sure they got in front of the people who needed them. In Detroit, for example, we shared the locations and hours of meal sites our bureau had collected for their map with Outlier Media, which then incorporated that data into the SMS tool it had set up for Detroit residents. And in Memphis, Caroline created a conversation, in both Spanish and English, using GroundSource so that Memphians could text in their ZIP code and receive the locations and hours for free meal pickup. When the conversation went live, Caroline began tapping her network of community organizations around the city that could help spread the word.

Collaboration within our newsroom was essential here as well. Early on as school closures rippled across our bureau communities, our managing editors for local news Eric Gorski and Carrie Melago helmed a cross-team project called “A Day Without School.” The engagement team passed along contact information for readers who had responded to callouts and indicated they were comfortable speaking with reporters. Bureaus then reported out snapshots of these readers’ daily lives, which were then collected in the published project. In part because of their geographical breadth, those vignettes painted a fuller picture of what the loss of the typical school day meant for parents, students, and educators.

It’s capturing that fuller picture that I think exemplifies how crucial engagement is at a time like this. We may have lost the in-person aspect of engagement — hosting events, building relationships on the ground, distributing flyers in a neighborhood to promote a reporting project — but when journalists use the avenues available to us and get creative with the format, we can keep the conversation going with the audience we serve, and our work is better for it.

— Caty Green, engagement editor at Chalkbeat

Engaged journalism amid COVID-19: How Chalkbeat adapted its approach was originally published in Chalkbeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Below is a letter written by Elizabeth Green and addressed to the staff of Chalkbeat, one of the largest nonprofit newsrooms in America, covering education in seven locales. Elizabeth is cofounder and CEO of Chalkbeat and cofounder of the American Journalism Project, the venture philanthropy firm dedicated to expanding nonprofit local news. If you like what you see, here is where you can donate.

Dear Team,

For 20 years, I have been driven to cover public education for those who depend on it most. But I have never been more inspired by our team and mission than I am right now. Over the past two weeks, our readers, each one enduring their own personal pandemic chaos, have turned to Chalkbeat for guidance through the crisis. How do we complete online homework if I don’t have internet or enough devices at home? Will I graduate from high school? How do I feed my children?

Only professional reporters with boots on the ground and a robust network of contacts can answer these questions quickly and accurately. We did that. In Denver, Memphis, Indianapolis, and Detroit, we published food resource maps so that kids who rely on school for meals don’t go hungry. They have been viewed 60,000 times in two weeks. In New York City, our reporting revealed that thousands of students were missing online lessons because their families were late to pay internet bills during the outbreak. After the story published, Spectrum reversed course, announcing it would allow families with old debt to sign up for a special service after all.

Meanwhile, our revenue, finance, operations, and people teams raced to ensure we have the money, safety, and baseline morale to keep our now fully virtual lights on. Conditions are suboptimal. Already, the pandemic has led advertising-dependent media, from alt weeklies to BuzzFeed, to enact layoffs and severe pay cuts. In nonprofit land, some philanthropists are announcing emergency funds, but as markets collapse, others will inevitably pull back their charitable giving. Nonprofits of all kinds will suffer along with everyone else. Our work at Chalkbeat will be affected. The question is, how?

In the middle of the night, when I’m being brutally honest with myself, I envision three scenarios. One is very bad: We are forced to enact pay cuts, furloughs, or layoffs, setting back years of progress toward building a robust local news ecosystem.

In the second scenario, we manage to sustain today’s Chalkbeat through emergency support, and we avoid cuts. But we hit the brakes on our growth plan, and we feel that viscerally. The 60+ communities that are begging Scott, Alison, and Bethanie to open a Chalkbeat bureau will continue to go without the coverage they need. More painfully, we go without the new investments we need now: a visuals editor, an analyst to help us better understand our readership, revenue capacity to build new sources of sustainable support, accounting resources to make critical decisions.

There is also a third scenario. It’s the one that helps me fall back asleep. In this scenario, the pandemic and the havoc it spreads show the world that local news is not a luxury item. The truth can save lives. It can feed people. It can get them the internet service they need to learn.

In this scenario, the world finally comes around. People acknowledge that local news is an essential public good that cannot be entrusted to the whims of markets, shareholders, and hedge funds. Private and public sources make an unprecedented investment in Chalkbeat and organizations like us. Our reporting and impact grow at the scale we laid out in our 2025 plan, maybe even faster and bigger. We strengthen our existing bureaus and open new ones. As we envisioned in our plan, the Chalkbeat model becomes a blueprint for recruiting others committed to local news to replicate our idea of a strong network standing behind talented, committed journalists, in more subjects and more communities, who actually live in the places they cover.

Ben Smith has a column in Monday’s New York Times outlining that hopeful possibility. Maybe things continue to deteriorate, and we look back and say, wouldn’t that have been nice. Maybe, though, we look back and say, that was the beginning, when local news began to flourish. Indeed, the last few weeks have already accelerated an opportunity to make our 2025 plan real. We always imagined replicating our multi-city local news model beyond education. Now we’re working with Kaiser Health News to pursue that vision together, expanding local coverage of public health as well as education. And the American Journalism Project is showing how journalism can flourish when impact is at the center. As the era of newspaper conglomerates comes to an end, my hope is that what is rebuilt puts mission (and not profit) and communities (and not shareholders) first.

We may not know much about what the next six months look like for ourselves, for Chalkbeat, or even for our country. While we wait to learn more about how the larger economy will fare and what that means for our work, we will continue to serve our community. We will also continue to dream big. But we will have to do that while acting with even more financial prudence than we have so far.

The good news is that we have strong partners in this fight. Advocacy to include journalism in stimulus actions is gaining momentum at the state and federal level, and philanthropists who care about journalism are rallying. Finally, and wonderfully, our readers themselves have poured in with donations to show they value our work and understand it’s more essential now than ever.

Have questions? JB (our new chief people officer) has made herself available to field questions one-on-one over Zoom, or you can email her questions, which she’ll then bring to the rest of the leadership team.

I know I’m not the only one losing sleep lately. I want to thank every single one of you for working harder than ever at the same time that the demands of your personal lives have become increasingly onerous. Like I said at the top, for 20 years I have been driven by our mission. But I have never been more inspired by a team than I am right now.

— Elizabeth

Support local news right now by donating to Chalkbeat.

The pandemic is killing local newspapers. It can also inspire us to rebuild local news. was originally published in Chalkbeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Idea, an Atlantic Media newsletter on media trends, caught up with Chalkbeat engagement editor Caty Green to chat about membership, the uniqueness of education reporting, and the rise of the term “audience” (she’s not its biggest fan).

This Q&A was originally published by the Idea.

Q&A: Caty Green, Engagement Editor @ Chalkbeat

By Lizzy Raben, an Atlantic Media fellow

Can you give a brief description of Chalkbeat and your role there?

Chalkbeat is an education reporting nonprofit. We started out as the merging of two bureaus — one in New York, which used to be called GothamSchools, and an organization in Colorado called EdNews Colorado. Since then, we’ve expanded to seven bureaus in Denver, Detroit, Memphis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Newark, and New York. We have plans to expand to more cities soon, and we also have a national coverage team.

My role in that so far has been engagement, mostly in the traditional sense, which has involved a lot of SEO and social media. I’m also going to be working with our digital marketing manager Kary Perez going forward, and we’re going to be building out our email strategy.

I’m going to be focusing a lot on the umbrella tier of community building. Part of that is going to be working with our reader advisory board, which is one of our main ways to talk to very loyal and passionate readers who have been part of the Chalkbeat community for varying lengths of time, and moderating conversations with them — finding out how we’re doing and what we could be doing better or more of.

The other part of that is figuring out what kind of online communities we can better develop for Chalkbeat. For me, that’s still kind of unclear whether that’s going to be a Facebook group, or what we used to do at The Atlantic, which was work with a group of Atlantic super readers and moving that conversation away from the comments section to a full forum. I haven’t yet figured out what the appetite for something like that would be.

When we make decisions like that, I’m a big believer in starting from the place of asking readers what they are up for and what would be a real service to them and not just, “Oh everyone else is doing this, so we should also do it.”

What is unique about working in the education space?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the balances we have to strike, and part of that is the local versus national balance. Another big part of it is the specificity of education policy versus the broad, general appeal of making sure kids have access to an education — and not just an education, but one that is quality and worthwhile.

On a larger scale, I really respect how when Chalkbeat sets out to open new bureaus, they look at where the need is and where the news deserts are, or where the school story is in such a space that there needs to be some coverage and could use deep analysis with some real expert insight into why schools are struggling here.

They really are looking at where can we do the most good. And that sounds very cheesy and corny (obviously we still have to operate within a budget), but I appreciate that they make those decisions based on that. And then they go and start building relationships and finding out who is covering this stuff there and what have they done differently or what could we bring to the table that this community wouldn’t already have.

What’s the balance between weighing what readers might want and what is feasible or attractive for the newsroom?

We’re thinking a lot about this right now with our newsletter strategy and taking a look at how big of a burden or slice of the workload producing a daily newsletter is for our team. A lot of our bureaus are so small, so for many of them it means rotating throughout the week, and after starting work at 8 or 9 a.m., they are still working at 9 or 10 p.m. to put this newsletter together and get it sent out the next day.

So we’re thinking about redesigning our daily newsletters and maybe making our monthly or weekly newsletters a little bit more of a narrative product, or a little bit more conversational.

I just come from a place where I want to ask readers what they want first before doing that. Which is not to say that depending on what the majority says, we’ll definitely do that, because within newsrooms you have to maintain editorial decision making, but I do want to know what people expect when they open those newsletters and what kind of experience they want at seven in the morning or on a Wednesday afternoon.

Being able to put that into a quantitative and qualitative experiment so that we get some real data to make decisions that’s more than just one guy’s email reply that says, “Hey, I really hate this section of the newsletter” — that to me is a more worthwhile and thoughtful approach to redesigning what is actually a major distribution channel for us.

Why does engagement work matter? Why should publications care about doing engagement or be invested in it?

From a business standpoint, media is sort of having this reckoning where we’re no longer just thinking about advertising as our main revenue generator. We aren’t just thinking about what can we offer advertisers, or what access to readers can we offer them so that our product is at a premium — instead, we’re thinking more about how can we serve consumers.

Engagement matters because we are relying on readers to support us financially, and we can’t really make the case for that if we keep the walls up between newsrooms and the audience. Even using the word audience can be sort of alienating. They’re just people. They’re just people like your mom and your music teacher from third grade who are trying to be actively informed citizens in the world. Not everyone is an actively informed citizen of the world, but we’re trying to serve people who are.

I came from this traditional newspaper newsroom that was in a pretty tumultuous period while I was there and then went into a membership newsroom where we really developed relationships with the people who supported our work. We had monthly coffees with them where we just had coffee from Starbucks and some pastries and we sat in a circle and just talked about the big trends — the big threads in politics, education, climate and things like that around San Diego where people probably didn’t have time to read every single story that we wrote on them.

That was our chance to make it more approachable and talk to them as people about what we were noticing that was happening in San Diego. I really believe in membership programs and I have since my first real year in journalism with the Voice of San Diego.

Another reason we’re invested in engagement is because it helps inform and better our reporting. For example, during the Denver teachers strikes that just happened last week, we were able to send out a few forms and a few surveys to get teachers and students’ stories of their experience during the strike. We also asked what main questions parents and teachers still had that weren’t really being answered. So engagement can shine a light on what is not being fulfilled and what the voids are in coverage that we can help people understand.

Coming from a membership background, is there anything that’s surprised you about the rise of subscriptions and membership?

What’s funny to me about that is it sort of reminds me of the old divide between journalists and the people who are responsible for the business of journalism. Because I think journalists all (or mostly all) get into this business because they are thinking about serving readers — they’re thinking about the role that their work is going to play in society and how are they going to help the greater good by writing their story.

Now the folks on the business side are thinking more about serving readers and serving people so that they invest in these media outlets, which is just a funny full circle. That’s why you’re seeing all of these subscription models pop up, along with all of these tiers of access that media outlets are offering readers, subscribers, and donors.

It’s been interesting to see the big boom in membership models since being at Voice of San Diego. Now I think there are these go-to options that you can offer people who become members. I personally enjoy being a Slate Plus member, but I think that is sort of what people think of for membership models now — people get an ad-free experience or bonus content on podcasts or maybe they get early ticket sales to Slate events and Slate panels.

And I like all of those things, but I always have to remind myself: I am not an average user. I am not an average reader. It’s a trap that a lot of people fall into. I think in all of my jobs I’ve played this every-man kind of role — as a journalist I’ve always been a generalist — and in a lot of cases that’s been good for me because I feel like I can help translate work for a wider audience without dumbing it down or without screwing it up.

What is a challenge you’ve faced while doing engagement work?

I think a big challenge, and it feels cliche to even talk about, is honestly burnout. I work on the internet and live on the internet and that never goes to sleep. There is a spiral you can get into where you’re just working constantly and hoarding a lot of information and trying to do so much that you don’t really give yourself time to be thoughtful about what you want to do next. I’m trying to avoid that as much as possible and I think I’m getting better about that as I get older.

I also think cynicism is a trap of this job. If you spend too much time on Twitter, you end up following the people who work in media who are suspicious of everything — not that you shouldn’t be skeptical and take things with a grain of salt, but I think that in itself can be a grind. So while spending a lot of time on social, I try to let it not affect my brain (although I can’t really avoid that with memes.)

What is a project that you’re excited to work on?

I am really excited about working on our newsletter strategy because that is such a big need among our reporters and it is one of our core ways of reaching readers on a daily basis. So I’m excited to work with our digital marketing manager and our editor to make that the best product it can possibly be.

What’s something interesting you’ve seen recently from a media outlet other than your own?

I really liked Vox’s Future Perfect rollout. From what I can tell, it’s very similar to some of the ongoing series or species projects we would do at The Atlantic, where we’re sponsored by a major foundation or major company but we have editorial freedom (obviously). I liked the approach on the site itself, where it’s not fluffy feel-good stuff, but it’s like, these are the major crises facing our country and our society, here’s how people are trying to solve it, or here’s the super context-heavy (because it’s Vox) and super nuanced thing to consider when you see what’s claiming to be a cure-all. And I also really like the newsletter. That is one that I spend time reading through.

Lizzy Raben is an Atlantic Media fellow. This Q&A was originally published by Lizzy via The Idea.

‘Media is having this reckoning.’ was originally published in Chalkbeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Chalkbeat, we’ve fully embraced the value of bridge roles and product thinking. To build a news organization that can flex and bend with the ever-changing environment, it’s imperative to fill your ranks with smart people who can approach problems with both creativity and rigor. We call that “product thinking,” and we think it’s the only way to rebuild the news infrastructure that democracy needs.

Below, we feature a piece by Chalkbeat Director of Product Becca Aaronson on the rise of product thinkers, which was originally published in NiemanLab’s Predictions for Journalism 2019.

From bridge roles to product thinkers

By Becca Aaronson, Chalkbeat’s director of product

For the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of bridge roles in newsrooms across the country — engagement reporter, designer/developer, digital editor, growth editor, the list goes on. Many of these roles perform the same essential task: They connect the dots between disciplines to enable more strategic work. They are, essentially, product thinkers.

Product thinking is the ability to think across disciplines — most commonly technology, user experience, and business — to define and execute a strategic plan. But it’s not limited to product teams. You could also call this “taking a holistic approach” or “strategic thinking.” In 2019, I believe we’ll see more journalists take on this kind of interdisciplinary approach as we increasingly value the ability to connect the dots between editorial strategy, audience development, revenue, and technology.

We’re already seeing media companies invest in product teams to carve new paths for sustainable revenue and audience development — a mark of how the industry has embraced product thinking. And we’re seeing the work initially created by people in bridge roles cascade across newsrooms.

Vox Media and The Washington Post have built product teams to create scalable, revenue-driving publishing platforms. These platforms modernize editorial workflows by democratizing some of the work of bridge roles — engagement, analytics, visual storytelling.

At the Miami Herald, they’ve changed the position of online producer to growth editor, which integrates product thinking into the editorial process. “We wanted reporters and editors to take ownership of each story, from conceiving it with audience and mission in mind, to how to best present it on digital platforms, to how to make sure it would reach its target audience,” Mindy Marquez and Rick Hirsch told Better News.

The existence of bridge roles shows small and local newsrooms don’t need a product team or swaths of developers, designers, and user researchers to integrate cross-functional thinking into their work. A person doesn’t need to have a product title to be a product thinker. Newsrooms already have these strategists in their midsts — engagement editors, growth editors, digital editors — leading change.

In last year’s predictions, Federica Cherubini said we need to think about how bridge roles, and the people in them, can evolve. My hope is that in 2019, more of these cross-functional strategists will be promoted to positions of leadership. We need leaders across all levels who make decisions that balance the organization’s mission with the needs of their audience and technological capacity, and who can train others to do the same.

These will be managing editors who facilitate communication and interpret perspectives across teams; product managers who prioritize and establish clear workflows for building new products; engagement editors who evangelize for the best audience experience and news delivery possible; and growth editors who apply data to elevate and sharpen editorial strategy. They will be journalists who fight to protect editorial integrity, encourage us to reach new audiences, and ensure that we’re working toward sustainable revenue models.

As the silos in newsrooms continue to break down, it allows us to make more strategic decisions — decisions that are necessary for our industry’s survival. Journalists have rightly been focused on developing a culture of empathy for our audiences so that we can better reach and serve our readers, listeners, and watchers. We need to turn this empathy inward and learn how we can work together, merge our expertise, and create a bridge culture that pushes our industry forward.

Becca Aaronson is Chalkbeat’s director of product. This piece was originally published in NiemanLab’s Predictions for Journalism 2019.

How product thinking transforms our newsroom was originally published in Chalkbeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the original piece (republished below), Elizabeth Green writes about the journey to this week’s official launch of AJP. Read about what it is, why it exists, and what she hopes $42 million (and counting) will do for local news — and ultimately the fate of civic discourse and democracy.

Why I’m placing my bets on the American Journalism Project

By Elizabeth Green, Chalkbeat founder, CEO, and editor

My inbox is accustomed to cold pitches. I’ve been a reporter and editor for more than a decade. But starting a few years ago — and increasingly each and every month — I’ve been getting a new genre of email solicitation: the request for business coaching, from my fellow journalists.

There was the longtime newspaper editor in a rural town who thought there must be a better way to serve his community than the newspaper that is now forcing him to lay off reporters. There was the award-winning reporter dreaming of a news outfit covering racial justice in the rust belt. And then there was the West Coast editor who wants to serve not just his affluent neighborhood niche, but more vulnerable communities, too.

I love these emails. They add an invigorating balance to my daily diet of news about the decline of civic engagement, or about the latest newspaper to lay off journalists or get acquired by a hedge fund. The emailers are all groping through the same challenging journalism landscape, but with a commitment to reinvention and growth against the odds. They give me hope.

They are the reason that, today, an incredible team of colleagues and I are officially launching a new project aimed at answering the call that those email solicitations represent. A project that will offer far more dedicated business coaching than I can provide, and that can supplement it with what these ambitious journalists need most: investment. Real cash money.

We’re calling it AJP, the American Journalism Project. Step one for AJP was to raise the kind of money that hasn’t yet been invested in local journalists with big dreams, much less in local, public-interest journalism businesses that put the public interest first and can sustain and grow their reporting for years into the future. We picked the number, $50 million, carefully — enough to make a difference, to provoke the boldness this moment in history requires, but not so much that we couldn’t invest it responsibly. (For more on how we did the math, read this.) Incredibly, we’re now $42 million of the way toward our goal.

Step two will be giving meaningful grants to the most promising local news institutions, both those that are already emerging and some that don’t yet exist. We are aiming these grants at the long term.

I know from my own experience building Chalkbeat — now one of the fastest-growing local news organizations in the country, with a team of more than 50 — that what is most needed is not one-year grants to support individual reporting projects, though those are nice. What is most needed is investment in organizations’ capacity to sustain themselves, and to grow.

We need expert teams whose sole focus is raising diverse revenue for news. We need product and technology talent to keep our work as high-impact as possible. We need strategic leadership and operational capacity to turn newsrooms with modest footprints into scaled institutions. And we need the real dollars required to build truly diverse teams of journalists, serving diverse readers, with diverse leadership, founding teams, and governing bodies.

There’s no guarantee we’ll succeed, crazy to think every news organization we support will meet its goals, and easy to think of reasons we might fail. But I’m much more comfortable taking the risk than not. Like so many journalists all across America have already done by starting new local news outfits, we need to set our fears to the side and take every step we can toward what we know our democracy needs. I have invested my own time and efforts in AJP, as co-founder and board chair, because I truly believe that making substantive investments in some of the hardest-working, biggest-dreaming journalists is the best shot we have at realizing a very important vision.

And anyway, my inbox needs someplace better to steer people to.

PS — About that: Here’s how to stay in touch. Sign up here to stay posted via email as we move forward. The team expects to make information about its grant process available in early summer. And if you want to talk more, write to Jason Alcorn, our founding VP of operations, for more information. His email is jason@theajp.org.

Elizabeth Green is the founder, CEO, and editor of Chalkbeat, and the cofounder of the American Journalism Project. This content was first published by Elizabeth Green.

The death of local news has been greatly exaggerated. Welcome the American Journalism Project was originally published in Chalkbeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The series took more than a year to report and write; below is the story (originally published by GroundSource) of how we used SMS — old technology that’s cool again — to tell this critical story.

How Chalkbeat connected with people it didn’t know to listen to

By Sara Catania for GroundSource

When Erin Einhorn and her tiny team at Chalkbeat, a non-profit covering K-12 education, partnered with Bridge Magazine on an investigation into the city’s public schools, their reporting revealed that one in three Detroit elementary students switched schools every year.

The high transfer rate left teachers struggling with the disruption, and test scores fell. No one knew why so many students were switching schools, and then switching again. Einhorn, Chalkbeat Detroit’s bureau chief, decided to find out.

“When we started this project there was already solid research about the impact of school transience and how it affected kids and classrooms in general,” she said. But two things were missing: the classroom-level details that described the impact in a narrative way, and why so many Detroit families were making the choice to switch schools, often not once, but multiple times.

First, Einhorn took a traditional journalistic approach, selecting one classroom at a specific school. She and Bridge Magazine’s Chastity Pratt Dawsey spent many hours in the classroom, learning the stories of each student and their family to build a compelling narrative.

The 31 eighth-graders in the class they focused on had collectively attended a total of 128 schools — an average of more than four schools each. But after several months, Einhorn realized that this was just part of the story, on its own not be sufficient to answer the questions she’d set out to address.

“Part of it was the nature of the process,” she said. On the one hand, getting to know one classroom can be helpful. But parents who know their names and their kids’ names are going to be published might be reluctant to disclose information that might reflect negatively on them, or expose their children to ridicule. “If the reason I changed schools is that my kid was expelled, I wouldn’t necessarily reveal that,” Einhorn said.

“You do your best to make your networks as broad and diverse as possible, but you’re always sort of limited, and you can end up trapped in an echo chamber.”

Einhorn also worried that her pool of sources was not broad enough to capture important elements of the reporting. She was certain she was missing big parts of the story. “I was limited to my network, and the networks of the people in my networks.” she said. “You do your best to make your networks as broad and diverse as possible, but you’re always sort of limited, and you can end up trapped in an echo chamber.”

She set about to supplement that reporting with another approach, one that cast a wider net and enabled participants to retain some degree of anonymity, if they chose to. The first few attempts were stumbles. “We tried to send an email blast to Detroit Public School employees,” she said. “But it got caught in their spam filter and we couldn’t get it out.”

The “Ah Ha” Moment

Eventually Einhorn found her way to GroundSource, an SMS-based texting platform that enables news outlets to connect directly with people on their phones (full disclosure: I’m chief storyteller for GroundSource and am writing this piece on their behalf). She’d heard about it from Sarah Alvarez, a journalist-entrepreneur who had a desk at the same co-working space as Chalkbeat, and whose reporting approach at Outlier Media was built on GroundSource.

At Outlier, Alvarez buys giant bundles of Detroit cell phone numbers from marketing companies and then blind-texts them, offering recipients information on the status of the properties where they live. If they want to know whether landlord owes back taxes or their building is due for an inspection, all they have to do is text their address back to Alvarez, who responds with the information.

“I was like, ‘oh my God, I can get a message directly into the hands of parents and communicate with them one-on-one.”

During a demo, Alvarez had Einhorn enter a code on her phone, which elicited an instant response via text. In Einhorn’s words, “This was my ‘ah ha’ moment. I was like, ‘oh my God, I can get a message directly into the hands of parents and communicate with them one-on-one.”

Outlier’s model is built on filling information gaps in the community, which was different from what Einhorn was looking for. But Alvarez was intrigued by the Chalkbeat project, and agreed to develop a GroundSource-based parent survey.

“Part of the reason I wanted to do this is because a lot of reporting on education is based on data that doesn’t necessarily align with the issues parents want to know about,” Alvarez said. “I was excited to get some parent-generated data.”

Conducting the Survey

Using a list of Detroit phone numbers purchased from a marketing agency and divided among all city zip codes, Alvarez sent more than 32,000 texts. She received about 1,000 responses and from those culled a group of 100 parents of students attending Detroit public schools to participate in the survey.

Alvarez, said she “dusted off” the survey design skills she learned while earning a dual degree in law and public health, “so we could ask questions in a way that don’t lead people to certain conclusions.” She then had the questions vetted by a couple of social scientists to confirm that the approach was solid.

“We tried to strike a balance between getting enough information and not eroding our sources’ trust by asking for too much information over the intimate medium of SMS.”

The survey was designed to take no more than five minutes to complete. In total, she created 53 questions, though no respondent saw more than ten. “We tried to strike a balance between getting enough information and not eroding our sources’ trust by asking for too much information over the intimate medium of SMS,” Alzarez said. Those who completed all ten questions received a texted $10 Amazon gift card as a thank you.

The survey, conducted over a three-week period in May and June of 2018, focused on on the oldest child in each household, asking how many times the child had switched schools outside of normal graduations. “We then asked what type of school they switched from and to and why the switch was made,” Alvarez said. “We also asked parents if they thought switching schools had helped or hurt the ability of their child to succeed in school and what they looked for when choosing a new school.” The questions each person saw depended on their answers to the previous questions.

Survey Responses

Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy filing five years ago was the largest in U.S. history, and its ongoing economic challenges are well documented, including one of the highest rates of poverty in the country, poor housing stock and a high rate of housing instability. At the start of the project, Einhorn said, nearly everyone she talked to thought most parents would cite a direct cause-and-effect relationship between at least one of those factors and the frequency of switching schools.

“Children were changing schools because they could.”

But in the majority of instances, she said, that wasn’t true. “All of those reasons combined were not even collectively a majority,” Einhorn said. “Children were changing schools because they could,” she said. “Their schools were bad. It was a toxic mix of really low quality schools and really high opportunity for school choice.”

As Einhorn and Dawsey wrote, “overwhelmingly, Detroit parents said they moved their children to new schools because they wanted better for their child — a safer school, a cleaner school, the kind of school where their children could thrive.”

With GroundSource, the story about an individual school was supplemented with a story with the force of 100 parent voices from a broad array of schools throughout the district. The breadth of voices and perspectives elevated the power and the credibility of the project, Einhorn said. “When you want to get out of that ‘how do I find the people who don’t know the people I know,’ ” she said, “this is a way to do that.”

Project Impact and Next Steps

The project “got a lot of attention from city and state leaders,” Einhorn said, including the leading candidates in the November gubernatorial race, both of whom pledged to take a closer look at the challenges facing Detroit families with school-age children, including putting more funding toward busing.

One piece in the project laid out five recommendations that could help relieve the school switching problem. And once the project was published, all of the participating families received a text with a link to the piece and an invitation to a forum focused on the findings.

Will Chalkbeat be using similar methods in its future reporting? “We were having a story meeting yesterday,” Einhorn said. “And my colleague said, ‘You know, this would be a great story for us to use GroundSource.’ ”

Sara Catania is the chief storyteller for GroundSource. This content was first featured in GroundSource’s weekly newsletter and on their Medium account.

Why are Detroit students switching schools so often? How Chalkbeat used SMS to find out was originally published in Chalkbeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Elizabeth Green

Appreciation is nice, but isn’t recognition better?

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, I want to reprise some of the strongest voices we’ve showcased in Chalkbeat so far this year: those of teachers. Nobody can tell the story of American education better than the people who create it every single day.

That was certainly the case for the following four teachers, who volunteered their time and, more importantly, their wisdom when they contributed to Chalkbeat’s reporting over the past year.

So here’s an idea: Thank one of them — or a teacher you know yourself — by making a donation to Chalkbeat in their honor. It’s a double-whammy kind of gift, because it’s easy (just click here) and meaningful (proceeds will go toward supporting our ability to tell more teachers’ stories in the months to come). We’re also sending an extra gift to the first 10 teachers to be honored, courtesy of our sponsor Yoobi, the very cool school supplies company. (By the way, check out their tear-jerking thank-you to teachers this week.) Plus, we’ll feature some of the honored teachers on Chalkbeat.

Oh, and one more thing: Thanks to a generous $10,000 matching gift from Rick Smith, one of my own incredible teachers, every donation will be doubled. (Rick was the longtime editor-in-chief and CEO of Newsweek, and I’ve learned a lot from him about leading a journalistic enterprise.)

Now, on to the teachers.

Quincy Stewart

We featured Quincy Stewart of Detroit’s Central High School because of his distinctive approach to teaching music, which blends African-American history with music theory. But it was the way he described a quintessential American teacher experience — being subject to policies outside your control — that made him unforgettable.

“It’s kind of like being…at the bottom of a latrine,” he said. “The biggest thud from what comes into the latrine lands at the bottom… Us teachers have really felt the thud of the crap.”

Sable Otey

Lately, whenever I push myself to add a workout into my busy day, I think of Sable Otey. For the last year, Otey would teach for a full day at her Memphis elementary school — and then spend a second full day training for the Olympics.

She told us how she found her motivation: “I realized I have been an inspiration to so many people, so many kids, so many adults, even, in my community. Just coming from Binghamton, being told some of the things that some of the kids are being told now — that they’re not going to be anything. They’re not going to get a college degree. I’ve overcome all of those obstacles.”

When students share their challenges with her, she tells them her own life story. “I think it’s my job to do that because it’s a village. Back when villages were raising people, a village actually raised me: my principals, my teachers, people in my community. All of those people helped me become who I am today.”

Ilona Nanay

You know “driveway moments,” when you stop what you’re doing to finish listening to a great radio story? I had one of those when I read teacher Ilona Nanay’s account of the pang of sadness she felt at her Bronx high school’s first-ever graduation ceremony. She was reading the graduation program, and all the students had notes next to their names sharing the college they planned to attend in the fall — except for two.

“These young women started high school as English learners and were diagnosed with learning disabilities. Despite these obstacles, I have never seen two students work so hard,” Nanay wrote. “By the time they graduated, they had two of the highest grade point averages in their class.”

“It would have made sense for them to be college-bound,” she continued. “But neither would go to college. Because of their undocumented status, they did not qualify for financial aid, and, without aid, they could not afford it.”

Jose Romero

I’m reserving this last entry for the person whose story gave me the most goose bumps. Jose Romero, a high school senior in Queens who is Mexican American, wrote about the perils of spending the first decade of his education never having a teacher who looked like him.

He framed his moving and beautifully written piece around two stories.

The first is of a moment in fifth grade when a classmate asked him whether he crossed the border from Mexico. Romero didn’t, but both of his parents did. Theirs is a powerful story of hope, challenge, love, and fate — and one that his classmate, sadly, never got the chance to hear. When the question came up, the classmate mixed it with a degrading slur about immigrants, and instead of creating an opportunity for sharing and learning, the boys’ teacher let the slur pass and shot down any further conversation.

The second story Romero tells is of his high school, the first place he’s ever had a teacher of color. He’s now part of an all-male mentorship group led by two African-American teachers. “It’s hard to explain the way it feels to have a teacher who looks like you,” Romero writes; “they’re like older brothers who become a huge part of our lives, even if it’s just for four years. They make it easier to connect and socialize and help me feel more like I belong.”

Here’s the part that gave me goose bumps: Romero’s own plan for the future is to pay his mentor teachers’ gift forward by becoming a fifth-grade teacher himself.

What I want to give teachers for Teacher Appreciation Week was originally published in Chalkbeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Matt Barnum

In 2015, two Obama cabinet secretaries encouraged schools to try a new way of handling free lunch: give it to everyone, no family paperwork required.

The hope was that the expanded program would “both improve child nutrition and reduce administrative burdens,” wrote Arne Duncan and Tom Vilsack. Others believed the lunch and breakfast for all would reduce any stigma associated with the free and reduced-price lunch program.

Now, a new study suggests the program succeeded on one dimension, making students in at least one state slightly healthier in the process. Participating in the program increased the share of a school’s students in the healthy weight range, according to the Georgia State University researchers, Will Davis and Tareena Musaddiq.

It’s an encouraging finding for the initiative — perhaps the first time its health effects been carefully studied — and aligns with other research showing that students benefit academically from access to food stamps and school meals. Yet a substantial number of eligible schools still don’t participate in the initiative, raising questions about whether lots of students are missing out on its benefits.

“If we’re able to find these benefits for the program on health, it may be … important to reconsider participation for schools that are eligible and are not participating,” said Davis.

The paper, which has not been formally peer-reviewed, examines the federal “community eligibility” program as it played out in Georgia schools. It finds that the program did mean more students in eligible schools received free meals, as expected.

When they looked at its affect on students’ health, they found that it increased the share of students in a healthy weight range by 1 percentage point and led to a small drop in average body mass index. The effects were most pronounced in elementary and middle schools.

The health effects are something of surprise, since some past research has found that the federal free- and reduced-price meal program may actually contribute to obesity.

The authors of the latest study hypothesize that improvements to health and quality of school lunches may have played a part. The same law that created the “community eligibility” program also changed nutritional standards for school meals.

“Prior to the … revised standards, meals served in school may have been of lower quality relative to meals brought from home,” write Davis and Musaddiq. “In light of these nutrition standard changes, it is generally important that we revisit the relationship between school meals and child health.”

The Trump administration recently halted other rules put in place during the Obama administration designed to further cut sodium and increase whole grains in school lunches.

Considering its encouraging findings, the paper concludes by noting that a large number of eligible schools in the study — 43 percent — did not participate in the free-lunch-for-all program.

Nationally, nearly half of qualifying schools didn’t take up the program in the 2016–17 school year, though that number that has fallen over time.

One explanation is likely that some eligible schools are not fully reimbursed for the costs of meals, meaning districts could take a financial hit from participating.

Another possible explanation is a bit ironic. The program was intended to ensure students are not stigmatized for getting free meals, but the researchers suggest some schools may be responding to stigma around the program itself.

If that’s true, the authors write, “the choice may come at the expense of forgone improvements to the health of their students.”

Free school lunch for all, meant to reduce stigma, may also keep students healthier was originally published in Chalkbeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Through this conflict, our students are learning the importance, and the mechanics, of political participation.

By Amy Curran

I’ve spent the last 40 years watching the state I love divest in its future. The cuts to education budgets just kept coming. Oklahoma City Public Schools, where I spent the last 10 years working with teachers, had to cut over $30 million in the 2016–17 academic year alone.

Over time, students, teachers, and parents, at times including myself, became complacent. We all did what we could. For me, that meant working with the students and teachers in the most disenfranchised areas of my city.

In the past 18 months, that has also meant working at Generation Citizen, a nonprofit promoting civics education across Oklahoma. We help students deploy “action civics.” Over the course of a semester, students debate what they would change if they were in charge of their school, city, or state, and select one issue to address as a class, which may involve lobbying elected officials or building a coalition.

Their progress has been incredible. But when teachers across the state decided to walk out of their schools and head to the State Capitol to demand additional funding for education, action civics came to life in a huge way. And in addition to galvanizing our teachers, I watched this moment in Oklahoma transform young people.

My takeaway? Over the long term, this walkout will hopefully lead to more funding for our schools. But it will definitely lead to a more engaged youth population in Oklahoma.

These past two weeks have sparked a fire that will not let up anytime soon. With actual schools closed, the Oklahoma State Capitol became a laboratory rich with civic experimentation. Students from Edmond Memorial High School wanted elected officials to personally witness what students and teachers continue to accomplish, and when the walkout started, the students started a “Classroom at the Capitol.” Over 40 students held AP English Literature on the Capitol lawn. Their message: the state might not invest in their classrooms, but classes would go on.

In the first few days of the walkout, the legislature refused to take action. Many wondered if their voices were being heard. That’s when Gabrielle Davis, a senior at Edmond Memorial, worked to rally students to the Capitol for a massive demonstration.

“I want the legislators to put faces to the decisions they’re making,” Gabrielle said.

By Wednesday, the “Classroom at the Capitol” had grown to over 2,000 students. The students were taking effective action: speaking knowledgeably on the funding crisis, with a passion and idealism that only young people can possess.

As students’ numbers grew, so did their confidence. By Wednesday afternoon, I watched as the state Capitol buzzed with students not only protesting, but getting into the nitty-gritty of political change by learning the names and faces of their elected officials.

By Thursday and Friday, students and teachers were no longer operating independently. The collaboration which makes classroom learning most effective was happening in the halls of the Capitol. When students identified the representative holding up a revenue bill, they walked through the line to find students from his home district to lead the charge.

Last Monday, with the walkout still ongoing, the students I saw were armed with talking points and legislative office numbers. After another student rally, they ran off to the offices of their elected officials.

Two students, Bella and Sophie, accompanied by Bella’s mom, made their way to the fourth floor. The girls stood outside the door, took a deep breath, and knocked. State Senator Stephanie Bice was in a meeting. They stepped out to decide their next move and decided to write personal notes to their state senators. With letters written, edited, and delivered, Bella and Sophie were beaming.

“That feels so good,” Sophie said.

A week of direct civic action had turned protesters into savvy advocates.

Until this walkout, most of the participating students had never met their elected officials. But that’s quickly changing. Students have worked collaboratively to demystify the legislative process, understand the policy goals articulated by organizing groups, and advocate for revenue measures that would support a more equitable education system.

Jayke, a student from Choctaw, reflected on this reality. “These last few days at the Capitol I have learned more about life and how to stand up for what I believe.”

That’s no small thing. Over those 14 days, I listened to students use their voices to express their experiences. Many also spoke on behalf of students who were not there. They spoke for the 60 percent of Oklahoma public school students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. They rallied for the students at each of their schools who do not have enough food to eat.

Through this conflict, our students are learning the importance, and the mechanics, of political participation. Our young people are becoming powerful in a way that will outlast this funding crisis. It’s everything a civics educator could hope for.

Amy Curran is the Oklahoma site director for Generation Citizen, an education nonprofit.

I’m an Oklahoma educator who had become complacent about funding cuts. was originally published in Chalkbeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Vouchers are a favored policy of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, albeit one she’s so far had little success at pushing from Washington.

By Matt Barnum

Students who won a school voucher in Louisiana to attend their top-ranked private high school were 6 percentage points more likely to enroll in college than students who lost the lottery, according to a new study.

The findings are reasonably good news for voucher supporters, who recently had to confront huge drops in test scores because of Louisiana’s program. Still, the results were not statistically significant — meaning the researchers can’t confidently say that the voucher made the difference.

It’s the latest attempt to quantify the effects of school vouchers, which allow students to attend private school using public dollars. They are a favored policy of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, albeit one she’s so far had little success at pushing from Washington.

This study, which has not been formally peer-reviewed, focuses just on the first group of students who took advantage of Louisiana’s controversial voucher program starting in 2012.

Previous research on student achievement in the initial years of the program was decidedly negative. It found that students in elementary and middle school who won a voucher saw their test scores decline sharply. By year three of the program, some students had bounced back, but not others.

That’s why the latest results are particularly notable: the impact of vouchers on college enrollment was neutral, even potentially positive. Voucher recipients, who were lower-income and largely black, saw enrollment rates rise from 54 percent to 60 percent, the study estimates.

The data could bolster the case of school choice advocates who have increasingly rejected test scores as their benchmark of success, pointing instead to high school graduation or college enrollment rates.

“The pattern in the literature seems to suggest that schools affect students in positive ways that are not always detected in standardized tests,” write the authors Heidi Erickson, Jonathan Mills, and Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas.

(Debates on whether this is true have grown increasingly prominent, with some choice advocates highlighting studies where results between test scores and longer-run outcomes point in the same direction. This study doesn’t look at test scores.)

Mark Dynarski, a researcher who has studied voucher programs and reviewed the new Louisiana research at Chalkbeat’s request, said the study was sound. But he notes an important caveat: because of how the state allocates vouchers, the study only looks at students who won one for their top-ranked private school.

That doesn’t include students who got a voucher to attend a lower-ranked private school or students whose private schools not popular enough to need a lottery.

“Essentially the study is comparing how much better these first-choice schools are compared to ones parents rank lower, including public schools,” said Dynarski. “Parents who win a second or third-choice lottery can elect not to send their child there and instead stick with the public school.”

Of the nearly 10,000 students who applied for a voucher in Louisiana for the 2012–13 school year, the study looks at the less than 500 who were high school students who won a voucher lottery. The small sample may help explain why the study can’t confidently say whether vouchers had any effect on college enrollment.

Wolf said the study’s approach was the only option given how Louisiana distributes vouchers, and that the approach makes sense in light of the goal of the policy. “The first choice school is the one parents and students would most prefer to attend,” he wrote in an email. “That’s the whole intention of school choice.”

Louisiana vouchers have led to big drops in test scores, but they also might boost college… was originally published in Chalkbeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.