Reporting on Solutions in Education: Jemiece Raphael in Conversation with Sami Edge

By Jemiece Raphael

Photo of Sami Edge for Idaho Education News

Idaho-based journalist Sami Edge shared what she thinks about Solutions Journalism, and how that plays into reporting on education. Edge graduated from the University of Oregon in 2016 and was a student of their first-ever Solutions Journalism course. She currently has a focus on education, and on visualizing data. We talked a bit about her 2019 solutions article, “Washington Teachers Enforce High Standards,” and her process of reporting. The 2019 article was a part of a larger series of stories run by Devin Bodkin, a Solutions Journalism network fellow, reporter, and former teacher. The series covered some of the nation’s highest poverty schools that were top-performing and what they were doing to boost achievement among all students. 

How did you get this story, and how did you get into the mindset to report on it?

I graduated from the University of Oregon in 2016, I was in one of the first solutions journalism classes there. I had done solutions work in college, so I had a bit of [a] baseline for how to do these stories, which is really helpful, because you can go through the checklist of “Have I looked at the limitations? What am I seeing from the data?” So I approached it with that training in mind. [To find the story] we looked at the data. Devin was part of this and he worked with a couple of researchers who examined which schools were overperforming compared to other schools with similar demographics with poverty in particular.

How did you find your sources for this story? For me, getting people to talk from educational institutions is really hard. How did you build that trust between you and the person you’re interviewing, say the teacher and the principal, for them to be transparent about the limitations?

That can be a real challenge. The school had been the winner of a Blue Ribbon award and that requires a pretty frank discussion of limitations, and discussion of improvement of the data, so there was a lot of that undocumented. The teachers and principal spoke about it a lot because they won this award, and they were a part of the “No excuses” network (“an educational model that aims to prepare every student for college by holding them to high standards and using data to measure and drive student improvement,” according to the article) So they were very well-practiced in discussing exactly how they changed the school and what led to this turnaround. 

A lot of these teachers started this turnaround from absolute rock bottom so they started by talking about it. They were very accustomed to examining the problem, and that doesn’t change really once you’ve started having success. They were still very in tune with places they felt they were falling short and open to talking about those because they knew that could hopefully fix it.

What are some tips for when you’re speaking with people who aren’t as, “Let’s get to the bottom of this”?

It's definitely a challenge for me too, getting people to be upfront about the limitations. I think being very, intimately familiar with the data is helpful because then you could point out to them in the data [and ask], “Oh you guys are doing very well in this area, but not here, can you explain that to me?” Also framing the question about “What are the limitations/what are the challenges?” Those are two words that don’t scare people too badly, so I tend to stick with those while I’m interviewing for solutions stories.

How did you work the data into the story?

Our team internally made those [visual data sets for the whole series], and they’re helpful to illustrate these points. They help people who might not follow a whole string of numbers in the story be able to see what you’re talking about in a different format. It’s also helpful to have graphs because then you don’t have to get into every single data-point. 

What are the dos’ and don'ts for reporting on education in solutions journalism?

That’s a tricky question, I don’t have a lot of 'don'ts'. For dos’ I would say: I have always found it easy to report on solutions if you know you have the data from the outset. If there’s not very much data from the outset, it can be much more difficult to write the story from a purely anecdotal data standpoint. It's not impossible, it’s just harder. I always start it with the data, and then I ask “Is there a student I can connect with? Is there a family I can connect with?” Look for that narrative that helps illustrate the data, because that’s what’s going to navigate your readers. That can be more difficult in education reporting, because you’re dealing with the student and sometimes schools are hesitant to connect you with a student because they’re afraid for those students’ privacy, but as long as you’ve got the parents on board, that’s good. 

What should pitching an educational solutions story look like?

First, your pitch should have the data to illustrate that it’s a solution and then it really needs to illustrate why should we care: What is the impact on the student? What is that impact on the rest of that student’s life? That makes that important. One of the greatest things about education reporting is that everything is very high stakes. How well these programs work really does have high importance on the rest of the kid’s life.

What if an educational solution is temporary? Is it still a solution to you?

I guess the temporary solution would be something that’s in place for one school or two school years, but doesn’t really become a part of systemic change.  If there’s enough data to show the efficacy, it can still be a solutions story, and I think that’s exactly where you look for limitations, particularly when you’re dealing with schools. If something doesn’t have long-term funding or if something seems like it’s only going to be around for a year or two, schools are often very hesitant to invest in that, because it takes a lot of effort to learn something that’s going to change again in the next year.

Why do you think that solutions journalism isn’t as prevalent as traditional journalism in the news?

I think for a couple of reasons. One of them is that I think that journalists are often driven to report on things that seem frustrating or outrageous. Things that will frustrate or outrage an audience, often, those things are very news-worthy things, but we don’t often think about the things that show a lot of promises being just as worthwhile [and] just as worthy of being in a story. I also think that doing good Solutions reporting is hard and it takes time to do it well, and unfortunately, many of our colleagues are strapped with [several] stories a week, tight deadlines, and shrinking staffs, and don’t always have the time to invest in doing this kind of work properly.

Why do you think it’s important that we do more solutions journalism?

I think it helps illustrate the path forward. If you have a body of research on things that could work, that can be really insightful for school districts that are maybe looking for a solution to the same problem. This is something one of my favorite professor’s used to point out in college: When you have a pressing problem that has been reported on a million times from the problem angle and you have officials who maybe are dragging their feet or keep saying that they're unable to solve this problem. Doing the solutions reporting really begs for accountability. It makes them confront the realities that there are potential solutions out there, and it keeps them accountable for being in charge of fixing problems.