Unless teachers and parents make extraordinary efforts, most students who choose to become part of print and online news programs in high schools tend to be more progressive than their peers, or at least more interested in prodding and pushing against the status quo.
That is important for any newish adviser to know from the start of a career, and good for even the most veteran advisers to remember.
I bring this up because school boards are in the news (and that is rarely a good thing). In Douglas County, the politics are raw and unavoidable, with the latest development being that the district will be releasing the names of the over 1,300 teachers and staff who called out sick a couple weeks ago, causing schools to close for the day. Evidently, this was prompted by someone requesting this information and a nearby district in the same situation about eight years ago was ordered by a court to do the same thing.
In Jefferson County, those names were released after a similar work stoppage soon after several radical board members were recalled. A recall election can't be held until officials have been in office for at least six months, so that may still be in DougCo's future. Based on current tensions, it would be shocking if there were NOT a recall election this June.
Also this week: San Francisco voters overwhelmingly recalled three school board members, with the major complaint being that those recalled were too focused on social justice issues and not focused enough on getting kids back to "normal" school. But the "winning" side ended up being Chinese-American parents who objected to some schools being forced to bring in more minority students. Lowell HS, for instance, is a high performing school whose students are overwhelmingly Asian or white.
The California district was also the object of some derision as the board spent lots of time and effort on renaming schools whose namesakes had some sort of objectionable past. And in the midst of the pandemic, so less.
Asians are not a numerical minority in San Francisco, and they value the extra push, so to speak, that a challenging school like Lowell can provide their children. The issue of education excited a lot of Chinese-American voters, a group that does not always engage politically, according to several news reports.
Circling back to my original point, that journalism students tend to be a bit more progressive than their peers and their communities, a true challenge is finding ways to protect excited students from getting too far into the weeds while balancing their free expression rights and not dismantling their idealism.
Extreme views, however satisfying and even honored by some, are usually reined in by reality. The truth is that for every Douglas County, where politics and a regular back and forth between reactionaries who would be fine with the public school system becoming completely privatized and with moderates who value public schools and supporting new ways to be more and more inclusive in our schools, there is a San Francisco, where some school leaders may have become distracted from the basic goal of supporting students and the teachers who help them develop.
A school media program that gets out ahead of the community risks losing readers and risks narrowing it coverage and its curiosity.
The editors of the school paper probably chafe at some of the "old" ideas they see in their communities. They are eager for change and they may be fine with stirring up trouble. "Stirring up trouble" is not a bad goal for news media, BTW, but there is danger for the teacher advisers who find themselves in a weird gray area: Not journalists. Not outside readers. Not members of the administration.
I will get into this tension that advisers must negotiate in my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment