Alexander Russo

Some vast majority of school systems assign students to schools by strict geographic (and thus economic) boundaries known as local school districts and neighborhood attendance zones.  The exceptions — magnet and themed schools, most charter schools, and districts with universal choice — are relatively few and far between.  That’s why parents “stealing” a better education […]

Teach and Frisk – The Awl http://t.co/KAT8Oj9FJR @lwoodhouse on one LAUSD teacher’s attempt at restorative justice pic.twitter.com/nGJjwzeJyL — alexanderrusso (@alexanderrusso) April 20, 2015 There’s one thing that seems for sure about today’s big LAUSD school board elections:  national media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ and AP seem to be paying nearly […]

Can racism be stopped in the third grade? A look at the controversial Fieldston experiment: http://t.co/SQTDO1y7YT pic.twitter.com/SLv30yw1J7 — New York Magazine (@NYMag) May 19, 2015 NY Magazine has a big cover story about Fieldston’s controversial white privilege awareness efforts, which makes what seems like the fifth story on the topic. Well, maybe it’s not that […]

Late last week, a big new report purporting tell the public how honest state test score results were came out from two pro-standards nonprofits (Achieve and the Collaborative for Student Success). Basically, the report compared state-produced achievement scores to national NAEP results. Some states like New York were ranked as top truth tellers. Others like Tennessee […]

Screengrab from a recent piece on Common Core testing coverage. Before launching this blog, I only had the occasional chance to look into media coverage of education with any depth or regularity. Most of the time, what I had time to do was little more than asking a question or two via email or on […]

According to Vox’s Dara Lind, Liberals are reducing one of the most fascinating speeches of Obama’s career to a Fox News joke. Describing a Tuesday night panel at Georgetown featuring Obama, researcher Robert Putnam, AEI head Arthur Brooks (yes, that guy who gave that speech about how to talk about education), and columnist E. J. […]

Despite all the education news coverage that’s being produced these days, there are always stories and angles that seem like they’ve been missed or downplayed (or are in the works, ideally). Here are a few that I’ve been wanting to read but haven’t yet seen: *Inside a Common Core test room. Despite all the coverage […]

One more thing from that recent Inside Philanthropy article about news coverage and foundation support to consider is the claim that there’s a double standard when it comes to public attention for media outlets receiving private foundation dollars depending on whether the money comes from a progressive foundation or not. In What’s Up With That […]

Screenshot from the New Yorker article “How to Stop Mass Incarceration.” I learned from a recent New Yorker article that in criminal justice circles “reformers” are the ones who are pushing back against accountability and narrow measures of public safety in favor of softer, more nuanced approaches. This is the the opposite of the dominant […]

It’s hard to get very far these days without running into a story written by the Hechinger Report. The nonprofit outlet based at Columbia University’s Teacher College seems to produce an enormous amount of coverage each week, which has resulted in several award-winning pieces. Its liberal content-sharing policy means that its stories appear in all […]