Posts Tagged ‘Education’

  • 25 Jul

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    Propublica and The Opportunity Gap

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    This is somewhat similar to a post I did on mining education data back in February—clearly, the topic is a real interest of mine.

    Propublica, with its story package titled, “The Opportunity Gap,” has taken data on public school districts fairly similar to that offered by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, but the nonprofit news organization made a conscious effort to make the data more social:

    Sharing — the Facebook aspect of the app — is a big part of the behavior ProPublica’s news apps team wanted to encourage for its users…One small-but-key feature: With that integration, users who are signed into Facebook can generate an individual URL for each cluster of data they dig up — the Cambridge [MA]-versus-Medfield-versus-Lawrence comparison, say — to make sharing and referencing the data almost seamless. The resulting page has a “share on Facebook” button along with a note: “Use this hashtag to share your insights on Twitter: #myschoolyourschool.”

    Since last time I was a bit nepotistic in picking my own high school, this time I looked at data from schools close to where my family currently lives—Dallas, Texas.

    W.T. White high school would be our local public school. The percentage of students who receive free or reduced-price lunch, a measure of poverty, is 68 percent—well below the average of  86 percent for Dallas Independent School District as a whole (side note: seriously? Eighty-six percent? And this is the state that voted to cut $4 billion from the education budget).

    If you look at the custom link I created, comparing nearby schools, there is one surprising data point: Highland Park high school, a mere seven miles and 15-minute drive away, has zero kids on free or reduced-price lunch. More kids, though, at W.T. White take advanced math. I would love to find out why—perhaps a Jaime Escalante (of Stand and Deliver fame) is at work?

    In order to paint the full picture of Dallas high schools, you would need to include private school data. I’ve yet to find a database for that. A goal for the future, to be sure.

  • 28 Feb

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    An Intro to CAR

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    I had the chance to meet up with two friends from my Poynter fellowship last summer this past weekend. They were in town for the 2011 Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR) conference in Raleigh, N.C. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend, but I was able to gain some second-hand knowledge from my friend Katelyn Polantz, an education reporter for the Roanoke Times.

    As an education reporter, she was obviously drawn to the session looking into education databases. One of the databases mentioned, the Common Core of Data from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, has a wealth of information on public school districts and their respective K-12 schools. I decided to take a jog down memory lane and pull data from the fine public school that gave me my diploma—Pine-Richland High School.

    Now, we always joked that we lived in a white picket fence-type “bubble”—and the demographic data certainly supports that notion. Out of 1,442 total high school students in grades 9-12, there is/are:

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 30 Aug

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    First Day of School

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    My summer will officially end at 2:50 p.m. when I go to my first class of my last year in college. With the start of a new year comes a plethora of opportunities—you can anyone you want to be (why yes, I will take that flier to try out for your a cappella group and Bhangra dance troupe!). Fortunately, though, I know I want to be a journalist, and I have spent the past three summers working to ease the transition from student-journalist to professional, paid, real-person, real-job journalist (by the way, my resume and clips pages are all up to date with this summer’s activities).

    While they don’t get paid and normally don’t get published by traditional media outlets during the year, student-journalists are still journalists. As Robert Niles of the Knight Digital Media Center points out in his advise for journalism students blog post, the career of a student-journalist has already begun.

    His other advice includes:

    • Everyone who posts online has the potential to be a journalist. Immediate access to a global publishing medium allows any source to become a breaking news reporter, even if it is only for a fleeting moment.
    • Your career is only as strong as your network. Networking has taken a digital turn thanks to the rise of social media. Now, you no longer have to have met someone in the flesh to make a professional connection.
    • Get passionate about a field and start to master it. Niles recommends turning it into a second major. My second major, for the record, is Spanish—I consider it a tool to hopefully allow me to reach more people and travel across the globe.
    • Conduct yourself as a journalist, at all times, and never stop reporting. This goes back to bullet point number one: anything posted online has to potential to be newsworthy to someone else. Journalists by definition are unbiased and open-minded—any hint of bias could come back to become your own personal Kate Moss cocaine scandal.

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  • 23 Aug

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    Poison Ivy or Sacred Walls?

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    UPDATE: Samantha Liss, one of my newest followers on Twitter and recent Missouri journalism school graduate, tweeted a link to this article from a Buffalo newspaper, which tackles this issue from a debt load perspective. Is a journalism graduate program worth many years of student loan payments? The two men interviewed in the article say yes.

    Recently, I heard a great analogy, one that you instantly commit to memory and will surely repeat a few times to others:

    Journalism is like art. We need someone to pay us to do it, and we’ll create masterpieces.

    I’ve made an entire life out of getting someone else to fund what I want to do (thanks Mom and Dad), but I’m sure that eventually I’ll be kicked out of my family’s financial nest and have to fly on my own. So maybe someday I’ll have to make a decision about paying for my own post-graduate school, like Leslie Minora wrote about in her blog post entitled Columbia Journalism School Is Worth Time and Money Even Though It Won’t Make You Rich; There, I Said It.

    Minora paid a sticker price of $51,156 for her 10-month program at Columbia Journalism School. The school estimates a total cost of $75,206 when you add in living expenses (food, rent, utilities, travel, personal). If you are thinking monetarily, this was her return on her investment (her words, not mine):

    • She’s working at her ninth internship, this one as a blogger for the Village Voice (she doesn’t say if its paid or not)
    • scraping by on rent with her parents’ help
    • eking out the rest of the summer on school health insurance

    I’m no stranger to a costly education. I will pay (correction: my parents will pay) $51,865 for my final year at Duke.  And I, too, am going into journalism, regardless of the practicality of my decision or lack thereof.  For a journalism student (and those funding one), money cannot be the main motivator. Instead, these have to be the type of returns used to measure your investment, courtesy of Minora:

    • a strange masochistic work ethic that allows her to find satisfaction in stress and poverty
    • a solid foundation of reporting and writing essentials
    • empowerment to break certain rules when you at least know they exist and can operate from a reasonably expansive body of knowledge (the difference between sounding like an imbecile and actually saying something intelligent)
    • a never-boring life

    Practical from a money standpoint? Nope. An infinitesimal beacon of hope that happiness transcends money? O yes. Keep fighting the good fight, Leslie, and maybe someday we can push our respective shopping carts full of our possessions together in Central Park and reminisce about the myriads of people we’ve talked to, places we’ve seen and events we’ve experienced.

    My trip to Fez, Morocco, last November was also priceless. This would be the herd of sheep that almost ran us over on the outskirts of the town.