"A newspaper that does not challenge its community's values and preconceptions will lose respect for failing to provide the honesty and leadership that newspapers are expected to offer.”
I also made it a requirement that at least one of their story ideas they pitched needed to challenge our community's beliefs. This was a really good way to frame our discussion because the students did not come in with generic topics; they came in with well-thought out directions for stories they wanted to pursue.
Even, and maybe especially, the students who were new this term came in with ideas regarding students being assigned classes they claim they did not register for, the gigantic gap in class expectations, atmosphere and rigor between the AP classes and the mainstream classes that is resulting in so many kids signing up for the AP classes, and several other stories that are more relevant to our school.
The editorial board is planning on a c-spread expose into social media. They would like to establish a fake facebook profile as a student at our school and see how many students friend them and what kind of information they share with them without even knowing who they are. I have urged caution on this, so that they do not share data and information which would have had the expectation of privacy, and we have talked about the ethics of misrepresenting yourself online and then reporting about it. I have also prepared them to expect that perhaps, they will receive very few friends, and there may not be a story. If we don't get a lot of traction on this early next week, it may have to be pushed to the next issue, and it may even be better that it is.
We also had a story fall into our lap, which will require some work and investigation and may need to run in the last issue of the year, but it could prove to be very interesting. One of my coworkers is challenging the MN Department of Education and the Pearson company which creates the standardized tests that all students take. She has two students who did work that she judges as equal on a test. One of them passed and the other did not. She has asked why they did not pass, and received answers such as: there are other factors on the rubric that the classroom teachers do not have access to; you cannot use other student essays or the sample essays they give out to compare student papers,you must use the anchor paper, which is housed at the state offices and cannot leave that building; the people who grade the essay are given two days of training, and they are not required to be certified in English . This is especially frustrating as the people who teach are under such increasing scrutiny for their content and skill delivery, but those that assess to determine the teachers' and students' success don't even need to be content specialists???
At any rate, we have a couple of stories that could shape up to be really important to our school community and maybe beyond, and they are exactly the types of stories I would like my students to be talking about.
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