“Education touches every family, drives state budgets and shapes long-term economic mobility. Yet news organizations continue to underinvest in covering it, treating it as a starter beat, allocating too few reporters to cover too many districts, and paying them less than the teachers they cover." 🔥
Year-end thanks to @greezbock.bsky.social, @kristajohnson.bsky.social, @laurapowellesq.bsky.social,
Kelsey Piper, Ekemini Ekpo, Alisha Thomas Searcy, and many others for their insights and contributions!
alexanderrusso.substack.com/p/the-grades...
To all the folks who trusted me with your stories, and to my colleagues who have been so generous with their friendship and support - thank you.
To any new or old connections, especially in the ed policy world, I’d love to hear from you.
✉️ Reach me at rgriesbach@tulane.edu.
I’m so grateful to the AL.com team for giving me the space to grow as a journalist, and now, to find a new path in education policy.
I’m so excited to dig in and try on some new hats, while keeping a focus on the kind of public service work that brought me to journalism in the first place.
Some personal news….
This project was my last for @aldotcom.
I’m starting a new position at Tulane’s Cowen Institute this week, where I’ll continue to work with education data to help improve outcomes for New Orleans students.
Thanks again to @edwriters.bsky.social for their support on this project, which helped me carve out the time and space to build relationships with students directly impacted by these policy changes. So grateful to all who have trusted me with their stories.
A 2024 bill, HB210, would have helped ease some of those restrictions. But it never reached a full vote.
“If we don’t change the trajectory, we will see communities that will continue to fall into poverty, that will continue to struggle,” one expert told me.
But one key group remains shut out.
With DACA in legal limbo, thousands of Alabama high schoolers are left with few options. My last story in this series explores the lasting impact of HB56, a 2011 state law that bars them from public colleges in the state.
www.al.com/educationlab...
Students told me they're putting their careers on hold to take care of family members or save up money, now that aid programs are limited. Others, meanwhile, are trying to rebuild what the state took apart.
www.al.com/educationlab...
Latino students already lag behind in college access and completion, a problem that may get even worse amid sweeping ICE raids and a flurry of anti-DEI directives and federal cuts.
www.datawrapper.de/_/CERmF/
🧵 For some students, Alabama is a uniquely challenging state to pursue a college degree.
Thanks to a grant from @edwriters.bsky.social, I was able to spend the past year speaking with 20+ Latino students and staff about how they're navigating higher ed today.
www.al.com/educationlab...
Our second story in this mini-series is out today:
www.al.com/educationlab...
Our CHOOSE coverage has been a huge team effort. More on tuition trends, policy questions and future outlooks here:
bsky.app/profile/gree...
None of these schools get much, if any, oversight from the state department disbursing the dollars. That means vetting of curricula and school quality comes down to two groups: parents, and a patchwork of private accredited, all with different rules.
www.al.com/educationlab...
Earlier this fall, I took a look at one of many new schools cashing in on the program. Here’s what it was like inside:
www.al.com/educationlab...
In Alabama, millions of dollars in taxpayer money are going to private schools that teach that humans lived among dinosaurs, and that rock music and mental health conditions are signs of rebellion.
Our latest story on the rollout of the state’s new CHOOSE Act:
www.al.com/educationlab...
Thank you friend 🫶
@al.com has been exploring Alabama's dramatic expansion of school choice -- and what it means for both public and private schools. @greezbock.bsky.social visited a school that just opened and is taking tax credits. www.al.com/educationlab...
So what's next?
Parents, teacher friends: I'd love to hear if y'all have questions about any of this, or if there's other data you'd like us to dig into.
Reach me on here or at rgriesbach@al.com.
@trishcrain.bsky.social has expertly detailed the gaps within school populations, both at the state and district level. For the first time, Alabama is parsing out scores between kids who live in poverty and those who don't.
And the results aren't pretty.
aldailynews.com/alabama-acap...
It's been interesting to witness Alabama's growth -- and its persistent challenges -- since schools shut their doors during COVID. In many ways, the state has bucked national trends. But there's a long, long road left ahead.
www.al.com/educationlab...
Who are the outliers, making big scores and big gains while met with high rates of student poverty?
We wrote about some standouts in the stories above (like Webb Elementary in Houston County), but I'd love to hear from educators: What are you doing that's moving the needle?
IMO, it shouldn't be up to journalists to interpret big results like this. There should be more of an effort from state leaders to present this data in a user-friendly way -- including the gaps among and between schools.
Because the truth is, there's SO much more to explore.
For example: ⬇️
a messy array of code in R used to make a visualization out of a recent test score release
a long list of dataframes made in R, ranging from big CSV files to smaller looks at student subpopulations and scores by race and ethnicity
some HTML code used to color code and format test scores in a user-friendly visualization
Education data is notoriously messy, and there's so much that goes into even the most simple analyses.
A peek behind the curtain 😅
This is my first go at covering ACAP scores since I took on the lead K-12 role at @al.com. Can't thank @edwriters.bsky.social enough for giving me the opportunity to learn R at Diving into Data in 2024 – I'd probably still be wrangling those 1M-row Excel files if I didn't have a script ready to go.
And growth varies widely by schools, too.
Cool to see lots of green on this dashboard -- some schools saw jumps as high as 30 percentage points in ELA and math.
But lots of high-poverty schools are still chronically underperforming.
www.al.com/educationlab...
Last week, we finally got a closer look at schools and systems.
On the district level, some systems saw double-digit gains in ELA, while others continue to slide in math and science.
www.al.com/educationlab...
Statewide, scores are trending up in math and English language arts -- a sign, leaders say, that current numeracy and literacy reforms are working.
But big gaps still remain.
www.al.com/educationlab...
Alabama's 2025 ACAP scores are out, and lots of schools have good news to share. 🧵
AH congratulations! You did phenomenal work here and can’t wait to see what you do next.
