My Journey From Classroom Teacher to Engagement Journalist
I’m sure a lot of people are intrigued by the idea of merging traditional journalism with community engagement to make a positive impact. I’m also sure that some people deem this goal idealistic, or even impossible given the public’s eroded relationship with the press. But, combining skills we are good at with things we care about, then somehow morphing them into a career is basically every millennials’ dream — okay I won’t speak for all of us — but, it is definitely mine.
I can’t talk about my decision to join the social journalism cohort at CUNY without talking a bit about my former career as a high school teacher, as the two are quite related. Also, we have to backtrack a little. And we have to talk about podcasts.
One morning, during my early bird commute to work in Boynton Beach, Florida, I was listening to This American Life with Ira Glass who was doing a two part interview with investigative civil rights reporter, Nikole Hannah-Jones. Throughout the interview, Jones spoke about her extensive reporting in the district that Michael Brown graduated from, Normandy, Missouri, which is statistically the worst school district in the state. The main story is about Missouri’s accidental implementation of a school integration plan, and uses the stories of resident Nedra Martin and her daughter Mah’Ria Pruitt-Martin to illustrate the plan in action. Though you should really listen or read the interview yourself — and I cannot recommend it highly enough — the general conclusion is that although the integration plan in Normandy worked for all students who were involved, lawmakers continued to do everything they could to keep schools segregated.
Nikole Hannah Jones absolutely changed the way I thought about the my own public school experience, my career, my students, and the way journalism can function in today’s digital age. After listening to the interview, then going back and reading more about her research on the systems that are put in place to keep schools, for the most part, segregated, a few concepts stuck with me:
- Why don’t I know more about the infrastructure of our schools? I know the problems that exist in my immediate classroom, but I am fairly uninformed when it comes to educational policy on a federal level.
- I didn’t know journalists could be problem solvers.
- Holy shit. The achievement gap — the observed disparity between low income minority students and affluent white students aka that THING we as teachers are constantly trying to singlehanded fix — is linked to segregation in schools which is linked to housing segregation. Our black and brown students are failing because the system is set up to fail them — they don’t have the same resources as white students when isolated from them.
The next logical step in my transformative journey was to tell every teacher friend I knew because, certainly, they’d be just as blown away as I was. Right?
The following weekend I drove to West Palm Beach on Saturday afternoon to see some of my students perform sixteen different versions of Rihanna’s Umbrella for their parents because I am a saint. After the performance, a few teachers decided to stay out for happy hour, presenting me with a good opportunity to test out my newfound knowledge on school segregation. The conversation went something like this:
TEACHER FRIEND # 1: So how do you like teaching? Are you going to keep doing it?
ME: Hmm, I don’t know exactly. There are things that I love about the job, namely, my students. But, there are things that really frustrate me about our education system in general.
TEACHER FRIEND # 2: Like what things?
ME: Oh you know like…Okay, so.. [Rant about everything I learned from the podcast]
Teacher friends sit in silence
ME: Well, what do you guys —
TEACHER FRIEND # 1: [verbal attack on everything I just stated including a personal argument about how she “paid” her way through a private school because she didn’t like the school district she was born into and if she can do that then every other struggling student can]
ME: [Failed attempt to argue back]
TEACHER FRIEND # 2: [snarky comment about how if you want to get into politics you have to be better at arguing]
ME: (on the verge of an emotional breakdown) Okay, you know what never mind. I give up.
TEACHER FRIEND #1: Yeah, maybe you should just stick with teaching.
BLACKOUT
Though somewhat silly, this snippet of a conversation represents a common response I would get from other teachers when I tried to explain my qualms with our system. I quickly learned that, in my school at least, many teachers were not as concerned with this issue of school segregation because it didn’t seem to affect them, their students, or their own children. Of course, school segregation touches many districts in Florida, however, at the non-profit charter school I worked for, many teachers were more interested in advocating for school choice (a notion way more complicated than our officials make it seem) than fixing the broken public system. Needless to say, I was frustrated with the response I was getting from my coworkers, but understood that many teachers were more preoccupied with their demanding jobs than caring about a single podcast I heard on the car ride to work.
It also became clear to me that many people in general do not like hearing that their own positive experience with the public education is invalid. Sure, public education has plenty of success stories. Look, for example, at the current mayor of Tallahassee and the Florida Democratic primary nominee, Andrew Gillum, who credits his public education for lifting his family out of poverty. However, generally speaking, nobody wants to talk about the problem of school segregation if they are not directly combatting it in their own communities. And, unfortunately, the students who are negatively affected by school segregation — the ones who have had no choice but to attend schools ill-equipped to teach them — are not in a position to advocate for change. They are most likely trying to change their current situation, and in many cases simply struggling to survive.
Jones’ reporting provided me with a window into a concept of injustice that I would have never come across in my own lived experiences. Until listening to this story, I was unaware of the how meaningful journalism can be for underrepresented communities, and how investigative reporting can uncover solutions to problems that even the policy-makers can’t seem to figure out. In addition to all of that, I was unaware the impact audio journalism can have on storytelling. Listening to interviews with the students and parents — namely, to young Mah’Ria Pruitt-Martin’s voice over my radio as she spoke about feeling trapped in a box not receiving the same opportunities as other kids, about just wanting to go to a good school without other kids bullying her because she was different from them, about hearing from other parents that they basically didn’t want her at their school — was more effective than any article I could have read.
Fast forward three years later, and I was finally able to make the decision to quit teaching. I didn’t quit because I hated the profession; I quit because after knowing the facts about our broken system I felt freed, and consequently became fascinated with informing others of the truths that no one was telling them. I want people to have the same experience I had when I learned something that contradicted everything I was used to hearing.
Looking forward, I want to use social journalism as a teaching tool for the public, except I want to grow my audience from single classrooms to entire communities. I want to merge my roles as teacher, writer, and activist into one coherent career. I want to use my journalistic skills to help desegregate schools by first making people aware of how and why our system got this way. I want people to look at the traditional “problem” students with empathy instead of judgement and recognize that they are a product of decades of systemic racism. I want people to stop expecting public school teachers to be martyrs of their profession and to be treated as professionals. I want a lot of things from my new career, but mostly, I want public education in America to finally start doing its job.
