Education, Coverage of

Early Education Coverage

At the turn of the last century, coverage was sporadic, with schools rarely providing the anchor for stories about education. Coverage instead focused on issues affecting children more generally, such as child labor, a significant issue of the day. Only occasionally did journalists address the impact of lost educational opportunities for working children and youth. A leading voice in the campaign to halt child labor—and to expand a child's educational opportunities—belonged to a New York City schoolteacher, Lewis Wickes Hine. In an article representative of the era's cover, with education as a secondary theme, a 1911 report in the San Francisco Call bemoaned the thousands of children and young people roaming the streets, as child-labor laws resulting from Hine's campaign barred children from working. The pursuit of education is rarely mentioned, but the heightened attention to issues affecting children did ultimately result in school reform. The high levels of truancy, and coverage of the problem in newspapers and magazines, prompted many states to pass compulsory school laws and forced states with such laws to enforce them more vigorously.

In the years that followed, education news was often absent from newspapers, magazines, and radio. But in 1944, The New York Times established a standard for education coverage with its Pulitzer Prize–winning series by Benjamin Fine, who reported that high school and college students did not know basic facts about U.S. history. The Times' series was the first notable reportage examining the quality of education in American classrooms, and it prompted a campaign by schools, colleges, and universities to upgrade instruction. In 1947, the National Education Writers Association was established by Fine and other journalists from the Christian Science Monitor and The New York World-Herald, among other publications, to improve the quality of education reporting by emphasizing news from inside the classroom.

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