CPS Absenteeism - News Series Entry
from WBEZ Award Submissions Hosted by WBEZ Award Submissions
Can two seemingly contradictory trends observed across dozens of schools both be true? That was the question that motivated education reporter Sarah Karp to go digging last school year. She and two colleagues found that a quarter of all high schoolers missed more than a month of class last year — double the 2019 number — even as graduation rates kept rising. To understand what was driving these trends, they looked at Chicago high schools with high absenteeism rates and committed the time to report this issue deeply and with sensitivity — by talking to students, teachers, families and administrators. They also mined the research on the relationship between attendance and academic achievement and looked at how changes in school policies were allowing students to miss class but still pass. They presented this reporting in two digital stories. Separately, Sarah took her audio reporting and used it to produce two sound-rich broadcast stories that brought the findings to a different audience. The first is a hard news piece laying out the startling findings and the consequences for learning. The second is built around one school and one teen, helping listeners understand why students stop coming to class and how to potentially draw them back. Both pieces put students’ stories and experiences squarely at the center of her storytelling while never losing sight of the contradiction that needed to be unpacked.
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