Dear Commons Community,

The Seattle Times has teamed up with the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) to change the conversation about education. As reported in The Huffington Post, the initiative, titled “Education Lab: Moving the Needle,” seeks to take a “solutions-oriented approach” to the paper’s education coverage, the Seattle Times’ Linda Shaw said.

The Solutions Journalism Network is a New York-based nonprofit, organization, formed by a team of experienced reporters and editors, that works to legitimize and spread the practice of solutions journalism: rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.

Through newsroom partnerships, funds that support individual reporting projects, curriculum development, and collaborations with journalism schools, the Solutions Journalism Network is building a network of journalists who are equipped to do critical and clear-eyed reporting on emerging innovations and proven solutions — coverage that changes public discourse and better engages citizens.

The partnership with the Seattle Times will be one of the first times that a daily newspaper reports on education with a direct focus on solutions. The news around education is largely negative and grim, and this partnership aims to point the way toward change.

“Instead of talking about what was wrong, we were able to apply the solutions model and ask our reporters to use all of their reporting skills and apply them to stories about education initiatives that showed promise and that were working,” Seattle Times’ editor Kathy Best said.

The newspaper, along with SJN, then hope to take their coverage to the next level and move the conversation forward by asking one key question: “Can that success be duplicated?”

Congratulations to the Seattle Times and SJN.  Since the 1980s, there has been a great deal of negativity about public education,   much of which has been fueled by the media operations of education profiteers, anti-teacher union operatives, and neo-liberal ideologues.

Tony