Back to School — Uplink Archive

Journalists across multiple newsrooms have uncovered significant issues in public school systems, including middle-income student exodus, uncertified substitute teachers, unequal teacher assignments, and disparities in minority hiring practices.

The binders have been bought. The pencils have been sharpened. Now it's time to see what's really going on behind the school house door.

Mark Skertic and The Cincinnati Enquirer found out that middle-income parents have yanked their kids from the city's public schools. Heather Newman and a team of reporters at the Detroit Free Press discovered that uncertified substitutes were often being called on to teach classes and that principals were being paid for outside activities that other principals did for free. NICAR's Kara Morrison reports on how the Baltimore Sun showed that the Baltimore school district's greenest teachers were assigned to the area's most disadvantaged schools.

And Griffin Palmer of The Daily Oklahoman tells how reporters there used computer-assisted reporting to analyze minority hiring in the school district.