A young Detroit journalist and his education news site editors were surprised that a seemingly routine list of five dozen departing Detroit teachers lit a burning fuse.
"I certainly didn’t join Chalkbeat to hurt teachers’ feelings with a four-paragraph story," Koby Levin writes Monday in a Chalkbeat Detroit newsletter about lessons learned from an outcry that brought "a sense of bewilderment" and self-reflection.
"I hadn't faced so many angry teachers in all of my 13 years of public schooling," he acknowledges wryly. Levin, a Metro Detroit native and 2015 Swarthmore College graduate, joined the national Chalkbeat network's branch in May.
Koby Levin: "I hadn't faced so many angry teachers in all my 13 years of public schooling."
His account of what happened and what's learned is shared with permission:
'We intended to help
honor retiring teachers'
A story of ours from last week generated a bit of controversy. The story was a list of teachers and school staff members in the main Detroit district who retired or resigned in June.
When I spotted the list among the documents posted by the school board, I thought: Why not post it to our website? We cover Detroit schools, and the Detroit Public Schools Community District represents about half of the schools in the city. I figured parents would want to know if their favorite teacher was leaving their child’s school.
None of us predicted what happened next.
"This was NOT okay," wrote one of the first commenters on our Facebook page, and other self-identified teachers weren’t far behind:
♦ "This crosses a line."
♦ "We're subjected to enough public scrutiny as it is."
I hadn't faced so many angry teachers in all of my 13 years of public schooling. I certainly didn’t join Chalkbeat to hurt teachers’ feelings with a four-paragraph story.
Mixed in with those feelings was a sense of bewilderment.
We had posted a list that was public record and was already online. We didn’t share addresses, current places of employment, salaries, or anything beyond teachers’ names and the schools where they no longer worked. Yet several commenters felt we had exposed sensitive information that could hurt teachers on the list.
But as more complaints flooded in, it began to seem that many teachers’ visceral reactions to the article went deeper than the list itself, to a set of feelings not unlike the ones that fueled teacher strikes in four states this spring. "This list, with whatever intentions, is just another slap in the face to an already battered profession," wrote one commenter.
It hardly mattered that we intended to help honor retiring teachers. They were used to seeing their life's work mentioned in the same sentence as school closures and low test scores.
Teachers feel under attack. So when a list of their names was published without much context attached, an attack is what they saw.
Needless to say, we won’t publish another list of teachers' names without thinking about it very carefully. We take feedback from readers very seriously, especially feedback from readers who are teachers.
But that's not the only lesson to be learned here. Seeing just how besieged Detroit teachers already are was a potent reminder that we have a lot of work to do as journalists trying to tell the story of education in this city.
Stories about the good work being done right now on behalf of Detroit’s children — stories like this one and this one — are too easily lost amid our coverage of the mammoth effort to turn around Detroit's schools. We can do more to ensure that our reporting covers every angle of the city’s complex reality.
And as always, we can be better listeners.
