We updated this piece on the four-day school week, originally published in June 2018, on July 15, 2023 to include new research and other information.

More than 2,100 public schools in 25 states have switched to a four-day school week, often in hopes of recruiting teachers, saving money and boosting student attendance, researchers estimate.

Small, rural schools facing significant teacher shortages have led the trend, usually choosing to take off Mondays or Fridays to give employees and students a three-day weekend every week. To make up for the lost day of instruction, school officials typically tack time onto the remaining four days.

In some places where schools made the change, school district leaders have marveled at the resulting spikes in job applications from teachers and other job seekers. Teacher shortages, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, have plagued public schools nationwide for decades.

“The number of teacher applications that we’ve received have gone up more than 4-fold,” Dale Herl, superintendent of the Independence, Missouri school district, told CBS News late last year.

The impact on students, however, has not been as positive. Although peer-reviewed research on the topic is limited, focusing only on a single state or small group of states, there is evidence that some groups of students learn less on a four-day schedule than on a five-day schedule.

A new analysis of student performance in six states — Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming — finds that students who went to class four days a week, as a whole, made less progress in reading during the academic year than students who went five days a week. Kids on a four-day schedule earned lower reading scores on a spring assessment known as the Measures of Academic Progress Growth, on average.

However, the authors of the paper, published last month, also found that the condensed schedule had little to no effect on the rural students they studied, on average. Schools located in towns and suburbs, on the other hand, saw student performance drop considerably after adopting a four-day week.

The authors also discovered differences among student groups. For example, Hispanic students going to class four days a week made less progress in math during the school year than white students on the same schedule. White students made less progress in math than Native American students during the 11-year study.

“For policymakers and practitioners, this study addresses previous ambiguity about the effects of four-day school weeks on academic outcomes and provides evidence supporting concerns about four-day school week effects on student achievement and growth, particularly for those implemented in non-rural areas,” write the authors, Emily Morton, Paul Thompson and Megan Kuhfeld.

In the spring before the COVID-19 pandemic, a total of 662 public school districts used the schedule — up more than 600% since 1999, Thompson and Morton write in a 2021 essay for the Brookings Institution. That number climbed to 876 during the 2022-23 academic year, they told The Journalist’s Resource in email messages.

In addition to studying the schedule’s effect on student achievement, researchers are also investigating its impact on other aspects of school operations, including education spending, student discipline and employee morale. To make the research easier to find, the University of Oregon’s HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice has created the Four-Day School Week Research Database.

Anyone can use the interactive platform to sift through research completed as of May 2023. It’s worth noting that most research in the database is not peer-reviewed journal articles. Seventy of the more than 100 papers are student dissertations, theses and other papers.

If you keep reading, you’ll find that we have gathered and summarized several relevant journal articles below. To date, the scholarly literature indicates:

• Some schools cut instructional time when they adopt a four-day schedule.
• The impact of a four-day school week differs depending on a range of factors, including the number of hours per week a school operates, how the school structures its daily schedule and the race and ethnicity of students.
• The condensed schedule does not save much money, considering employee salaries and benefits make up the bulk of school expenses. In a 2021 analysis, Thompson estimates schools save 1% to 2% by shortening the school week by one day.
• Staff morale improves under a four-day school week.
• Fighting and bullying decline at high schools.

Both Thompson and Morton urged journalists to explain that the amount of time schools dedicate to student learning during four-day weeks makes a big difference.

“It’s pretty critical to the story that districts with longer days (who are possibly delivering equal or more instructional time to their students than they were on a five-day week) are not seeing the same negative impacts that districts with shorter days are seeing,” Morton, a researcher at the American Institutes of Research, wrote to JR in late 2023.

In a follow-up conversation with JR in July 2024, Morton pointed out that parents like the four-day schedule despite concerns raised by education scholars. In interviews with researchers, she wrote, “parents mention that they appreciate the additional family time and perceive other benefits of the schedule for their children, and they overwhelmingly indicate that they would choose to keep a four-day schedule over switching back to a five-day schedule.”

Morton would not recommend schools adopt a four-day schedule if their main aim is saving money, boosting student attendance or recruiting and retaining teachers. Research findings “do not provide much support for the argument that four-day school weeks are delivering the intended benefits,” she wrote to JR.

Keep reading to learn more. We’ll update this collection of research periodically.

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A Multi-State, Student-Level Analysis of the Effects of the Four-Day School Week On Student Achievement and Growth
Emily Morton, Paul N. Thompson and Megan Kuhfeld. Economics of Education Review, June 2024.

Summary: This study looks at how switching to a four-day school week affects student achievement over the course of the school year in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. A key takeaway: On average, across those six states, students on a four-day schedule learned less during the school year than students who went to class five days a week. However, students in rural areas fared better on that schedule than students in “non-rural” areas.

Researchers studied the scores that students in grades 3-8 earned on an assessment called the Measures of Academic Progress Growth, administered each fall and spring to gauge how much kids learned over the course of the school year. The analysis uses 11 years of test score data in reading and math, collected from the 2008-09 to the 2018-19 academic year.

Researchers found that students who went to school four days a week, as a whole, made smaller gains in reading during the academic year than students who went five days a week. They also earned lower scores in reading on the spring assessment, on average.

When researchers looked at the data more closely, however, they found differences between students attending rural schools and students attending schools located in towns and suburbs — communities the researchers dubbed “non-rural.”

Although adopting a four-day schedule had little to no impact on kids at rural schools, student performance fell considerably at schools in non-rural areas. Those children, as a whole, made less progress in reading and math during the academic year than children attending non-rural schools that operated five days a week. They also earned lower scores in both reading and math on the spring exam.

“The estimated effects on math and reading achievement in non-rural four-day week schools are ‘medium’ and meaningful,” the researchers write, adding that the difference is roughly equivalent to a quarter of a school year worth of learning in the fifth grade.

Researchers also discovered that student performance at schools with four-day schedules varied by gender and race. At schools using a four-day-a-week schedule, girls made smaller gains in reading and math than boys, on average. Hispanic students made less progress in math than white students, who made less progress in math than Native American students.

“The estimated effects on math and reading gains during the school year are not ‘large’ by the developing standards used to interpret effect sizes of education interventions, but they are also not trivial,” the researchers write. “For the many districts and communities who have become very fond of the schedule, the evidence presented in this study suggests that how the four-day school week is implemented may be an important factor in its effects on students.”

Impacts of the Four-Day School Week on Early Elementary Achievement
Paul N. Thompson; et al. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 2nd Quarter 2023.

Summary: This study is the first to examine the four-day school week’s impact on elementary schools’ youngest students. Researchers looked at how children in Oregon who went to school four days a week in kindergarten later performed in math and English Language Arts when they reached the third grade. What they found: Overall, there were “minimal and non-significant differences” in the test scores of third-graders who attended kindergarten on a four-day schedule between 2014 and 2016 and third-graders who went to kindergarten on a five-day schedule during the same period.

When the researchers studied individual groups of students, though, they noticed small differences. For example, when they looked only at children who had scored highest on their pre-kindergarten assessments of letter sounds, letter names and early math skills, they learned that kids who went to kindergarten four days a week scored a little lower on third-grade tests than those who had gone to kindergarten five days a week.

The researchers write that they find no statistically significant evidence of detrimental four-day school week achievement impacts, and even some positive impacts” for minority students, lower-income students,  special education students, students enrolled in English as a Second Language programs and students who scored in the lower half on pre-kindergarten assessments.

There are multiple reasons why lower-achieving students might be less affected by school schedules than high achievers, the researchers point out. For example, higher-achieving students “may miss out on specialized instruction — such as gifted and enrichment activities — that they would have had time to receive under a five-day school schedule,” they write.

Effects of 4-Day School Weeks on Older Adolescents: Examining Impacts of the Schedule on Academic Achievement, Attendance, and Behavior in High School
Emily Morton. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2022.

Summary: Oklahoma high schools saw less fighting and bullying among students after switching from a five-day-a-week schedule to a four-day schedule, this study finds. Fighting declined by 0.79 incidents per 100 students and bullying dropped by 0.65 incidents per 100 students.

The other types of student discipline problems examined, including weapons possession, vandalism and truancy, did not change, according to the analysis, based on a variety of student and school data collected through 2019 from the Oklahoma State Department of Education and National Center for Education Statistics.

“Results indicate that 4-day school weeks decrease per-pupil bullying incidents by approximately 39% and per-pupil fighting incidents by approximately 31%,” writes the author, Emily Morton, a research scientist at NWEA, a nonprofit research organization formerly known as the Northwest Evaluation Association.

Morton did not investigate what caused the reduction in bullying and fighting. She did find that moving to a four-day schedule had “no detectable effect” on high school attendance or student scores on the ACT college-entrance exam.

Only a Matter of Time? The Role of Time in School on Four-Day School Week Achievement Impacts
Paul N. Thompson and Jason Ward. Economics of Education Review, February 2022.

Summary: Student test scores in math and language arts dipped at some schools that adopted a four-day schedule but did not change at others, according to this analysis of school schedule switches in 12 states.

Researchers discovered “small reductions” in test scores for students in grades 3 through 8 at schools offering what the researchers call “low time in school.” These schools operate an average of 29.95 hours during the four-day week. The decline in test scores is described in terms of standard deviation, not units of measurement such as points or percentages.

At schools offering “middle time in school” — an average of 31.03 hours over four days — test scores among kids in grades 3 through 8 did not change, write the researchers, Paul N. Thompson, an associate professor of economics at Oregon State University, and Jason Ward, an associate economist at the RAND Corp., a nonprofit research organization.

Scores also did not change at schools providing “high time in school,” or 32.14 hours over a four-day school week, on average.

When describing this paper’s findings, it’s inaccurate to say researchers found that test scores dropped as a result of schools adopting a four-day schedule. It is correct to say test scores dropped, on average, across the schools the researchers studied. But it’s worth noting the relationship between test scores and the four-day school week differs according to the average number of hours those schools operate each week.

For this analysis, researchers examined school districts in states that allowed four-day school weeks during the 2008-2009 academic year through the 2017-2018 academic years. They chose to focus on the 12 states where four-day school weeks were most common. The data they used came from the Stanford Educational Data Archive and “a proprietary, longitudinal, national database” that tracked the use of four-day school weeks from 2009 to 2018.

The researchers write that their findings “suggest that four-day school weeks that operate with adequate levels of time in school have no clear negative effect on achievement and, instead, that it is operating four-day school weeks in a low-time-in-school environment that should be cautioned against.”

Three Midwest Rural School Districts’ First Year Transition to the Four Day School Week
Jon Turner, Kim Finch and Ximena Uribe-Zarain. The Rural Educator, 2019.

Abstract: “The four-day school week is a concept that has been utilized in rural schools for decades to respond to budgetary shortfalls. There has been little peer-reviewed research on the four-day school week that has focused on the perception of parents who live in school districts that have recently switched to the four-day model. This study collects data from 584 parents in three rural Missouri school districts that have transitioned to the four-day school week within the last year. Quantitative statistical analysis identifies significant differences in the perceptions of parents classified by the age of children, special education identification, and free and reduced lunch status. Strong parental support for the four-day school week was identified in all demographic areas investigated; however, families with only elementary aged children and families with students receiving special education services were less supportive than other groups.”

Juvenile Crime and the Four-Day School Week
Stefanie Fischer and Daniel Argyle. Economics of Education Review, 2018.

Abstract: “We leverage the adoption of a four-day school week across schools within the jurisdiction of rural law enforcement agencies in Colorado to examine the causal link between school attendance and youth crime. Those affected by the policy attend school for the same number of hours each week as students on a typical five-day week; however, treated students do not attend school on Friday. This policy allows us to learn about two aspects of the school-crime relationship that have previously been unstudied: one, the effects of a frequent and permanent schedule change on short-term crime, and two, the impact that school attendance has on youth crime in rural areas. Our difference-in-difference estimates show that following policy adoption, agencies containing students on a four-day week experience about a 20 percent increase in juvenile criminal offenses, where the strongest effect is observed for property crime.”

Staff Perspectives of the Four-Day School Week: A New Analysis of Compressed School Schedules
Jon Turner, Kim Finch and Ximena Uribe–Zarian. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 2018.

Abstract: “The four-day school week is a concept that has been utilized in rural schools for decades to respond to budgetary shortfalls. There has been little peer-reviewed research on the four-day school week that has focused on the perception of staff that work in school districts that have recently switched to the four-day model. This study collects data from 136 faculty and staff members in three rural Missouri school districts that have transitioned to the four-day school week within the last year. Quantitative statistical analysis identifies strong support of the four-day school week model from both certified educational staff and classified support staff perspectives. All staff responded that the calendar change had improved staff morale, and certified staff responded that the four-day week had a positive impact on what is taught in classrooms and had increased academic quality. Qualitative analysis identifies staff suggestions for schools implementing the four-day school week including the importance of community outreach prior to implementation. No significant differences were identified between certified and classified staff perspectives. Strong staff support for the four-day school week was identified in all demographic areas investigated. Findings support conclusions made in research in business and government sectors that identify strong employee support of a compressed workweek across all work categories.”

The Economics of a Four-Day School Week: Community and Business Leaders’ Perspectives
Jon Turner, Kim Finch and Ximena Uribe–Zarian. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 2018.

Abstract: “The four-day school week is a concept that has been utilized in rural schools in the United States for decades and the number of schools moving to the four-day school week is growing. In many rural communities, the school district is the largest regional employer which provides a region with permanent, high paying jobs that support the local economy. This study collects data from 71 community and business leaders in three rural school districts that have transitioned to the four-day school week within the last year. Quantitative statistical analysis is used to investigate the perceptions of community and business leaders related to the economic impact upon their businesses and the community and the impact the four-day school week has had upon perception of quality of the school district. Significant differences were identified between community/business leaders that currently have no children in school as compared to community/business leaders with children currently enrolled in four-day school week schools. Overall, community/business leaders were evenly divided concerning the economic impact on their businesses and the community. Community/business leaders’ perceptions of the impact the four-day school week was also evenly divided concerning the impact on the quality of the school district. Slightly more negative opinions were identified related to the economic impact on the profitability of their personal businesses which may impact considerations by school leaders. Overall, community/business leaders were evenly divided when asked if they would prefer their school district return to the traditional five-day week school calendar.”

Impact of a 4-Day School Week on Student Academic Performance, Food Insecurity, and Youth Crime
Report from the Oklahoma State Department of Health’s Office of Partner Engagement, 2017.

Summary: “A Health Impact Assessment (HIA) utilizes a variety of data sources and analytic methods to evaluate the consequences of proposed or implemented policy on health. A rapid (HIA) was chosen to research the impact of the four-day school week on youth. The shift to a four-day school week was a strategy employed by many school districts in Oklahoma to address an $878 million budget shortfall, subsequent budget cuts, and teacher shortages. The HIA aimed to assess the impact of the four-day school week on student academic performance, food insecurity, and juvenile crime … An extensive review of literature and stakeholder engagement on these topic areas was mostly inconclusive or did not reveal any clear-cut evidence to identify effects of the four-day school week on student outcomes — academic performance, food insecurity or juvenile crime. Moreover, there are many published articles about the pros and cons of the four-day school week, but a lack of comprehensive research is available on the practice.”

Does Shortening the School Week Impact Student Performance? Evidence from the Four-Day School Week
D. Mark Anderson and Mary Beth Walker. Education Finance and Policy, 2015.

Abstract: “School districts use a variety of policies to close budget gaps and stave off teacher layoffs and furloughs. More schools are implementing four-day school weeks to reduce overhead and transportation costs. The four-day week requires substantial schedule changes as schools must increase the length of their school day to meet minimum instructional hour requirements. Although some schools have indicated this policy eases financial pressures, it is unknown whether there is an impact on student outcomes. We use school-level data from Colorado to investigate the relationship between the four-day week and academic performance among elementary school students. Our results generally indicate a positive relationship between the four-day week and performance in reading and mathematics. These findings suggest there is little evidence that moving to a four-day week compromises student academic achievement. This research has policy relevance to the current U.S. education system, where many school districts must cut costs.”

Other resources

• The Education Commission of the States offers a 50-state comparison of public school students’ instructional time requirements. For example, students in Colorado are required to be in school for a minimum of 160 days each academic year while in Vermont, the minimum is 175 days and in North Carolina, it’s 185.
• The State of the American Teacher project offers insights into how teachers feel about their jobs and the education field as a whole. In early 2022, RAND Corp. surveyed a nationally representative sample of teachers, asking questions on topics such as job-related stress, school safety, COVID-19 mitigation policies and career plans. Survey results show that 56% of teachers who answered a question about their attitude toward their job “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the statement, “The stress and disappointments involved in teaching aren’t really worth it.” Meanwhile, 78% “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the statement, “I don’t seem to have as much enthusiasm now as I did when I began teaching.”
• Opinions about the four-day school week vary among school board members, district-level administrators, school principals and teachers. These organizations can provide insights: the Schools Superintendents Association, National School Boards Association, National Association of Elementary School Principals and National Association of Secondary School Principals.

Looking for more research on public schools? Check out our other collections of research on student lunches, school uniforms, teacher salaries and teacher misconduct.

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Journalists can’t report accurately on research involving human subjects without knowing certain details about the sample of people researchers studied. It’s important to know, for example, whether researchers used a nationally representative sample.

That’s important whether a journalist is covering an opinion poll that asks American voters which presidential candidate they prefer, an academic article that examines absenteeism among U.S. public school students or a clinical trial of a new drug designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

When researchers design a study, they start by defining their target population, or the group of people they want to know more about. They then create a sample meant to represent this larger group. If researchers want to study a group of people across an entire country, they aim for a nationally representative sample — one that resembles the target population in key characteristics such as gender, age, political party affiliation and household income.

Earlier this year, when the Pew Research Center wanted to know how Americans feel about a new class of weight-loss drugs, it asked a sample of 10,133 U.S. adults questions about obesity and the effects of Ozempic, Wegovy and similar drugs. Pew designed the survey so that the answers those 10,133 people gave likely reflected the attitudes of all U.S. adults across various demographics.

If Pew researchers had simply interviewed 10,133 people they encountered at shopping malls in the southeastern U.S., their responses would not have been nationally representative. Not only would their answers reflect attitudes in just one region of the country, the individuals interviewed would not represent adults nationwide.

A nationally representative sample is one of several types of samples used in research. It’s commonly used in research that examines numerical data in public policy fields such as public health, criminal justice, education, immigration, politics and economics.

To accurately report on research, journalists must pay close attention to who is and isn’t included in research samples. Here’s why that information is critical:

1. If researchers did not use a sample designed to represent people from across the nation, it would be inaccurate to report or imply that their results apply nationwide.

A mistake journalists make when covering research is overgeneralizing the results, or reporting that the results apply to a larger group of people than they actually do. Depending on who is included in the sample, a study’s findings might only apply to the people in the sample. Many times, findings apply only to a narrow group of people at the national level who share the same characteristics as the people in the sample — for example, individuals who retired from the U.S. military after 2015 or Hispanic teenagers with food allergies.

To determine who a study is designed to represent, look at how the researchers have defined this target population, including location, demographics and other characteristics.

“Consider who that research is meant to be applicable to,” says Ameeta Retzer, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham’s Department of Applied Health Sciences.

2. When researchers use a nationally representative sample, their analyses often focus on what’s happening at a national level, on average. Because of this, it’s never safe to assume that national-level findings also apply to people at the local level.

“As a word of caution, if you’re using a nationally representative sample, you can’t say, ‘Well, that means in California …,” warns Michael Gottfried, an applied economist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

When researchers create a nationally representative sample of U.S. grade school students, their aim is to gain a better understanding of some aspect of the nation’s student population, Gottfried says. What they learn will represent an average across all students nationwide.

“On average, this is what kids are doing, this is how kids are doing, this is the average experience of kids in the United States,” he explains. “The conclusion has to stay at the national level. It means you cannot go back and say kids in Philadelphia are doing that. You can’t take this information and say, ‘In my city, this is happening.’ It’s probably happening in your city, but cities are all different.”

3. There’s no universally accepted standard for representativeness.

If you read a lot of research, you’ve likely noticed that what constitutes a nationally representative sample varies. Researchers investigating the spending habits of Americans aged 20 to 30 years might create a sample that represents this age group in terms of gender and race. Meanwhile, a similar study might use a sample that represents this age group across multiple dimensions — gender, race and ethnicity along with education level, household size, household income and the language spoken at home.

“In research, there’s no consensus on which characteristics we include when we think about representativeness,” Retzer notes.

Researchers determine whether their sample adequately represents the population they want to study, she says. Sometimes, researchers call a sample “nationally representative” even though it’s not all that representative.

Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation at Pew Research Center, has questioned the accuracy of election research conducted with samples that only represent U.S. voters by age, race and sex. It’s increasingly important for opinion poll samples to also align with voters’ education levels, Kennedy writes in an August 2020 report.

“The need for battleground state polls to adjust for education was among the most important takeaways from the polling misses in 2016,” Kennedy writes, referring to the U.S. presidential election that year.

4. When studying a nationwide group of people, the representativeness of a sample is more important than its size.

Journalists often assume larger samples provide more accurate results than smaller ones. But that’s not necessarily true. Actually, what matters more when studying a population is having a sample that closely resembles it, Michaela Mora explains on the website of her research firm, Relevant Insights.

“The sheer size of a sample is not a guarantee of its ability to accurately represent a target population,” writes Mora, a market researcher and former columnist for the Dallas Business Journal. “Large unrepresentative samples can perform as badly as small unrepresentative samples.”

If a sample is representative, larger samples are more helpful than smaller ones. Larger samples allow researchers to investigate differences among sub-groups of the target population. Having a larger sample also improves the reliability of the results.

5. When creating samples for health and medical research, prioritizing certain demographic groups or failing to represent others can have long-term impacts on public health and safety.

Retzer says that too often, the people most likely to benefit from a new drug, vaccine or health intervention are not well represented in research. She notes, for example, that even though people of South Asian descent are more likely to have diabetes than people from other ethnic backgrounds, they are vastly underrepresented in research about diabetes.

“You can have the most beautiful, really lovely diabetes drug,” she says. “But if it doesn’t work for the majority of the population that needs it, how useful is it?”

Women remain underrepresented in some areas of health and medical research. It wasn’t until 1993 that the National Institutes of Health began requiring that women and racial and ethnic minorities be included in research funded by the federal agency. Before that, “it was both normal and acceptable for drugs and vaccines to be tested only on men — or to exclude women who could become pregnant,” Nature magazine points out in a May 2023 editorial.

In 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidance on developing plans to enroll more racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials for all medical products.

When journalists cover research, Retzer says it’s crucial they ask researchers to explain the choices they made while creating their samples. Journalists should also ask researchers how well their nationally representative samples represent historically marginalized groups, including racial minorities, sexual minorities, people from low-income households and people who don’t speak English.

“Journalists could say, ‘This seems like a really good finding, but who is it applicable to?’” she says.

The Journalist’s Resource thanks Chase Harrison, associate director of the Harvard University Program on Survey Research, for his help with this tip sheet.  

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School board elections have grown increasingly politicized in recent years as conservative politicians and advocacy organizations push to restrict how public schools address issues related to race, gender and sexuality.

But the job of school board members, many of whom are unpaid volunteers, isn’t just setting education policy. In fact, they oversee and make decisions about a range of programs and projects, including the school district’s annual budget, which, in the largest cities, can total tens of billions of dollars.

Their primary responsibility: Being a watchdog for their communities to ensure public money is well spent, schools and buses are safe, and students receive a high-quality education.

Nationwide, more than 82,000 people served on school boards in more than 13,000 public school districts during the 2022-23 academic year, according to Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan online political encyclopedia. Texas alone has 1,022 school districts.

The vast majority of board members are elected to office. And this fall, counties, cities and towns in many states will hold school board elections.

These races tend to be decided by a small number of people, however. A “discouragingly low” number of voters participate in school board elections — often 5% to 10%, according to the National School Boards Association. Even when voters show up at the polls, many skip school board races because they tend to appear at the bottom or on the back of their ballots.

Nonprofit groups such as Campaign for Our Shared Future and the XQ Institute are trying to change that by calling attention to the importance of school board elections.

Meanwhile, Moms for Liberty, a conservative political organization, and Run for Something, a progressive political organization, are vying to get their candidates seated on local school boards.

Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021 by two former school board members in Florida, has grown to 130,000 members and 300 chapters in 48 states, according to its X account. Of the 166 school board candidates it publicly endorsed in 2023, 54 won their elections, according to a recent analysis from the nonprofit think tank the Brookings Institution.

Last year, Run for Something endorsed 416 candidates running for various local offices across the U.S. and 226 won, according to the group’s 2024 Strategic Plan. Late last year, Run for Something announced its 50 State School Board Strategy to “fight back and recruit and train young, diverse progressive candidates for school board.”

Guidance for journalists

To help journalists cover school board elections, we’ve gathered and summarized six academic studies that look at how school board members are chosen and the impact they can have on school funding and student achievement.

Journalists need to keep in mind that while school boards make decisions on such things as book bans and which bathrooms transgender children use, their overarching goal is ensuring nearly 50 million students in pre-kindergarten through 12^th grade develop the skills necessary to get jobs, go to college or otherwise become responsible adults.

The most recent research suggests:

• Most people who vote in school board elections in California, Illinois, Ohio and Oklahoma are white and likely don’t have children in local public schools. Estimates further suggest that in at least two-thirds of school districts where the majority of students are racial and ethnic minorities, the majority of voters are white.
• Teacher unions maintain a strong influence over school board elections in Florida and California, where most candidates endorsed by teacher unions prevail.
• In North Carolina, public schools become less racially segregated when Democrats join school boards than when someone affiliated with another political party or someone with no party affiliation joins.
• Student test scores rise and schools serving large percentages of Hispanic students receive more funding in California when a white school board member is replaced by someone who is not white.

Although much of the most recent research on U.S. school board elections focuses on a small group of states, these studies provide insights on issues affecting school boards nationwide.

We elaborate on these studies below. But first, we’d like to spotlight three important pieces of context journalists should consider including in news stories about school board elections.

• Voter turnout in school board races is notoriously low in some parts of the U.S. In Newark, New Jersey, for example, about 3% to 4% of voters typically participate in school board elections, according to Chalkbeat Newark. Only a few hundred people voted in the school board election held in April in Oklahoma City, home to more than 700,000 people, the Oklahoma State Election Board reports.
• In many communities, most school board members are white men. Ballotpedia examined the demographics of more than 82,000 people who served on school schools during the 2022-2023 academic year and found that 52% were male and 43% were female. In Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, more than 60% were men. Meanwhile, 78% of school board members who participated in a survey the National School Boards Association conducted in 2017 and 2018 identified as white.
• School board elections are generally nonpartisan, but that may be changing. In nonpartisan races, candidates’ political party affiliation, if they have one, is not listed on the ballot. In November, Florida voters will decide whether to amend the state constitution to allow school board elections there to be partisan. In recent months, legislators in Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky and New Hampshire have introduced bills to make school board elections partisan in those states. In North Carolina, where counties can decide whether their school board races are partisan, a growing number of boards have made the change.

No organization tracks school board elections in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. However, Ballotpedia provides information on elections in 475 of the largest school districts, including the 100 most populous cities.

Research roundup

The Democratic Deficit in U.S. Education Governance
Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz. American Political Science Review, March 2021.

The study: Researchers looked at how the demographics of people who vote in school board elections in the U.S. differ from the demographics of students attending local public schools. They examined a variety of data on voters who participated in school board elections between 2008 and 2016 and students who attended public schools during that period. The researchers focused on four states — California, Illinois, Ohio and Oklahoma — because they are large states with numerous school districts and higher percentages of students who are racial and ethnic minorities.

Because votes are confidential, the researchers predicted the race or ethnicity of each voter by combining census surname distributions with demographic information from the Census block where each voter lived. This is a common procedure for this type of research and has a 90% accuracy rate, the researchers note.

The findings: The study documents a “demographic disconnect.” Most people who voted in school board elections in these four states during this period likely didn’t have children enrolled in local public schools. The authors also note that voters and students differed in terms of race and ethnicity. In at least two-thirds of school districts where the majority of students were racial and ethnic minorities, the majority of voters were white, according to the researchers’ analysis.

The researchers also discovered that the gaps in student achievement separating white students and non-white students tended to be “larger in districts where the electorate looks most dissimilar from the student population.”

In the authors’ words: “If elected officials are motivated to respond to voter preferences, our results suggest that school board members face the least political pressure to address persistent racial achievement gaps in precisely the districts where these gaps are largest because minority populations are most politically underrepresented in these jurisdictions.”

School Boards and Student Segregation
Hugh Macartney and John D. Singleton. Journal of Public Economics, August 2018.

The study: To better understand the role school boards play in student segregation, the researchers matched data on school board members in 105 North Carolina school districts with data on student enrollment patterns in those districts from 2008 to 2012. The researchers looked at whether student enrollment at local elementary schools became more racially diverse after a Democrat joined the school board.

Intentionally segregating students by race is illegal in the U.S. In many parts of the country, public schools are racially segregated as the result of residential sorting, school attendance boundaries and other factors.

The researchers measured changes in race-based segregation in North Carolina by calculating what they call the “black dissimilarity index.” During the study period, 26% of students in North Carolina school district were Black, on average. Meanwhile, 63% of students were deemed “economically disadvantaged.”

The findings: When a Democrat was elected to a school board in North Carolina, racial segregation in local public schools fell. The Black dissimilarity index dropped about 8 percentage points across schools within the district, the researchers write, adding that a main way school boards reduce segregation is by adjusting public schools’ attendance boundaries. 

The researchers note this change typically occurs two years after an election, but is likely temporary. “In the long run, much of it may be undone by household re-sorting,” they write. The researchers found that some white students left their public schools when attendance boundaries shifted and moved to private schools or charter schools.

In the authors’ words: “Taken together, our findings underscore the central role that school boards play in allocating students to schools, with likely implications for the production of learning and social inequality more generally. Understanding how school boards may influence human capital accumulation is of key policy interest and an important direction for future work.”

Are School Boards and Educational Quality Related? Results of an International Literature Review
Marlies Honingha, Merel Ruiterband and Sandra van Thiel. Educational Review, 2020.

The study: Researchers reviewed 16 academic studies published between 1996 and 2016 to better understand the relationship between school boards and educational quality in different countries. The 16 studies look at how various aspects of school boards, including their composition and the behavior of school board members, affect student test scores in the public schools they govern. Twelve studies focus on U.S. school boards, two focus on school boards in the United Kingdom and two examine them in the Netherlands.

The findings: Differences in how school boards and school districts operate in different countries and regions make it difficult to draw any conclusions that would apply to school boards globally, the researchers write. Because several studies examine a single school district or rely heavily on anecdotal evidence, their results cannot be broadly applied. The researchers write that, based on the literature they reviewed, it’s unclear whether school board members have an impact on student achievement in their school districts.Whatever affect they do have is indirect, the researchers add.

The researchers stress the need for larger and more rigorous studies on this issue as well as the need to investigate school board impacts beyond student test scores.

In the authors’ words: “This article draws on a systematic literature review to show that there is a lack of solid empirical evidence on the relation between boards and educational quality. This means that we know less than is reflected in policy assumptions about school boards. The ambitions for school boards and the expectations upon them are not evidence-based.”

How Does Minority Political Representation Affect School District Administration and Student Outcomes?
Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz. American Journal of Political Science, July 2021.

The study: The researchers investigate whether student achievement changes after racial and ethnic minorities are elected to local school boards. The researchers reconstructed the composition of local school boards between 2000 and 2014 using election data obtained from the California Election Data Archive. They collected data on public school districts and student test scores during that period from the California Department of Education.

The findings: After a racial or ethnic minority was elected to a school board in California, test scores rose among students who were racial or ethnic minorities. While the increase did not materialize until several years after the election and then gradually declined in magnitude, it was substantial.

“The largest estimated effect occurs five years after the election, when the estimated effect of a pivotal minority candidate victory is approximately 0.15 standard deviations,” the researchers write, adding that the change is roughly equivalent to an additional 46 days of learning.

The researchers could not determine the effect on white students’ scores. However, they found “no evidence that the improvements in non-white student performance come at the expense of white students.” They suggest gains in minority students’ test scores may have been driven in part by increased operational spending and changes in school administration that happened after the election of the minority school board member.

In the authors’ words: “We find little evidence that minority representation on school boards affects the total number of employees or the racial and ethnic composition of rank-and-file workers. Nor does school board composition appear to have a consistent effect on school-level segregation. We do, however, find evidence that the share of school district principals who are non-white increases when minorities win more school board seats, providing another potential policy lever through which changes in board composition may affect student learning.”

No Spending without Representation: School Boards and the Racial Gap in Education Finance
Brett Fischer. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023.

The study: This paper, which also focuses on California school boards, looks at whether replacing a non-Hispanic school board member with a Hispanic board member results in greater spending on Hispanic students. The researcher examined capital spending specifically — how local school boards used grant money that they received from the state’s School Facility Program to fund projects such as campus renovations between 1999 and 2016.

The findings: After a non-Hispanic school board member was replaced with a Hispanic board member, California school boards invested more money in schools where the majority of students were Hispanic. The researcher’s analysis “indicates that a 20 percentage point increase in Hispanic board representation raises [School Facility Program] modernization spending by $93 per student (81 percent) among high-Hispanic schools within the district.” Schools with relatively low Hispanic enrollment received an increase, too, although a smaller one. However, that increase was determined not to be statistically significant.

The analysis also suggests that after a Hispanic person joined a school board, that school district directed more construction funding to schools with a high percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school. There’s also evidence that having a Hispanic school board member is linked to improvements in teacher retention at “high-Hispanic” schools.

In the author’s words: “My analysis confirms that school boards play an integral role in education finance. Using spending data from the [School Facility Program], I find that an additional minority (Hispanic) school board member increases spending on school renovations using state transfer grants. In particular, SFP spending on high-Hispanic and high-poverty schools within the district increases by up to 69 percent, which juxtaposes smaller, insignificant changes among low-Hispanic and relatively affluent schools.”

Teachers’ Unions and School Board Elections: A Reassessment
Michael T. Hartney. Chapter in Groups in U.S. Local Politics, September 2023.

The study: The researcher examines the impact that teacher-union endorsements have on school board elections in California and Florida. The researcher chose to study California because it’s a large, racially diverse state where unions representing government employees are especially powerful, he writes. He chose Florida, another large, racially diverse state, because labor law there has historically been less favorable to teacher unions.

He analyzed union endorsements given to 3,336 school board candidates across 468 school districts in California between 1995 and 2020. He also analyzed endorsements of 361 school board candidates running for office in 36 Florida school districts between 2010 and 2020.

The findings: In both states, school board candidates backed by local teacher unions did “exceptionally well” in most elections. In California, about 90% of union-backed incumbents were reelected and two-thirds of union-backed candidates running against an incumbent won their races. Meanwhile in Florida, about 80% of incumbents endorsed by teacher unions won reelection and more than half of candidates who challenged an incumbent and had union endorsements prevailed.

In the author’s words: “I have shown, quite simply, that union power in school board elections remains both robust and resilient. Irrespective of the very real setbacks that unions have faced in state and national politics, in the local trenches of school board electioneering, the data tell an unambiguous story: teacher-union interest groups remain an important player, they are still the ones to beat.”

Additional resources

• In “Outside money targets school board elections,” we examine research on how wealthy individuals and national advocacy groups have used their money to influence local school board elections.
• The National School Boards Association offers various national reports on school boards. Organizations such as the Illinois Association of School Boards and Texas Association of School Boards provide state-level data and reports.
• We created a tip sheet to help journalists understand and cover teacher unions, including their influence on local school boards.
• This article warns journalists about the dangers of horse race coverage of elections — focusing on who’s in the lead and who’s behind instead of policy issues. It can harm political candidates, the public and news outlets themselves.
• Tammy Patrick, a former federal compliance officer for the Maricopa County Elections Department in Arizona, offers eight tips to help journalists improve their overall coverage of U.S. elections.

The image above was obtained from the Flickr account of Joe Brusky and is being used under a Creative Commons license. No changes were made.

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Uri Simonsohn is an outspoken advocate for open science — adding transparency to the research process and helping researchers share what they’ve learned in greater detail with a broad audience.

Many people know Simonsohn for his data analyses on Data Colada, a blog about social science research he writes with two other behavioral scientists, Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons. The three scholars, who co-direct the Wharton Credibility Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, occasionally use the blog to spotlight evidence of suspected fraud they’ve found in academic papers.

In his role at the Credibility Lab and as a professor at Esade Business School in Barcelona, Simonsohn travels to speak on issues around scientific integrity and data science. During his recent visit to Harvard University, The Journalist’s Resource asked for his thoughts on how journalists can improve their coverage of academic fraud and misconduct.

Here are three big takeaways from our conversation.

1. Before covering academic studies, ask researchers about preregistration.

Preregistration is “the practice of documenting your research plan at the beginning of your study and storing that plan in a read-only public repository such as OSF Registries or the National Library of Medicine’s Clinical Trials Registry,” according to the nonprofit Center for Open Science. Simonsohn says preregistration helps prevent research fraud. When researchers create a permanent record outlining how they intend to conduct a study before they start, they are discouraged from changing parts of their study — for instance, their hypothesis or study sample — to get a certain result.

Simonsohn adds that preregistration also reduces what’s known as “p-hacking,” or manipulating an analysis of data to make it seem as though patterns in the data are statistically significant when they are not. Examples of p-hacking: Adding more data or control variables to change the result or deciding after the analysis is complete to exclude some data. (For more on statistical significance, read our tip sheet on the topic.)

Preregistration is particularly important when researchers will be collecting their own data, Simonsohn points out. It’s easier to alter or fabricate data when you collect it yourself, especially if there’s no expectation to share the raw data.

While preregistration is the norm in clinical trials, it’s less common in other research fields. About half of psychology research is preregistered as is about a quarter of marketing research, Simonsohn says. A substantial proportion of economic research is not, however, because it often relies on data collected by other researchers or nonprofit organizations and government agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau.

Simonsohn urges journalists to ask researchers whether they preregistered their studies before reporting on them. He likened reporting on research that isn’t preregistered to driving a car that hasn’t been inspected. The car might be perfectly safe, but you can’t be sure because no one has had a chance to look under the hood.

“If the person says ‘no,’ [the journalist] could ask, ‘Oh, how come?’” he says. “And if they don’t provide a compelling reason, the journalist could say ‘You know, I’m not going to cover work that hasn’t been preregistered, without a good rationale.’”

Research registries themselves can be a helpful resource for journalists. The Center for Open Science lets the public search for and read the thousands of preregistered research plans on its Open Science Framework platform. Researchers who preregister their work at AsPredicted, a platform Simonsohn helped create for the Wharton Credibility Lab, can choose whether and when to make their preregistered research plan public.

2. Report on the lack of oversight of research data collection.

Journalists and the public probably don’t realize how little oversight there is when it comes to collecting and analyzing data for research, Simonsohn says. That includes research funded by the federal government, which gives colleges, universities and other organizations billions of dollars a year to study public health, climate change, new technology and other topics.

Simonsohn says there’s no system in place to ensure the integrity of research data or its analysis. Although federal law requires research involving human subjects to be reviewed by an Institutional Review Board, the primary goal of these independent committees is protecting the welfare and rights of study participants.

Academic papers are reviewed by a small group of experts before a scholarly journal will publish them. But the peer-review process isn’t designed to catch research fraud. Reviewers typically do not check the authors’ work to see if they followed the procedures they say they followed to reach their conclusions.

Simonsohn says journalists should investigate the issue and report on it.

“The lack of protection against fraud is a story that deserves to be written,” he says. “When I teach students, they’re shocked. They’re shocked that when you submit a paper to a journal, [the journal is] basically trusting you without any safeguards. You’re not even asked to assert in the affirmative that you haven’t done anything wrong.”

Journalists should also examine ways to prevent fraud, he adds. He thinks researchers should be required to submit “data receipts” to organizations that provide grant funding to show who has had access to, changed or analyzed a study’s raw data and when. This record keeping would be similar to the chain of custody process that law enforcement agencies follow to maintain the legal integrity of the physical evidence they collect.  

“That is, by far, the easiest way to stop most of it,” Simonsohn says.

3. Learn about open science practices and the scientists who expose problematic research.

Nearly 200 countries have agreed to follow the common standards for open science that UNESCO, the United Nations’ scientific, educational and cultural organization, created in 2021. In December, UNESCO released a status report of initiatives launched in different parts of the globe to help researchers work together in the open and share what they’ve learned in detail with other researchers and the public. The report notes, for example, that a rising number of countries and research organizations have developed open data policies.

As of January 2024, more than 1,100 open science policies were adopted by research organizations and research funders worldwide, according to the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies, which tracks policies requiring researchers to make their “research output” public.

In the U.S., the universities and university departments that have adopted these policies include Johns Hopkins University, University of Central Florida, Stanford University’s School of Education and Columbia University’s School of Social Work. Such policies also have been adopted at Harvard Kennedy School and one of its research centers, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which is where The Journalist’s Resource is housed.

Simonsohn recommends journalists learn about open science practices and familiarize themselves with research watchdogs such as Nick Brown, known for helping expose problems in published studies by prominent nutrition scientist Brian Wansink.

Retraction Watch, a website that tracks research retractions, maintains a list of more than two dozen scientific sleuths. Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and science integrity consultant who has been called “the public face of image sleuthing,” was a guest speaker in The Journalist’s Resource’s recent webinar on covering research fraud and errors.

Here are some of the open science organizations that journalists covering these issues will want to know about:

• The Virginia-based Center for Open Science.
• The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences.
• Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project, an online platform for sharing clinical trial research data.
• VEDA (Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis), NASA’s open-source platform that allows researchers to collaborate on Earth science studies.
• MedRxiv (pronounced “med-archive”) is an online platform owned and operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Researchers can use it to share preprint research — academic papers that present preliminary findings and have not been peer reviewed — on medical, clinical and health science topics.

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This journalism tip sheet on covering guns in the U.S., originally published in October 2018, was updated on May 3, 2024 with new data and links to more recent research and reports.

It’s crucial that journalists reporting on guns get the details right, down to the type and style of firearm involved. When news outlets make mistakes, audiences can view their work as sloppy or, worse, as an effort to mislead. Regardless, when the news media get facts wrong, audiences — especially gun owners — might not trust the information they provide.

Although gun ownership is common in the U.S., it remains one of the country’s most divisive issues. About 40% of U.S. adults say they live in a gun-owning household, according to a national survey the Pew Research Center conducted in June 2023. About 12% of women and 33% of men personally own firearms, researchers estimate in a paper published in the journal Injury Prevention in 2020.

To help reporters avoid errors when reporting on guns, The Journalist’s Resource teamed up with two journalists with lots of experience covering them. We thank Henry Pierson Curtis, who covered gun and drug trafficking and other crime at the Orlando Sentinel for 25 years before retiring in 2016, and Alex Yablon, who reported on the business side of guns and gun policy for about five years at The Trace, for helping create this tip sheet.

Here are seven things journalists should keep in mind when reporting on guns:

1. People who die in mass shootings represent a small fraction of the number who die from gun injuries in the U.S.

In 2022, 48,204 people died from injuries caused by firearms, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most gun deaths — 56% in 2022 — are suicides. Almost 41% of people killed by guns in 2022 were homicide victims.

2. Most guns made in the U.S. are handguns. 

While AR-15-style rifles get a lot of media attention, most firearms made in this country are handguns. In 2022, gun companies manufactured 6.2 million pistols and 830,786 revolvers, data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show. In comparison, nearly 3.6 million rifles and 662,350 shotguns were manufactured that year.

“There are just so many handguns out there,” Yablon says. “That has really been the story of America’s love of guns. There have been many, many AR-15s and AK-47s sold in the past 10 or 15 years, but there have been far more handguns sold.”

Of the nearly 2 million guns that U.S. law enforcement agencies recovered during crime investigations and performed traces on between 2017 and 2021, 79% were pistols or revolvers, according to the federal government’s most recent “National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment” report, released in February 2023.

A paper published in 2021 in the journal Injury Epidemiology identifies the specific brands and models of guns U.S. adults own.

3. Expect pushback from gun enthusiasts if you call an AR-15 an “assault rifle.”

An assault rifle, by some definitions, is a military firearm capable of fully automatic fire, meaning it can fire without pause until empty. AR-15-style guns are semi-automatic, meaning they fire a bullet for each pull of the trigger.

It’s worth pointing out that the “AR” in AR-15 doesn’t stand for assault rifle or automatic rifle. It comes from ArmaLite, the name of the company that developed that rifle style.

Organizations such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms industry trade association, refer to AR-15-style guns as modern sporting rifles and warn against confusing them with military rifles such as the M-16. “These rifles are used by hunters, competitors, millions of Americans seeking home-defense guns and many others who simply enjoy going to the range,” the organization explains on its website.

The Associated Press updated its Stylebook in July 2022 with new guidance on weapon terms. It suggests newsrooms use the term “semi-automatic rifle” when referring to a rifle that fires once for each trigger pull and reloads automatically. “Avoid assault rifle and assault weapon, which are highly politicized terms that generally refer to AR- or AK-style rifles designed for the civilian market, but convey little meaning about the actual functions of the weapon,” AP recommends.

4. When writing about guns, it’s helpful to refer to the make and model to avoid confusion and errors.

“I would suggest that if you’re writing about a particular crime … ask whatever law enforcement agency is involved for the make and model for the gun used in the crime,” Yablon says. “That’s going to be the easiest way to avoid tripping up on any of these things.”

Curtis suggests that reporters covering crime and court beats take a gun safety course to learn some of the basic terminology. “I took the concealed carry [class] twice at the Sentinel,” he says. “That starts exposing reporters … to people who are very familiar with firearms. They [instructors] can be very arrogant, but they’re people who can help you out.”

5. All automatic weapons are not banned in the U.S.

Under the National Firearms Act, civilians cannot own fully automatic weapons made after May 19, 1986. But adults  who pass a federal background check and pay a $200 tax can legally purchase older automatic weapons, provided they also register them with the Secretary of the Treasury.

There are a limited number of those guns available, though, and they’re expensive, Curtis explains. “For a fully automatic M-16, you might pay $15,000,” he says. “Typically, it’s going to be stuff from World War II — German Schmeissers, stuff like that. Old Thompson submachine guns. That’s a good down payment on a nice house.”

As of May 2021, a total of 741,146 machine guns were registered with the federal government. The five states with the largest number of registered machine guns were Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Texas and Virginia.

6. There’s a difference between a bullet and a cartridge.

A bullet is the metal projectile that leaves the barrel of a gun when fired. The bullet, along with the case, primer and propellant, make up the cartridge that goes into the gun. It is incorrect to say “box of bullets” when you actually mean a “box of cartridges” or “box of ammunition.”

Keep in mind that shotguns use a different kind of ammunition. Shotgun shells contain either shot, which are metal pellets, or a slug, a projectile that can be made of various materials such as rubber or metal.

7. Silencers don’t make guns silent.

A suppressor — also known as a silencer — can be attached to the end of a gun barrel to reduce the dangerously loud sound of gunfire. But a suppressor doesn’t make gunfire silent.

You can find videos on YouTube of people using silencers and see for yourself.

For journalists wanting to learn more:

• We’ve gathered academic research examining how journalists portray gun owners in news stories.
• Poynter’s Al Tompkins created this guide in 2012: “What Journalists Need to Know about Guns and Gun Control.”
• This guide, created by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, includes a glossary of gun-related terms. It lists examples of what it considers inaccurate and misleading news coverage and offers suggestions for improvement. Even if journalists disagree with the opinions presented, there’s value in seeing how other organizations interpret their work.
• Patent and trademark attorney Bennet Langlotz, whose clients include firearms manufacturers, wrote “The Journalists’ Guide to Guns (How Not to Look Like an Idiot When Writing About Firearms).”

If you’re writing about guns, you should know about these groups and government agencies:

• The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is the primary regulator of firearms. It provides a variety of data, including firearms trace data and a listing of licensed firearms manufacturers, dealers, collectors and importers.
• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks violent deaths, including gun-related deaths. Its National Center for Injury Prevention collects information on firearm injuries and death.
• The National Rifle Association is a pro-gun lobby organization and leading provider of civilian firearms education.
• The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Coalition to Stop Gun Violence are advocacy organizations fighting to reduce gun-related deaths and injuries.

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A common complaint I hear from researchers is that journalists make a lot of mistakes when they report on academic studies. They often describe study findings incorrectly, for example, or claim that a new paper proves something when it doesn’t.

I’ve written dozens of tip sheets in recent years to help journalists fine-tune their skills in choosing, vetting, understanding and explaining research as part of their reporting process. This tip sheet, however, is for researchers, who also play a role in helping journalists get it right.

Our main goal at The Journalist’s Resource is bridging the gap between newsrooms and academia to ensure news coverage of public policy issues is grounded in high-quality evidence — peer-reviewed research in particular.  Everyone benefits when journalists report accurately on research findings, especially the everyday folks who make decisions about their health and safety and their children’s futures based on that information.

When I speak to groups of researchers about the best ways to build relationships with journalists, I often share these 10 tips with them. They represent some of the many ways researchers can help the news media avoid errors, starting with the journalists who interview them about their own work.

1. Use plain language.

Many journalists haven’t studied research methods or statistics and often don’t fully understand the technical terms researchers use to communicate with one another about their work. That’s why it’s important to use plain language when discussing the details of a research paper.

For example, instead of saying you found a positive association between air pollution and dementia in older adults, say you found that older adults exposed to higher levels of air pollution are more likely to develop dementia.

Another example: Instead of saying there’s heterogeneity in the results of three experiments, you could say the trials produced different results.

2. Make sure any press releases written about your research are accurate.

When journalists cover research, they sometimes look to press releases for guidance in describing research findings and to double-check key names, facts and figures. Unfortunately, the press releases that higher education institutions and research organizations issue to promote their researchers’ work sometimes contain errors.

When possible, review the final version of a press release about your research before it’s shared with news outlets. If you spot problems after it’s distributed, ask for a correction and note the error in the initial press release when speaking with journalists.

3. Offer examples of the right and wrong ways to explain relationships among the key variables that were studied.

Not all journalists know what causal language is, or when they should and shouldn’t use it to describe the relationship between key variables in a research study. When speaking with a journalist about a study’s findings, point out whether there’s evidence of a causal relationship between or among certain variables. If there isn’t, offer the journalist examples of correct and incorrect ways to explain this relationship

An example: Let’s say a study finds that crime rates increased in 10 cities in 2020 immediately after local police departments implemented a new crime-fighting program. Let’s also say researchers found no evidence that this new program caused crime rates to rise.

A researcher discussing these findings with a journalist could help them avoid errors by explicitly pointing out the right and wrong ways to report on them. In this case, tell the reporter it would be inaccurate to say this study finds that this program causes crime rates to rise, might cause crime rates to rise or leads to higher crime. It also would be inaccurate to say that introducing this program contributed to higher crime rates in those 10 cities in 2020.

Then share examples of accurate ways to describe what the authors of the study learned: They discovered a relationship, correlation or link between this new program and increased crime rates in these specific cities in this one year. However, researchers found no evidence that the program caused, led to or contributed to the increase.

4. Note the generalizability of findings.

Many news stories and news headlines overgeneralize study findings, reporting that the findings apply to a much larger group than they actually do. Researchers can help journalists get it right by noting how generalizable a study’s findings are.

Example: Let’s say an academic paper concludes that 25% of student athletes at public universities in one state reported using marijuana during the past year. A researcher doing an interview about this study could help ensure the journalist reports on it accurately by stressing that the findings apply only to student athletes at these specific universities. It would be helpful to also point out that it would be incorrect to insinuate these findings apply or might apply to other types of students or to student athletes at any other higher education institution.

5. If a study’s results are expressed as standard deviations, be prepared to help journalists explain those findings using common measurements the public will understand.

A lot of journalists will need assistance describing results reported as standard deviations. Mainstream news outlets will generally avoid the term in news stories because it’s unfamiliar to the general public. Also, even when it’s explained using plain language, the concept can be difficult for even the most educated audience members to grasp.

One way to help audiences comprehend results expressed as a standard deviation, or SD, is by describing the results using more common units of measurement such as points, percentiles, dollars and years. Santiago Pinto, a senior economist and policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, does a good job explaining standard deviation changes in student test scores in his August 2023 report, “The Pandemic’s Effects on Children’s Education.”

The report looks at how U.S. eighth-grade students performed on the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 2019 and 2022. Pinto writes:

“What does a decline of 8 points in the NAEP math test mean? In math, one SD of individual student scores is about 40 points and is roughly equivalent, as a rule of thumb, to three years of schooling. The national average loss of 8 points is equivalent to 0.2 SD, which implies 0.6 years of schooling lost.”

6. Ask journalists to briefly summarize the key takeaways of your interview with them.

Doing this at the end of an interview is a good way to gauge how well a journalist understands the research so you can correct any errors and misunderstandings. Keep in mind, though, that journalists working on a tight deadline will have limited time to go over the key points of your conversation.

7. Offer to answer follow-up questions and review word choices.

At the end of an interview, invite journalists to contact you if they have additional questions, including questions about whether they’ve explained something correctly in their story. Journalists generally won’t share copies of their work before it runs — news outlets tend to discourage or prohibit it. But they might share a few sentences or paragraphs when they ask for help making sure there aren’t mistakes in those parts of the story.

Although they probably won’t share the direct quotes they plan to use from sources they’ve interviewed, some journalists will read your own quotes back to you. It’s worth asking about, and could be another way to prevent errors.

When you offer to answer follow-up questions, point out the best ways and times to reach you.

8. Provide examples of accurate news coverage and summaries.

You can also help a journalist check their work by sharing news stories, reports and summaries that correctly characterize the research the journalist is reporting on.

9. Share The Journalist’s Resource’s tip sheets.

You’ll find a link to our “Know Your Research” section on the right side of our homepage. We’ve created tip sheets, explainers and other resources to help journalists build research literacy and numeracy. Our tip sheets cover topics such as statistical significance, standard deviation, the purpose of peer review and how to interpret data from polls and surveys.

All our written materials are free. We publish them under a Creative Commons license so anyone anywhere can share and republish them as much as they like.

10. After the journalist’s story runs, give feedback.

Good journalists want to know if they got something wrong. They correct their mistakes and try to learn from them.

Too often, when researchers and others spot errors in news stories, they do not alert the journalist. If no one raises an issue with a news story, the journalist who reported it — and all the other journalists who will use it as a reference in the future — will assume it’s accurate.

If a journalist covers an academic paper well, they’ll want to hear about that, too. One way to let them know they got it right: Share their story on social media. Also, reach out with new research you think they’d be interested in reading.

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U.S. lawmakers have introduced a flood of legislation to limit or eliminate colleges’ DEI initiatives, which are designed to improve diversity, equity and inclusion on campus. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI Legislation Tracker, a total of 82 such bills have been filed in 28 states and Congress since early 2023.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are three closely linked values that, together, have become an umbrella term for efforts to ensure people from various backgrounds are included and supported. DEI programs at colleges and universities tend to focus on students, faculty and staff from groups that historically have been marginalized — for example, racial and religious minorities, military veterans and students who start college later in life.

Anti-DEI legislation often targets DEI offices or staff as well as schools’ diversity statements, training programs and policies on hiring and promoting employees and admitting students, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

To help journalists better understand what DEI is and how anti-DEI legislation could impact higher education nationwide, The Journalist’s Resource co-hosted a webinar March 28 with Harvard Kennedy School’s Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.

If you missed it, you can watch the recording. Keep reading for five key takeaways based on presentations from:

• Kristen Renn, the Mildred B. Erickson Distinguished Chair and Professor of Higher, Adult, & Lifelong Education at Michigan State University and a former dean in Brown University’s Office of Student Life.
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.
• Erica Licht, IARA’s research project director and co-host of the podcast Untying Knots.

1. A wide variety of student groups benefit directly from DEI initiatives.

“DEI efforts often get, particularly in some parts of the country, framed simply around race, sometimes around gender or sex,” Renn said.

She noted that framing is incomplete. In fact, two broad categories of students benefit directly from DEI initiatives: those with minoritized identities and those whose experiences are underrepresented on campus, she explained.

Minoritized students are from groups that historically have been marginalized, discriminated against and excluded from higher education based on race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability, Renn added.

Students whose experiences are underrepresented include neurodiverse students, students who are military veterans, first-generation college students, low-income students, students who returned to college later in life, international students and students who are raising children or caring for older adults.

2. Many colleges and universities have tried to incorporate DEI values across campus — from student housing, dining services and health care to coursework, academic advising and mentoring.

Institutions often use a variety of approaches across campus to promote DEI, including revising course syllabi so students study the work of diverse authors, and launching programs that celebrate or raise awareness about different cultures and world views. Ohio State University’s Native American and Indigenous Frybread Community Social and South Dakota State University’s World Languages and Cultures Film Festival are examples of such programs.

Many colleges and universities have created communities within student housing to make it easier for students of the same identity group — first-generation college students and transfer students, for instance — to find and support one another.

Hiring faculty and staff from different backgrounds also promotes DEI. Not only does it provide career opportunities for diverse groups of people, it allows students to seek help from academic advisers, mental health specialists, professors and other campus authorities who have similar life experiences.

Some DEI programs offer support and resources for specific identity groups, like Bristol Community College’s Women’s Center, the University of Georgia’s Pride Center and Duke University’s Her Garden, a mentoring program for female students of color.

3. Journalists reporting on anti-DEI legislation must familiarize themselves with academic research on the impacts of DEI in higher education.

In the webinar, Licht spotlighted several studies suggesting students who attend schools with DEI programs perform better academically, work better in teams and are more engaged in their classes. Meanwhile, Muhammad introduced the Race, Research & Policy Portal, a free online collection of research summaries created by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.

Muhammad stressed the need for journalists “to show extreme skepticism” for claims that critics of DEI make to justify anti-DEI legislation. Elected leaders and organizations that oppose DEI efforts often mischaracterize research findings on the topic or claim there’s no research to support the need for DEI at higher education institutions.

“Much of what is being blamed on DEI doesn’t actually have a basis in fact other than a few anecdotal examples, you know, of some terrible training models that went haywire,” Muhammad said.

He acknowledged that it’s difficult to know what programs are offered at each institution and how they’re working. Schools customize their programs to serve their own student populations.

“There are thousands of DEI offices around the country,” Muhammad said. “No one can actually know exactly what everyone is doing.”

4. Because of the number of people and institutions affected, curbing or eliminating DEI initiatives will have a bigger impact than banning race-based affirmative action in admissions.

Over the past year or so, politically conservative organizations and politicians have worked together to sway public opinion against DEI initiatives and push anti-DEI legislation, news outlets have reported. Earlier this year, The New York Times characterized the movement as a backlash against “wokeism.”

The focus on DEI has grown sharply since last summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions. The nation’s military academies are now the only higher education institutions that can consider race and ethnicity when selecting students.

That ruling will affect students at dozens of selective colleges and universities. Anti-DEI legislation, however, will have a significantly larger impact on American higher education, Renn said.

Race-based affirmative action policies have helped racial and ethnic minorities get into the most selective institutions, such as Ivy League schools. DEI initiatives, on the other hand, benefit a bunch of student groups across all types of colleges and universities.

Renn noted that anti-DEI bills target the institutions most U.S. college students attend — community colleges, state flagship universities and mid-tier public schools and universities. More than 10.2 million students — 35% of undergraduates nationwide — went to community colleges in the fall of 2021, according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Education.

“It’s very important to talk about DEI as what’s happening on campuses,” Renn pointed out. “When politicians or legislators restrict curricula and campus climate efforts, that actually has a much greater harm than curtailing affirmative action in admissions.”

5. Journalists need to ask more probing questions about DEI efforts and higher education history.

Licht said journalists should delve more deeply into schools’ histories to better understand campus culture and the need for DEI programs.

“Journalists should be asking these questions of, does the university know its own history?” Licht said. “Do the people who work there know it?”

It’s also important, she added, to ask legislators and critics of DEI if they know how higher education institutions discriminated against, exploited or excluded certain groups of people well into the mid-20^th century.

Other questions worth exploring:

• Which initiatives work best for reaching the goals of diversity, equity and inclusion, according to peer-reviewed research?
• How will anti-DEI legislation affect historically Black colleges and universities?
• Could any anti-DEI bills infringe on student rights protected under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits colleges and universities from discriminating against students based on their sex?
• How does the amount of money an institution spends on DEI efforts compare with the amount of money it loses on other programs, including student athletics?
• What disparities have existed among different student groups over the past decade? For example, how do students compare in terms of graduation rates, debt accumulation and job placement? If DEI efforts are prohibited, how will schools address disparities?
• How should the perspectives and experiences of women, students of color and LGBTQ students shape campus policies and practices?

Further reading

• Last month, the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center released the 62-page report, “Truths About DEI on College Campuses: Evidence-Based Expert Responses to Politicized Misinformation.”
• Check out our tip sheet on covering race-based affirmative action. Although affirmative action is prohibited in nearly all college admissions offices, many of these tips will help journalists report on issues around college admissions and student diversity more broadly.
• Our collection of research on race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action examines colleges’ efforts to diversify enrollment when admissions officials cannot take students’ race or ethnicity into account.

This tip sheet was updated for clarification on April 4, 2024.

The post Reporting on DEI in higher education: 5 key takeaways from our webinar appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

New York Times investigative reporter Hannah Dreier wanted to know what happened to the hundreds of thousands of migrant children who came to the U.S. alone in recent years through the country’s southern border. Most sought to escape extreme poverty in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

In her five-part series, “Alone and Exploited,” Dreier demonstrates how a long chain of government failures and willful ignorance allowed this “new economy of exploitation” to grow and thrive.

“This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century,” she writes in the first story in the series, published in February 2023.

“Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine.”

The series also reveals:

• More than 250,000 migrant children arrived alone in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022, a sharp increase over prior years. As emergency shelters ran out of room, the federal government pressed case managers to work faster to place kids in private homes and loosened some restrictions to make vetting sponsors easier.
• The U.S. government lost track of many migrant children shortly after they left the shelters. “While H.H.S. [the Department of Health and Human Services] checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children,” Dreier writes in the first story in the series. “Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.”
• Federal officials missed or overlooked warnings signs about child labor violations, including reports from social workers about dangerous working conditions and reports from the U.S. Department of Labor outlining evidence of child labor trafficking.
• Private audits ordered by several big companies consistently missed child labor violations. “Children were overlooked by auditors who were moving quickly, leaving early or simply not sent to the part of the supply chain where minors were working, The Times found in audits performed at 20 production facilities used by some of the nation’s most recognizable brands,” Dreier writes in the last article in the series, published in December 2023.

Federal and state officials responded quickly to Dreier’s reporting by changing laws, strengthening programs and overhauling some federal agencies. Days after the first story ran, President Joe Biden’s administration announced a crackdown on child labor exploitation. Congress and the Department of Labor launched their own investigations.

Meanwhile, many major companies, including McDonald’s, Costco and PepsiCo, announced their own reforms aimed eliminating child labor across their supply chains, Dreier reported in February 2024.

I interviewed Dreier to learn more about her series and the database she created to ground her coverage. Dreier, who is on maternity leave, answered my five questions by email.

In the short Q&A below, she discusses the database, which contains key details the federal government collected on more than 550,000 migrant children from January 2015 through May 2023, and why The New York Times chose to make it public. Dreier also offers tips to help other journalists use the anonymized data to report on migrant children and labor issues in their states and communities.

Her responses have been lightly edited to match The Journalist’s Resource’s editorial style.

Denise-Marie Ordway: Why did you create this database and how did it help you report out the series?

Hannah Dreier: This was a story that focused on people and on-the-ground reporting, but it started with data. I started out in early 2022 with a question: What happened to the hundreds of thousands of young people who were crossing the southern border by themselves?

I knew from years of immigration reporting that some of these children ended up working industrial jobs. But little was known about the startling scope of child labor throughout the United States, or the industry and governmental failures that have allowed it to thrive.

My first, and largest, hurdle was figuring out how to find children in this hidden workforce. The government provides shelter to children when they arrive, but after releasing them to sponsors, it doesn’t track them further. To find where children were working, I had to develop a new approach to analyzing federal data.

I quickly realized that children released to distant relatives and strangers were the most likely to be put to work. So I filed multiple FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests with the Department of Health and Human Services — and eventually sued them in federal court. I was able to obtain ZIP code-level data showing where children had been released to these nonparent sponsors. I then overlaid this data with U.S. Census population-density data to pinpoint parts of the country with especially high concentrations of children living far from their close relatives.

The resulting database guided two years of reporting across 13 states.

The data pointed to spots I never would have thought of: Flandreau, South Dakota; Parksley, Virginia; Bozeman, Montana. I started visiting these towns for weeks at a time, embedding in schools, and accompanying families to weddings and quinceañeras. I sat in factory parking lots during the midnight shift change and waited outside day labor sites before dawn. I found town after town where migrant child labor was an open secret.

Ordway: What made you decide to make this data public? Should more journalists and news outlets do this?

Dreier: Yes! And I hope more reporters use this data to dig into migrant child labor in America.

After I wrote a Times Insider piece explaining my process for mapping migrant child labor, Congressional staffers, academics, other journalists and even Department of Labor investigators requested access to our database. As part of its commitment to exposing the full scope of child labor, The Times made this data public, along with a detailed map that outlined outcomes for more than 550,000 children over a period of eight years.

We found migrant child labor in all 50 states. It’s clear there’s more to this story than what one journalist or even a team of reporters can report.

Ordway: How do you recommend other journalists use this database?

Dreier: Journalists at different outlets around the country have already picked up on some child labor stories, and this data can help them tell new stories. For local reporters, the database provides a previously unavailable level of detail about migrant children, including where kids are coming from, how long they’re staying in government-run shelters, and what kind of relationships they have with their sponsors (if they’re being released to aunts and uncles, distant cousins, strangers, etc.).

It’s been great to see reporters starting to use the database to fuel their own reporting, including at The Cincinnati Enquirer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Ordway: What advice would you give other journalists who’d like to create databases for their own reporting projects?

Dreier: Though the heart of this reporting was the stories of the children themselves, I used data to add sweep and bring home to readers just how widespread this problem has become.

We found useful data everywhere. It doesn’t always take a federal lawsuit to shake it loose. We used court records from PACER [the federal Public Access to Court Electronic Records system] and state courts, as well as documents from dozens of FOIA requests to the Department of Labor and state labor agencies to hunt down outcomes the government does not track.

We built a database of migrant children killed on the job, including a 15-year-old who fell on his first day roofing and a 14-year-old who was hit by a car while delivering food.

Another database showed how rarely the government prosecuted child labor trafficking cases. I also tracked serious workplace injuries suffered by children, including crushed limbs and seared lungs.

A lot of data is sitting there for the taking, and doesn’t require submitting any requests at all. I’d encourage reporters to spend time on the websites of the agencies they’re reporting on — for me, that was OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration], DOL [the Department of Labor], HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services], SEC [the Securities and Exchange Commission], and CBP [Customs and Border Protection].

I also found it helpful to try site searches of these websites (by adding “site:hhs.gov” to Google searches for example), and to add the search term .csv or .xlsx, because some databases are posted to the site but not listed anywhere.

Ordway: When you ask government agencies for data such as this, how do you make sure you receive it in a form that you can easily use for reporting purposes?

Dreier: I always ask FOIA officers to email me records and to send data as a spreadsheet, but government offices often ignore that request.

With this project, some state agencies and police departments would send records only in hard copy or on CDs.

HHS gave us thousands of rows of data in the form of poorly rendered PDFs. We resolved this issue by scanning hundreds of pages of documents, and then using online tools to convert them to searchable text and spreadsheets.

For me, the most important thing is to get the records. From there, it’s almost always possible to find some way to make them useable … even if it ends up being a time-consuming process.

Read the stories

Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.

As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings

The Kids on the Night Shift

Children Risk Their Lives Building America’s Roofs

They’re Paid Billions to Root Out Child Labor in the U.S. Why Do They Fail?

The post How they did it: The New York Times exposes migrant child labor exploitation across 50 states appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

It was no surprise to Jerry Mitchell to learn high-ranking law enforcement officials had been accused of behaving badly in parts of Mississippi where journalists had not kept a watchful eye.

But the details he and his colleagues at Mississippi Today and The New York Times uncovered during a yearlong investigation shocked even this veteran journalist, who has been exposing corruption in the state’s criminal justice system for more than 30 years.

The project uncovered decades of allegations of sex abuse, torture, bribery, retaliation and other abuses of power at sheriff’s offices across the state. When Mitchell and a fellow journalist at Mississippi Today, Ilyssa Daly, started looking into claims made about one sheriff in 2022, residents came forward with what seemed like unbelievable stories about other sheriffs as well as detectives and patrol deputies in different parts of the state.

The combined efforts of these journalists and journalism organizations produced the seven-story series, “Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs.” It revealed that:

• A sheriff in Noxubee County, located on the Mississippi-Alabama border, allegedly demanded that a woman being held in the county jail send him sexually explicit photos and videos and ignored her complaint that she had been coerced into having sex with two deputies.
• Multiple women accused a sheriff in Clay County, in northeastern Mississippi, of sexually harassing or coercing them. For example, an incarcerated woman accused the sheriff of arranging for her and another prisoner to be brought to his house, where they had to change into boxer shorts and pose for photos. A Clay County Sheriff’s Office employee told journalists she picked up two female prisoners from the sheriff’s house and returned them to the jail.
• A sheriff in Rankin County, in the middle of the state, allegedly lied to get grand jury subpoenas to spy on his married girlfriend.
• Rankin County narcotics detectives and patrol officers, some of whom referred to themselves as the “Goon Squad,” allegedly used Tasers and waterboarding to torture people into confessing to drug crimes or providing information. Of the drug raids the journalists examined, the biggest involved a $420 sale of heroin. The series identified 20 of the deputies present during those incidents.

“All of this reporting has just been beyond the pale,” Mitchell says. “A lot of this has been totally shocking to me.”

A lack of oversight in Mississippi

The series also documents how the three sheriffs operated largely without oversight and avoided being investigated for a range of serious allegations.

For example, a district attorney compiled a report of evidence collected against Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey in 2016 but stopped investigating, in part because he was friends with Bailey. Although he shared details with two local judges and forwarded the investigation to the state’s attorney general, the case ended there, Daly and Mitchell reported in September.

When a former deputy called Bailey to warn him about the Goon Squad, Bailey called him “a dirty cop and accused him of secretly recording the call,” Howey and Rosenfield write in a November article.

The impact

The series jarred public leaders. Earlier this year, state legislators introduced a bill that would allow the Mississippi Board on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Training to investigate law enforcement misconduct. The measured passed the Mississippi House unanimously last week and was sent to the senate.

The series also spurred federal action. Several weeks after journalists asked about the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s languishing investigation of former Noxubee County Sheriff Terry Grassaree, he was indicted on bribery charges. After the story about him ran in April, he was indicted on additional charges.

Immediately after the two news outlets published the piece on Rankin County’s Goon Squad, attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division flew to the state capital to meet with the president of the local chapter of the NAACP. Days later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office put out a press release urging victims to come forward.

Federal officials put up billboards, too, urging residents to report police brutality to the FBI.

Meanwhile, on March 19, two members of Rankin’s Goon Squad were sentenced to prison for torturing two Black men last year using Tasers, a sex toy and other objects. One of the victims was shot in the mouth. On March 20, two other former deputies were sentenced for their part in the torture, one of whom received a 40-year federal prison sentence.

We asked the reporting team for advice to help other journalists take on similar projects. Below, we highlight four of the tips they shared.  

1. If you report on law enforcement agencies, get their Taser log data.

Data collected from deputies’ Tasers played a key role in Howey and Rosenfield’s reporting on Rankin County deputies’ use of force. It allowed them to confirm victim statements and demonstrate when, where, how, and how long deputies fired their Tasers while on the job.

“One running theme we kept hearing again and again is people being tased and Tasers being used as torture weapons,” Rosenfield says.

Many Tasers keep detailed digital records of their use. The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office gathers that data to compile departmentwide logs. Mississippi Today and The New York Times examined 24 years of the agency’s Taser data.

The journalists determined, for example, that three deputies triggered their Tasers a combined 14 times during a 2018 home raid over an $80 sale of methamphetamine. The four men at the home that night said deputies beat them and used Tasers and a blowtorch while interrogating them.

Howey and Rosenfield reported the Taser logs also showed that “[a]t least 32 times over the past decade, Rankin deputies fired their Tasers more than five times in under an hour, activating them for at least 30 seconds in total — double the recommended limit. Experts in Taser use who reviewed the logs called these incidents highly suspicious.”

Rosenfield recommends asking industry experts and academic researchers for help understanding Taser log data and identifying potentially problematic patterns.

“We talked to lots of use of force experts to find out what we could actually glean from the logs and how to read them correctly to contextualize them,” he adds.

2. Be kind and transparent. Sources may be more willing to help if you’ve treated them well.

Daly, the lead reporter on the project, spent hours driving across the state with Mitchell, interviewing sources, tracking down court files and transcripts, and digging through stacks of paper records in various government offices and facilities.

When she’s  out reporting, she says she tries to treat everyone she encounters with kindness. She also aims for transparency, so sources know what she plans to do with the information they share with her.

She calls this approach “walking in the sunshine.”

“Always walk in the sunshine with whatever you’re doing and be friendly and polite and make source connections with everyone around you — because you don’t know who’s going to help you with the thing you need most,” she says.

It paid big dividends for her last year, when an assistant records clerk she saw often at a local courthouse went out of her way to find a case file. Details from the case, filed in 2012 by a former prisoner accusing Clay County Sheriff Eddie Scott of sex abuse, were crucial to the story about Scott.

Initially, no one could locate the file, which Daly later learned probably had been missing for years.

“The woman comes back and can’t find it and she’s freaking out and she’s saying, ‘This has never happened before,’” Daly says.

Daly helped search the office’s paper files but also came up emptyhanded.

A couple weeks later, she and Mitchell returned to the courthouse with a different strategy for gathering bits of information from court filings, to try to figure out what information the missing file contained. When the head clerk spotted the two journalists, she told them the assistant clerk found the file they wanted.

The assistant clerk had spent days looking for the file and found it misplaced in another part of the clerk’s office. What it contained: The only public record of a local woman’s allegations that Scott, when he was the county’s chief deputy, had coerced her into a sexual relationship after her arrest. He had promised to use his influence to help her, she writes in the court filing. She says they had sex in his patrol car, parked on a hog farm, on at least five occasions.

The file also contained hand-written, suggestive letters that Scott sent to her in prison in 2011, months before he became sheriff. Mississippi Today and The New York Times published one of those letters.

“You never know which source might go that extra mile,” Daly says.

3. Understand that the way you present yourself through your words, actions and appearance can create or break down barriers between you and members of the public.

For Howey, one of toughest parts of the series was getting people to open up, especially those living in communities that have been regularly targeted by law enforcement.

He discovered that being himself, which meant not hiding his tattoos and piercings, helped him connect with residents in the rural and lower-income communities he visited. Sometimes, he wore a T-shirt to interviews — for his own comfort and so people he approached might be less apprehensive or suspicious of him.

“Usually, the people with the big vocabularies and nice wardrobes are the people who put them in the positions they’re in,” Howey says.

He notes that most people can “sniff out insincerity.”

“I just approach people as myself instead of a stuffy, professional reporter,” he says. “It’s about finding that line that allows you to stay professional and allows you to be personable enough for people to see you’re a real human being.”

If someone starts confiding in you, they might tell others you’re trustworthy.

“I’ve had situations where I’m talking to people and they’ll make a phone call [to a potential source] and say, ‘He’s actually cool,’” Howey says. “That has gotten me interviews.”

4. Use digital tools such as Pinpoint and Descript to make your job easier.

Two of the investigative team’s favorite digital tools are Descript and Google’s Pinpoint.

Descript is a video editing app. You can use it to record, edit and transcribe videos as well as collaborate on videos and podcasts. Rosenfield and Howey use it for transcribing audio files.

There is a free version, but they recommend investing in the paid version, which starts at $12 a month. The free version comes with one hour of transcription per month while the entry-level paid plan provides 10 hours a month.

Pinpoint is a free research tool that lets you examine and search large collections of documents quickly. You can also use it to transcribe audio and video files and sort documents according to key words and phrases, including locations and people’s names.

“It’s a great resource when you’re grappling with reams of court and police records and it’s a mixture of digital and paper,” Howey explains. “This tool allows you to compile everything into one folder and makes it all text searchable so it’s easy to extract information. It’s extremely useful. We used it constantly to look for patterns in police reports, to pull certain records out without spending 20 minutes looking for them in folders.”

Read the stories

Sex Abuse, Beatings and an Untouchable Mississippi Sheriff

Where the sheriff is king, these women say he coerced them into sex

The Sheriff, His Girlfriend and His Illegal Subpoenas

How a ‘Goon Squad’ of Deputies Got Away With Years of Brutality

Who Investigates the Sheriff? In Mississippi, Often No One.

The post How they did it: Mississippi Today and The New York Times reveal sex abuse, torture allegations at sheriff’s offices appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

At first glance, registering to vote in the U.S. may seem easy: Adults fill out a form and submit it online, in person or through the mail. But getting onto a state’s voter roll — and staying there — can be complicated. It’s also a key reason more Americans don’t participate in elections. 

All states except North Dakota require voter registration for federal, state and local elections. The U.S., unlike many other democratic nations, puts the burden of registration on its citizens.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, the government creates voter rolls automatically from census data, according to a 2020 report from the Pew Research Center. America’s neighbor to the north, Canada, maintains a national database of registered voters who are added automatically based on data collected across government agencies there, including birth and death records and income tax filings.

Pew notes that half of the 226 countries and territories included in the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network have some type of registration mandate. The network, launched at the United Nations in 1998, is a global repository of election-related information.

In 2022, 69% of U.S. citizens aged 18 years and older were registered to vote, according to a report the U.S. Census Bureau released last year. Registration rates ranged from 61% in North Carolina to 83% in Oregon.

The four most populous states — California, Texas, Florida and New York — had some of the lowest registration rates: 67%, 65%, 63% and 66%, respectively.

U.S. election oversight

U.S. elections are broadly governed by federal laws such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. All three aimed to broaden the number of people participating in American elections.

The National Voter Registration Act significantly expanded residents’ opportunities to register to vote. It’s commonly referred to as the “Motor Voter Act” because it requires states to allow residents to register to vote at the same time they apply for or renew their driver’s licenses. The law also mandates that residents be able to register at certain state and local offices, including public assistance offices.

There’s no national list of registered voters or people eligible to vote, however. Individual states and the District of Columbia maintain their own voter rolls. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia share data through the Electronic Registration Information Center to help one another keep track of voters who move or die and prevent duplicate registrations.

Federal law forbids people who are not U.S. citizens from voting in federal elections, but states decide who can participate in state and local elections. While all states prohibit non-citizens from voting in state elections, a few cities in California, Maryland and Vermont allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, according to Ballotpedia.

Why voter registration rates differ

A big reason voter registration rates differ so much is because each state has its own election policies and processes, which can make registering easy or difficult. In addition, local election offices vary in how they interpret those rules, how they educate and engage with residents, and how they maintain their voter lists.

To complete this first part of the voting process, U.S. citizens must:

• Make sure they are eligible to register. Adults living in the U.S. can register to vote in federal, state and local elections if they are U.S. citizens and meet their state’s residency requirements. Although citizens cannot vote until they are 18 years old, many states allow them to register starting at age 16. Some states prohibit certain groups from voting, including people who have been convicted of a felony and adults with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities.
• Determine where, when and how to register. In most states, residents can register online any time, provided they have access to the internet, can locate the registration form for their state online and can fill out a digital document. Those who cannot or do not want to register online can do it by mail or visit a local election office in person during its business hours.
• Correctly complete a voter registration application. Lots of people make mistakes or leave out key information on their applications. Applicants in the three states that require them to answer a question about their race or ethnicity might skip it if they aren’t sure what to write. Occasionally, applicants get their birthdates, driver’s license numbers or other identification numbers wrong.
• Submit it before their state’s deadline. Voter registration deadlines vary. In Texas, for example, citizens must be registered at least 30 days before Election Day. In Alabama, they must be registered 15 days prior. It’s 10 days in New York. In 22 other states and the capital, citizens can register to vote and cast ballots on the same day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
• Promptly fix any errors or provide missing information. Local election officials review voter registration applications and notify people needing to correct an error or provide additional information. If applicants don’t share their phone numbers on their registration application, election officials will reach out by mail. If issues are not resolved by the voter registration deadline, the applicant will not be added to the voter roll in time for their ballots to count.
• Check on their voter registration status. After registering to vote, it’s a good idea for residents to periodically check their registration status. Election offices remove people from the voter rolls for various reasons, which also differ by state. Officials in Massachusetts, for instance, can remove residents who don’t participate in city and town censuses. States can cancel the registrations of residents deemed to be “inactive voters” — a term defined differently across states. Voters in Wyoming can have their registrations canceled after not voting in one general election.

Each step can be a stumbling block that ultimately results in someone not being able to register, political scientists Christopher B. Mann of Skidmore College and Lisa A. Bryant of California State University Fresno write in a 2020 paper, published in the journal Electoral Studies.

“It is a cliché that ‘getting to the starting line’ is often more difficult than running the race, and this sentiment seems applicable for many American citizens when it comes to voting: The requirement to register is a costly and time-consuming obstacle to casting a ballot,” Mann and Bryant write.

Voter registration rates among demographic groups

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrates substantial disparities in voter registration rates across states and the District of Columbia. The Census Bureau provides a variety of reports and spreadsheets containing estimates of the number and percentage of people from each state who are registered to vote. It offers data broken down age, sex, race, household income, employment status and other demographic factors.

White U.S. citizens are much more likely to be registered to vote than citizens of other racial and ethnic groups. Nationally, about 71% of white adult citizens, 64% of Black adult citizens, 60% of Asian adult citizens and 58% of Hispanic adult citizens were registered to vote in November 2022, according to Census Bureau estimates.

Some other disparities:

• Older adult citizens are more likely to be registered than younger ones. While 77% of citizens aged 65 years and older were registered to vote in November 2022, 63% of citizens aged 25 to 34 and 49% of citizens aged 18 to 24 were.
• Voter registration rates differed by job status in November 2022. For example, 60% of unemployed adult citizens reporting being registered compared with 72% of self-employed adult citizens and 79% with government jobs.
• Adult citizens with lower incomes are less likely to register to vote than those with higher incomes. For example, 83% of adult citizens with family incomes of $150,000 per year or higher were registered to vote in November 2022. Meanwhile, 58% of adult citizens with family incomes of $15,000 to $19,999 were.

KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, used Census Bureau data to create an interactive database that lets the public search and sort voter registration rates by race and ethnicity in even-numbered years from November 2014 to November 2022. It shows stark differences across racial groups in certain parts of the country.

A few examples:

• The voter registration rate among Hispanic adult citizens in November 2022 was lowest in Mississippi, at 23%, and highest in Minnesota, at 75%.
• In Iowa, 76% of white adult citizens were registered to vote, compared with 41% of Black adult citizens, 45% of Asian adult citizens and 58% of Hispanic adult citizens.
• In 10 states, fewer than half of Black adult citizens were registered to vote in November 2022. In 15 states, fewer than half of Asian adult citizens were.

A look at academic research

Scholars have documented problems with the voter registration process across the U.S. for decades. In recent years, they have focused on voter education and outreach as well as voter list maintenance, a process of updating the rolls of registered voters that includes removing people who have died, moved to other states or lost their eligibility to vote.

Researchers stress that registration rates would be higher if citizens understood the rules around voter registration and the consequences of not following them. However, the quality of voter education programs varies from state to state and even from election office to election office, studies conducted by Thessalia Merivaki, an associate professor in American politics at Mississippi State University, have found.

Merivaki is among a small group of researchers who study voter registration, education and outreach. Several of her most recent studies focus on Florida, probably in part because the state’s broad open records laws make it much easier to obtain data and reports there than in many other states. Two chapters of Merivaki’s 2021 book, “The Administration of Voter Registration: Expanding the Electorate Across and Within the States,” also focus exclusively on Florida election administration.

When Merivaki and her colleague, Mara Suttmann-Lea, an assistant professor of American politics at Connecticut College, studied the education and outreach efforts of Florida’s 67 county election offices, they learned they varied considerably. Those offices “enjoy significant discretion in how they engage in voter education and the resources they dedicate to these efforts,” the two researchers write in a 2022 paper published in Policy Studies.

When Merivaki and Suttmann-Lea studied states’ efforts to improve voter education after Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, they discovered some states did more than others. In fact, they found that some states’ improvement plans probably did not comply with the federal law, created in the wake of the controversial presidential election results in Florida in 2000. The legislation provided $3.9 billion to help states modernize their election equipment and processes.

Some states did not incorporate the federal law’s “core voter education provisions, particularly voting technology demonstrations, voter guides, and toll-free hotlines” in their plans for improving voter education, Merivaki and Suttmann-Lea write in a 2022 analysis in the Election Law Journal. They also note “differences in the inclusion of education materials for language minority and disabled voters, suggesting limits on compliance with existing federal laws.”

Once citizens are added to the voter rolls, they can be removed, though. Election researchers have raised questions about the effectiveness and lawfulness of states’ procedures for maintaining voter lists.

List maintenance is meant to protect against fraud and help election officials estimate the number of voting machines, ballots, poll workers and polling locations they will need on Election Day. But that process also is flawed. It can remove eligible voters en masse and with little notice.

Some residents do not realize they have been taken off the voter roll until they show up at their polling place on Election Day. As a result, some Americans who are eligible to vote either don’t vote or vote using a provisional ballot, which is kept apart from regular ballots until election officers determine whether the individual who filled it out is eligible to vote.

Recent academic research also indicates:

• Local election offices vary in the way they process voter registration applications, which seems to contribute to big differences in the percentage of applications each office rejects. When researchers studied the issue in Florida, they found that rejection rates also varied seasonally, with fewer applications being rejected in October — the cut-off there for applying to register to vote in November elections.
• In Florida, younger voters and racial and ethnic minorities were more likely to have their voter registration applications put “on hold,” meaning they needed to correct errors and provide additional information before their applications can be processed.
• Compliance with Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act has been “spotty and variable over time and across states.”
• Some states have started automatically prompting residents to register to vote when they visit a government office. While voter registration has risen in these states, the registration rates of underrepresented groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans appear unchanged.

We elaborate on these findings below. We have summarized four peer-reviewed papers and a report from the University of Southern California that investigate these issues. We plan to update this article occasionally as new studies and data become available.

Research roundup

Voter registration challenges

Registered, But Not Quite: Processing Pending and Incomplete Registrations
Thessalia Merivaki. Chapter 6 of The Administration of Voter Registration: Expanding the Electorate Across and Within the States, 2021.

The study: In this book chapter, Merivaki examines records from two county election offices in Florida to better understand why some voter registration applications are placed “on hold” and which individuals are more likely to have their applications put in this category. She compares records from 2016 from Pinellas and Polk counties, which are located in the same region of Florida and have populations of similar size.

Between Jan. 1, 2016 and Oct. 18, 2016, a total of 2,132 applications in Polk County and 3,892 in Pinellas County were placed “on hold,” meaning they were either incomplete or denied. The deadline to register to vote in the general election that year in that state was Oct. 18.

The findings: The most common reason applications were placed on hold was because of a missing or incorrect identification number such as a driver’s license number or the last four digits of the applicant’s social security number, Merivaki found. In Polk County, 55% of “on hold” registrations were deemed incomplete because of this. In Pinellas County, 31% were. The most common reason for being denied: Having a felony conviction.

Merivaki learned that individuals with “on hold” applications “were overall young, racially diverse, predominantly registering as NPAs [not having a political party affiliation] or Democrats, and slightly more male than female,” she writes. However, Black applicants were much less likely than white applicants to be placed on hold because of missing or incorrect identification information. Hispanic applicants, on the other hand, were much more likely than white, non-Hispanic applicants to be placed on hold for this reason.

Applicants who failed to disclose their race were 55% more likely to have their application put “on hold” because of missing or incorrect information than those who disclosed it.

In the author’s words: “While disclosing one’s gender and/or race is not required [in Florida] to register to vote, it offers an opportunity to assess whether undisclosed information affects the prospects of one’s application being classified as ‘incomplete’ or denied, after taking any other factors into consideration,” Merivaki writes.

Access Denied? Investigating Voter Registration Rejections in Florida
Thessalia Merivaki. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, January 2021.

The study: Merivaki examines monthly voter registration reports from each of Florida’s 67 county election offices to better understand the reasons why they rejected tens of thousands of voter registration applications between January and December 2012. Florida requires voters to be registered 29 days before a general election.

The findings: Election offices, on average, rejected about 11% of all registration applications submitted that year. But rejection rates varied by month and county. Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, had the highest monthly rejection rate — it rejected 56% of applications submitted in March 2012. Duval County’s rejection rate for the year averaged 15%, compared with about 11% in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, and 6% in Orange County, which includes Orlando.

Merivaki discovered that county election offices were least likely to reject applications in October 2012, when the rejection rate statewide averaged 3%. Oct. 9 was the deadline to register to vote in Florida’s November elections. She writes that the lower rejection rate in October suggests “administrative issues in processing voter registration applications when the volume of voter registration applications dramatically increases in a short period of time.”

She also discovered rejection rates were lower when a larger share of applications went through organizations such as public libraries and military recruitment offices. A 10% increase in voter registration applications submitted this way was associated with a 3% reduction in the rejection rate, she finds.

In the author’s words: “Given that the influx of voter registration applications peaks during the last weeks prior to the voter registration deadline, and so do the rates of rejected voter registrations, it appears that voter registration rejections stem from administrative challenges in processing applications in short time intervals,” Merivaki writes. “However, due to the fact the rates of rejected voter registrations also increase as early as eight months prior to the voter registration closing book date may have to do with the voters’ capacity to avoid errors when completing voter registration forms.”

Voter list maintenance issues

The Racial Burden of Voter List Maintenance Errors: Evidence from Wisconsin’s Supplemental Movers Poll Books
Gregory A. Huber, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse and Katie Steele. Science Advances, February 2021.

The study: This paper estimates how often voters in Wisconsin are incorrectly flagged as having moved to a new address, prompting the state to either remove them from its voter roll or start a process that can lead to their voter registration being cancelled. “It is important to understand how often these registrants did not move, and how often such an error is not corrected by the postcard confirmation process, because uncorrected errors make it more difficult for a registrant to subsequently vote,” write the researchers, Gregory Huber of Yale University and Marc Meredith, Michael Morse and Katie Steele of the University of Pennsylvania.

When Wisconsin residents change the address on their driver’s license or file a change of address through the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address System, the Electronic Registration Information Center reports that information to Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Election Commission then sends postcards to people who are registered to vote asking them to confirm whether they have moved.

The findings: In October 2017, ERIC notified Wisconsin that 341,855 voters had potentially moved. Of those, 6,153 responded to the state’s postcard to confirm they remained eligible to vote at the address they had used to register. The remaining 335,702 voters were initially removed from the state voter roll.

Huber and his colleagues estimate that 4% of voters who had been flagged as suspected movers and did not respond to postcards voted in 2018 and still lived at the same address they used to register. This represents at least 9,000 people. Racial and ethnic minorities were about 4 percentage points more likely than white residents to vote at the address that ERIC had flagged as being out of date.

In the authors’ words: “Our results show why it is essential to make registrants aware if their registration is being moved to inactive status and to continue to alert these registrants to upcoming elections so that they know when and where to vote if they still reside at their address of registration.”

Complying with federal election law

Race, Poverty, and the Redistribution of Voting Rights
Jamila Michener, Poverty and Public Policy, June 2016.

The study: Jamila Michener of Cornell University examines the reasons states vary in their compliance with Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act Of 1993, which requires public assistance agencies to offer voter registration services to everyone applying for or renewing their government benefits. She looks at changes in compliance between 1995 and 2012.

The findings: Compliance with the federal law was higher when the president was a Democrat and lower when legislatures were more heavily Republican. Race played a key role in determining whether states worked to bring people with lower incomes into the election process, Michener finds.

She also finds that compliance was lower in states where a larger percentage of the population was Black. Meanwhile, she adds, that “[h]igher percentages of Black bureaucrats are associated with increased compliance while growing ranks of Latinos in state welfare bureaucracies are associated with decreases in compliance.” Michener explains that she is unsure why compliance falls under Latino leadership. But she notes that Latino bureaucrats “are likely better educated and more economically advantaged than other Latinos,” which she adds “can translate into less liberal attitudes, less of a sense of linked fate, and an increased desire to disassociate oneself from more marginal co-ethnics.”

In the author’s words: “These findings raise concerns about the political equality of disadvantaged citizens and underscore the need to scrutinize the outcomes of expansionary voting policies. Even more broadly, this research shows how the entanglement of race and poverty in a federalist polity frustrates efforts to advance participatory equality.”

Automatic voter registration

Effects of Automatic Voter Registration in the United States
Eric McGhee and Mindy Romero. Report from the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California, 2020.

The study: This report looks at how introducing automatic voter registration affected registration rates in 11 states. In most of those states, eligible residents were automatically registered to vote based on information they provided their state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, unless they actively declined. The authors, Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California and Mindy Romero of the University of Southern California, note the report’s conclusions “are not firm” because Americans nationwide had reduced access to government agencies at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings: While voter registration rose after states implemented AVR initiatives — starting with Oregon in 2016 — the researchers are unsure how much of the increase is a direct result of AVR. In Oregon, for example, 722,823 people who had not previously been registered were added to the state’s voter roll between January 2016 and January 2020. Another 1.2 million Oregonians already registered to vote updated their addresses.

McGhee and Romero note there is evidence, from Oregon and California in particular, that AVR “adds new registrants consistently throughout the election cycle in a way that could have lasting effects on the state’s overall registration rate.” However, AVR does not appear to improve the relative registration rates of underrepresented groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans.

In the authors’ words: “The data suggest the reform probably encourages some new people to register who would not have done so without AVR. However, the effect on overall registration is ambiguous because most AVR increases we estimate are small and the reform is still relatively new.”

The post How voter registration rules discourage some Americans from voting: An explainer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

We updated this tip sheet on private school choice, originally published Feb. 7, 2024, to provide more recent data on U.S. students participating in these programs as well as additional historical context.

About half of U.S. states offer private school choice programs, which help families pay for private school. It’s a highly politicized, complicated issue involving multiple types of tuition assistance, hundreds of thousands of children and billions of taxpayer dollars.

It’s also an issue journalists need to examine closely. News coverage grounded in academic research is particularly important as more states consider starting these programs and lawmakers in states that have them push to expand.

How can journalists strengthen their coverage? We put this question to seven university professors who study private school vouchers and other private school choice programs. Here’s their advice:

1. Explain how the various private school choice programs differ.

In the U.S., the three most common private school choice programs are tuition vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, or ESAs. Journalists often refer to them all as “voucher” programs, but there are key differences.

“ESAs are radically different from school vouchers,” Patrick J. Wolf, a professor of education policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.

In our roundup of research on private school choice, we briefly explain these three programs:

• Private school vouchers are public funds that generally cover all or a portion of private school tuition. Families typically do not receive this money, however. Program administrators tend to send it to the private schools. In a landmark ruling in 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court found that allowing religious schools to participate in the state’s voucher program did not violate the state or federal constitution, partly because of the way funds were distributed. Although the state sent voucher checks to participating private schools, it required parents and guardians to “restrictively endorse” the checks to the schools.

• Tax-credit scholarships also cover all or part of a student’s tuition bill. This money also tends to go to directly to the private schools. A primary difference between these two programs: While government agencies take money from their own coffers to offer vouchers, they fund tax-credit scholarships indirectly. They give businesses and other taxpayers tax credits in exchange for donating money needed to provide scholarships.

• Education savings accounts contain public funds that students can spend on a variety of education-related items and services. Allowable expenses frequently include private school tuition, online courses, tutoring, standardized testing fees and homeschooling materials. In Arizona, students also can use ESA dollars to buy laptops, telescopes, gym memberships, desks and tickets to zoos, museums and musicals. However, during the 2022-23 school year, 66% of Arizona’s ESA money went to tuition and fees at private schools, with the largest share going to schools created to serve students with disabilities, according to an analysis from KNXV-TV Channel 15.

2. Find out how families decide whether to participate in private school choice programs.

Vanderbilt University researcher Claire Smrekar urges journalists to ask families how they decide whether to participate in these programs and to ask school officials what kinds of information they provide.

Policymakers and school officials often assume incorrectly that parents and guardians have access to the same information, says Smrekar, an associate professor of public policy and education who’s also editor of the Peabody Journal of Education. But studies consistently show that lower-income families and parents with lower levels of formal education generally do not receive or seek out the same information that higher-income families and parents with college degrees do, she adds.

Parents and guardians who aren’t familiar with education jargon or certain terms might not fully understand what school officials convey about private school choice programs in person or in writing. The same is true for parents who don’t speak English or aren’t fluent.

The method of communication matters, too, Smrekar points out. School officials often use email and social media to share information. That’s a problem for families who don’t have internet service or use the same social media platforms. 

“This is not an indictment of or finding fault with parents,” she says. “It’s a problem with the assumption that all families have access to high levels of information.”  

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, says journalists should pay attention to enrollment patterns. Students aren’t leaving their public schools in droves. A lot of the kids using public money to pay for a private K-12 education were already enrolled in private schools, he notes.

In Iowa, for example, state officials reported in July that 40% of students approved for education savings accounts were public school students planning to transfer to private schools and 60% were students already enrolled in private schools, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch.

In Florida, 84,505 students receiving private school vouchers were already enrolled in private school, Politico reports. And 22,294 children started kindergarten at private schools using tuition vouchers. Meanwhile, 16,096 kids — 13% of all voucher recipients — transferred from public to private schools.

3. Scrutinize private schools.

Researchers we interviewed stressed the need for more in-depth reporting on private schools in states that have introduced school choice programs and states where lawmakers are considering it.

Questions they say journalists should answer in their news coverage:

• What assumptions are being made about the quality and number of private schools willing to participate in these programs?
• What’s the history and track record of private schools that participate in these programs in your state or other states?
• What’s the capacity of private schools in your community and state?
• What are the types and locations of private schools that have the most room available for new students?
• Are the highest quality private schools willing to participate? If so, are they also willing — and able — to expand to accommodate students using vouchers, tax-credit scholarships or education savings accounts?
• What rules or other factors could deter the highest quality private schools from participating?
• If a private school has limited seats available, which types of students are most likely to be admitted?
• Do any private schools in your state or community bar certain types of students from enrolling — for example, pregnant students, LGBTQ students, students with disabilities or students who don’t speak English?
• If a student’s voucher, tax-credit scholarship or education savings account doesn’t cover the full tuition amount, which schools will help students cover the remainder? How?

4. Note that using public money to pay for private education is not a recent development.

State and local governments have funded private K-12 schools and private colleges and universities for generations. Rural communities in New England started offering “town tuitioning” to school children after the Civil War, starting with Vermont in 1869 and Maine in 1873.

In these communities, local governments give families money to pay for private school because they don’t operate public schools that serve all grades. Kids who cannot go to public school in these towns have the option of enrolling in a public or private school in another location. As of February 2023, 45 Vermont communities offered this option, the Valley News in New Hampshire reports. This school year, these towns are paying $18,266 in tuition, on average, for each student in grades 7 to 12 and $16,756, on average, per child in the lower grades, according to the Vermont Agency of Education.

In parts of the U.S. South in the 1950s and 1960s, governments paid for white students to attend private schools so they could avoid learning alongside Black students in public schools. “Securing public funding for all-white private schools was the go-to solution in the face of integration mandates,” researchers Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer and Timothy Jon Nelson wrote in November in the Daily Beast.

In 1989, Wisconsin enacted the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which provided private school tuition vouchers to lower-income children in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city. The program has been expanded multiple times over the years. Florida launched the first statewide voucher program in 1999, giving students in failing public schools the option of transferring to private schools.

This year, an estimated 836,447 students across more than 20 states will receive a projected $6.2 billion through private school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, according to a recent report from EdChoice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for school choice. Almost one-third of those students are using vouchers averaging $8,566 to attend private schools.

State governments have long provided funding for private colleges and universities as well. As a comparison, state governments gave private higher education institutions a total of $2.8 billion in fiscal year 2022 — $297 million to help them with operating costs and $2.5 billion to help students pay for tuition and other education-related expenses, according to a report the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association released last year.

5. Push back on claims made by advocates on both sides of the issue.

“More journalists should challenge the slogans and talking points of policy advocates on both sides of the school choice debate,” Wolf wrote to The Journalist’s Resource. “For example, if a [school] choice supporter declares ‘school choice is a lifeline for needy students,’ ask them: ‘What proportion of students who switch from public to private schools clearly benefit from the change?’ [and] ‘What proportion leave the private school within two years and just end up bouncing around from school to school with no stability?’

Wolf also suggested journalists push back on claims from school choice critics who declare, for example, that private school vouchers will destroy public schools.

“Ask them: ‘Why are public schools so fragile that they can only endure if students have no other option?’ [and] ‘Where has school choice destroyed the public-school sector? Give me an example,’” he added.

Huriya Kanwal Jabbar, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Southern California, advised journalists to press supporters of private school choice to explain their reasons why.

“The slogan we hear is that choice is good in and of itself,” Jabbar wrote to The Journalist’s Resource. “I’d be curious to see if leaders advancing this are also concerned about school quality or accountability or student outcomes — or if their main goal is simply to give families more choices, even if they end up selecting schools that are worse for their children’s academic outcomes. In other words, what are the main priorities driving these policies? It seems important to be transparent about the aims so that we can then assess the evidence associated with those goals/aims.”

Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy who directs Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, suggests journalists ask about potential learning loss. How would parents and guardians react if their children’s standardized test scores drop after enrolling in private school? How much of a decline is acceptable? Which should be policymakers’ priority: Getting the biggest positive impact they can for taxpayer dollars or giving families the ability to choose for themselves the type of education they want for their kids?

6. Familiarize yourself with the research on private school choice.

Academic journals are continually publishing new studies on private school choice. It’s critical for journalists covering the topic to stay up to date and incorporate new findings into their stories.

“The research has shifted — we’re seeing a different story from the research than we were 10 years ago,” Lubienski says.

While studies in the 1990s and early 2000s generally indicate U.S. students in these programs perform as well or better on standardized tests than their public school peers, more recent research finds private school choice students do about the same or worse. In Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and the District of Columbia, test scores fell after public school students transferred to private schools, according to papers published or released in 2016 and 2018.

Cowen says the challenges associated with scaling up these programs are reflected in the newer studies.

“There are not enough good private schools to take these children,” he says. “It’s that simple.”

The Journalist’s Resource has gathered and summarized several peer-reviewed papers on private school choice. They are among the most recent and offer valuable insights into how these programs affect student achievement in the U.S., Chile, Colombia, Denmark, India and other countries.

For help spotting problematic research, check out our tip sheet, “How to Gauge the Quality of a Research Study: 13 Questions Journalists Should Ask.”

Also, because education researchers sometimes report their findings in terms of standard deviations instead of more common units of measurement such as points or rates, you might find this short explainer helpful: “What’s Standard Deviation? 4 Things Journalists Need to Know.”

7. Report on long-term trends in test scores and other indicators of progress.

M. Danish Shakeel, who co-edited the book Educating Believers: Religion and School Choice, says it’s important that journalists look at how individual private school choice programs perform over time. Academic studies often provide a snapshot of a program over the span of several months or a few years.

In addition to standardized test scores, journalists should examine other indicators of student achievement such as civic engagement, college graduation rates and the development of non-cognitive skills, including problem solving and communication skills, says Shakeel, a professor at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom and director of the E.G. West Centre for Education Policy there.

It’s also important that journalists know that families have many reasons for seeking a private school education. Not all parents who care deeply about their children’s academic progress consider large spikes in test scores the main priority, Shakeel adds.

Some families prefer religious instruction or that their children learn in a faith-based environment, neither of which is available in American public schools. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that religious schools cannot be excluded from government programs that help parents and guardians pay private school tuition.

Some families believe it’s just as important to instill morals and values in children as it is to teach them reading and math. Shakeel recommends journalists look at how students’ lives, as a whole, have changed since they began participating in private school choice programs.

“Start asking questions on outcomes that are not typically discussed,” he says. “[Academic] outcomes are important, but those things that are important to the family get missed in the news reports.”

Some questions to ask families:

• What have their children’s interactions with teachers and classmates been like at their private school? If their kids transferred from a public school, how has their learning experience changed?
• Have families’ attitudes about education or schools changed?
• Do parents and guardians feel supported by teachers and staff at the private school?
• How have their parenting styles changed since their children started private school?
• Has the family or child become more religious, compassionate or civic-minded?
• How has the child’s behavior at home and in the community changed?
• How satisfied are parents and guardians with their children’s education?

The post 7 tips for improving news coverage of private school choice appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Last year, at least 31 states considered legislation to create or expand programs that use public money to help parents pay for a private, K-12 education, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 2024, conservative leaders and political candidates — including the two Republicans vying for the U.S. presidency — are pushing to make private school vouchers and other forms of tuition assistance even more widely available.

Local governments in the U.S. have, on a limited basis, provided funding for their residents to attend private schools since the mid-1800s, starting with rural communities in Maine and Vermont. The practice has grown increasingly common in recent decades, and even more common the past few years. Florida introduced the first statewide private school voucher program in 1999, offering children in the lowest performing public schools the option of transferring to a private school.

A total of 310,770 students in 16 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico used vouchers in 2023, according to a recent report from EdChoice. a nonprofit organization that advocates for school choice. Another 312,471 students in 21 states used tax-credit scholarships, which are similar to vouchers, to attend private school, EdChoice reports.

Private school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts

Three of the most common programs governments implement to help families pay for private school are private school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts. Many politicians, journalists and others refer to all three as vouchers. But there are key differences:

• Private school vouchers are public funds that generally cover all or a portion of private school tuition. Families typically do not receive this money, however. Program administrators tend to send it to the private schools. In a landmark ruling in 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court found that allowing religious schools to participate in the state’s voucher program did not violate the state or federal constitution, partly because of the way funds were distributed. Although the state sent voucher checks to participating private schools, it required parents and guardians to “restrictively endorse” the checks to the schools.
• Tax-credit scholarships also cover all or part of a student’s tuition bill. This money also tends to go to directly to the private schools. A primary difference between these two programs: While government agencies take money from their own coffers to offer vouchers, they fund tax-credit scholarships indirectly. They give businesses and other taxpayers tax credits in exchange for donating money needed to provide scholarships.
• Education savings accounts contain public funds that students can spend on a variety of education-related items and services. Allowable expenses frequently include private school tuition, online courses, tutoring, standardized testing fees and homeschooling materials. In Arizona, students also can use ESA dollars to buy laptops, telescopes, gym memberships, desks and tickets to zoos, museums and musicals. However, during the 2022-23 school year, 66% of Arizona’s ESA money went to tuition and fees at private schools, with the largest share going to schools created to serve students with disabilities, according to an analysis from KNXV-TV Channel 15.

States offering ESAs usually call them scholarships. Florida and Arizona, for example, named their ESAs “empowerment” scholarships.

Academic researchers, meanwhile, often refer to these three programs, as a group, as “private school choice” programs. Some call them “voucher and voucher-like” programs.

Another important detail: In recent decades, private school choice programs in the U.S. have been largely restricted to certain student groups, including low- and middle-income youth, children in foster care, kids with disabilities and students attending poor performing public schools. Some states have made their programs “universal,” meaning all students within their boundaries can participate.

Arizona, in 2022, became the first state to introduce a universal education savings account program. As of November 2023, a total of eight states had enacted private school choice programs that are universal or nearly universal, Politico reports.

An extraordinarily divisive topic

In the coming months, journalists across the country will be reporting on legislative efforts to create or change private school choice programs. In many communities, journalists will need to cover new legislation as they also cover the challenges government officials will likely face implementing the policies lawmakers approved last year or in prior years.

Among the new proposals:

• A Republican legislator in Kentucky filed a bill Jan. 26 aimed at amending her state’s constitution to allow public funding to be spent on private education.
• Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced plans to introduce a bill during this year’s legislative session that would dramatically increase the number of students eligible for one of his state’s education savings accounts, which he has named Education Freedom Scholarships. Lee, a Republican, wants to open the program to all students statewide during the 2025-26 school year.
• Earlier this month, Republican lawmakers in New Mexico announced they plan to establish a tax-credit scholarship that would help lower-income students there afford private school, according to the nonprofit news outlet, Source New Mexico.
• Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, wants to overhaul — and shrink — school choice programs in that state, the Associated Press reports.

In the U.S., lawmakers’ support for or opposition to private school choice programs tends to follow political party lines. Conservative and conservative-leaning legislators often support programs that offer parents more control over where and how their children will be educated. Liberal and liberal-leaning legislators often oppose these programs because of concerns about program accountability, drops in test scores in some states, and using public money to support private schools, religious instruction, wealthy students and homeschooling families.

Researchers who study private school choice also are divided, in their opinions and their interpretations of what studies show, making it even tougher for journalists to distill research findings for the public.

Last year, Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, wrote essays explaining his opposition to vouchers for Time magazine and the Brookings Institution last year.

He advises journalists to read studies of private school choice programs operating in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and the District of Columbia. In his Time piece, he links to four papers released or published in 2016 or 2018 — each examining one of those locations.

“Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record — between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss,” he writes in Time in April 2023. “That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.”

Patrick J. Wolf, a professor of education policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas, has spoken out in favor of private school choice. He recommends journalists rely most heavily on the most rigorous studies to help them explain the impacts of vouchers and voucher-like programs.

Wolf also stresses the importance of journalists checking the quality of the studies that politicians, government officials, advocates, critics and others cite.

The Journalist’s Resource steers journalists toward research that has undergone peer review, an evaluation process performed by independent experts that is designed for quality control. We also encourage journalists to seek out randomized, controlled trials and meta-analyses, when possible.

A randomized, controlled trial, a method of studying the effect of a program or intervention, is widely considered the gold standard in research. A meta-analysis, also one of the most reliable forms of research, is a systematic study of the numerical data collected from a group of studies on the same topic.

When it comes to complicated, politicized topics like school choice, though, journalists should cautiously vet findings even from peer-reviewed studies using these research methods.

Both Cowen and Wolf created short documents to present the research to date in simple terms. We got permission to share Cowen’s “Quick Hits of Voucher Research” and Wolf’s “Summary of Research Findings Regarding the Effects of Private School Choice Programs.”

A November 2022 policy brief coauthored by Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy who directs Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, also examines private school choice research. In it, Lubienski warns against evaluating a program by simply comparing the number of studies that show benefits against the number of studies that shows harms.

Such an assessment does not take into account differences in study quality or size or the magnitude of the impacts that were found.

“Such simplistic representations of the research evidence obscure important factors in understanding the effectiveness and potential of voucher programs,” Lubienski and doctoral student Yusuf Canbolat write in the policy brief.

Research to help journalists report on private school choice

We recommend familiarizing yourself with the breadth of academic research on this topic. It’s important to have a basic understanding of how private school choice programs work and how they affect students — those using public funds for private school as well as their peers who remain in neighboring public schools.

To help you get started, we’ve gathered and summarized a sampling of studies of vouchers and voucher-like programs. These four peer-reviewed papers are not meant to be representative of all the research to date. But they are among the most recent and offer insights into how these initiatives impact student achievement in various countries, including the U.S., Canada, Chile, India, New Zealand and Sweden.  

We included two meta-analyses, both of which analyze more than a decade of numerical data to provide a broad overview of the effects of vouchers and voucher-like programs.

Together, these four papers suggest:

• Studies from the 1990s and early 2000s generally indicate that U.S. students participating in these programs do as well or better on standardized tests than their public school peers. But studies released or published after around 2015 show a shift in performance. They indicate program participants do about the same or worse — in some cases, student scores have dropped considerably.
• When researchers looked at student achievement in the U.S., India and Colombia, they found that kids who participate in these programs, as a whole, earn higher test scores as they progress through private school. But the change is driven largely by Indian and Colombian students. The researchers note this might be due to large differences in the quality of education provided by public and private schools in developing countries.
• U.S. public school students earn slightly higher test scores in communities where private school vouchers and similar tuition assistance programs are available. Researchers explain that this appears to be a response to competition from area private schools. They also note the increase is very small.
• There’s evidence that high school graduation rates are higher among private school choice students in the U.S.

———————-

Effects of Maturing Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students
David N. Figlio, Cassandra M. D. Hart and Krzysztof Karbownik. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023.

The study: Researchers look at how the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program affected public schools in the first 15 years after it was launched. They examine data from the Florida Department of Education and Florida Department of Health to better understand how public school students fared when tens of thousands of their peers left public schools to attend private schools using vouchers from 2002-03 to 2017-18.

This paper analyzes changes in standardized test scores, absenteeism and suspension rates among public school students in grades 3 to 8. It also compares public schools in terms of the amount of competition they faced from private schools even before voucher programs began. Researchers created a “Competitive Pressure Index” for public schools, based on factors such as the proximity and number of private schools operating in the same area and the religiosity of the surrounding community.

The findings: As the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program grew during its first 15 years, public school students in grades 3 to 8, as a whole, earned slightly higher test scores and missed fewer days of class. The impact was strongest at public schools that faced competition from private schools in 2000, the year before the voucher program was created.

The authors write: “We find that as public schools are more exposed to private school choice, their students experience increasing benefits as the program matures,” the researchers conclude. “We find that the public school students most positively affected by increased exposure to private school choice are comparatively low-socioeconomic status (SES) students (those with lower family incomes and lower maternal education levels).”

The Competitive Effects of School Choice on Student Achievement: A Systematic Review
Huriya Jabbar; et al. Educational Policy, March 2022.

The study: Researchers analyzed 92 studies published from 1992 to 2015 to determine whether competition generated by school choice programs reduces or improves student achievement. All the studies examined focus on school choice programs in the U.S.

The findings: When a private school choice program launches and public schools must compete for students, student scores on standardized exams rise very slightly for students who leave their public schools to attend private schools and for their peers who stay behind.

The results indicate that competition created by private school choice programs has a more positive impact on student achievement than the competition created by charter schools. However, the changes are so small they are, for practical purposes, negligible, lead author Huriya Kanwal Jabbar, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Southern California, wrote in an email to The Journalist’s Resource.

In the authors’ words: “A key argument for school choice made by policymakers and advocates is that school choice has the potential to benefit historically disadvantaged students in particular, due to its ability to break up strong links between poor neighborhoods and underfunded local schools. We tested this relationship, and we found that our measure of poverty, the percentage of students eligible for [free or reduced-price school meals], did not moderate the effects of competition. However, we found some evidence that the sample percentage of minority students was a significant moderator, suggesting that school competition may have a larger influence on student achievement for minority students. This is consistent with advocates’ claims that choice may improve educational opportunities for marginalized students in particular, not just for those who choose, but also for those ‘left behind’ in traditional public schools.”

The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers Around the Globe: A Meta-Analytic and Systematic Review
M. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin P. Anderson and Patrick J. Wolf. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, April 2021.

The study: Researchers examined 21 studies of voucher and voucher-like programs in the U.S., India and Colombia to evaluate how well students who use vouchers performed on standardized tests. This paper is the first meta-analysis of evidence collected from randomized, controlled trials of voucher programs conducted in multiple countries, the researchers write.

The 21 studies, dated from 1998 to 2018, represent a total of 11 voucher programs serving low-income students in these locations: Toledo, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Charlotte, North Carolina; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Washington D.C.; the state of Louisiana; Delhi, India; Andhra Pradesh, India; and Bogota, Colombia.

The findings: When researchers focused on the most recent year of data provided by each study, they found that the 11 voucher programs, overall, had a “generally modest positive” effect on test scores in those locations. Voucher programs in India and Colombia had a larger impact than programs in the U.S. “The results indicate that voucher programs tend to moderately increase test scores, particularly in developing countries with a large private-public school quality gap,” the researchers write.

In the authors’ words: “Many of the programs included here are still relatively small scale,” they write. “More experimental work should take place on larger programs in order to understand whether or not the achievement benefits of private school vouchers replicate at scale.”

School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature
Dennis Epple, Richard E. Romano and Miguel Urquiola. Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017.

The study: Researchers examine more than two decades of economic research on private school vouchers in the U.S., Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Holland, India, New Zealand and Sweden to answer five key questions, including “What effects do vouchers have on the students who use them?” The papers they analyzed span from 1990 to 2014.

The findings: The researchers determined that the answers to their questions vary depending on “the characteristics of the program analyzed and the context into which it is introduced.” When they looked specifically at how vouchers affect the academic achievement of U.S. students who use them, they discovered that the evidence, overall, “finds not very robust effects on test scores” and that the effects are “most frequently nonexistent.”

The researchers note, however, that three studies of private school choice programs in Louisiana and Ohio, published in 2015 and 2016, show large declines in test scores. They point out that the data does indicate an uptick in high school graduation rates among voucher users in the U.S., and Black students in particular.

In the authors’ words: “Vouchers have been neither the rousing success imagined by proponents nor the abject failure predicted by opponents,” they write. “While the evidence does not make a case for wholesale adoption of vouchers, recent theoretical and empirical results suggest a need for — and reasons for cautious optimism about — potential gains from improving voucher design.”

Other resources

• The Education Commission of the States provides a state-by-state look at private school choice policies plus a 50-state comparison summary.
• The EdChoice Dashboard provides detailed information about U.S. school choice programs, including the number of students participating in each program.
• The U.S. Government Accountability Office has compiled several lengthy reports on private school vouchers and other school choice programs. A report released in November 2017 finds that “private school choice programs inconsistently provide information on changes in rights and protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) when parents move a child with a disability from public to private school.” An October 2019 report looks at the characteristics of the 22 tax-credit scholarship programs operating in 17 states at that time.
• For journalists interested in comparing funding levels, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association provides data on state funding for private colleges and universities. In fiscal year 2022, state governments gave private higher education institutions a total of $2.8 billion — $297 million to help with operating costs and $2.5 billion in student financial aid, the organization reports.
• Gallup, an analytics firm that has tracked Americans’ satisfaction with public schools annually since 1999, reports that 63% of the people it surveyed in August 2023 were somewhat or completely dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s K-12 education. The sentiment among parents was a bit better — 59% were somewhat or completely dissatisfied.

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When researchers looked at news coverage of obesity in the United States and the United Kingdom a few years ago, they found that images in news articles often portrayed people with larger bodies “in a stigmatizing manner” — they emphasized people’s abdomens, for example, or showed them eating junk food, wearing tight clothes or lounging in front of a TV. 

When people with larger bodies were featured in photos and videos, nearly half were shown only from their necks down or with part of their heads missing, according to the analysis, published in November 2023.  The researchers examined a total of 445 images posted to the websites of four U.S. news outlets and four U.K. news outlets between August 2018 and August 2019.

The findings underscore the need for dramatic changes in the way journalists report on obesity and people who weigh more than what medical authorities generally consider healthy, Rebecca Puhl, one of the paper’s authors, told The Journalist’s Resource in an email interview.

“Using images of ‘headless stomachs’ is dehumanizing and stigmatizing, as are images that depict people with larger bodies in stereotypical ways (e.g., eating junk food or being sedentary),” wrote Puhl, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut and a leading scholar on weight stigma.

She noted that news images influence how the public views and interacts with people with obesity, a complicated and often misunderstood condition that the American Medical Association considers a disease.

In the U.S., an estimated 42% of adults aged 20 years and older have obesity, a number researchers predict will rise to 50% over the next six years. While the disease isn’t as common in other parts of the planet, the World Obesity Federation projects that by 2035, more than half the global population will have obesity or overweight.

Several other studies Puhl has conducted demonstrate that biased new images can have damaging consequences for individuals affected by obesity.

“Our research has found that seeing the stigmatizing image worsens people’s attitudes and weight bias, leading them to attribute obesity to laziness, increasing their dislike of people with higher weight, and increasing desire for social distance from them,” Puhl explained.

Dozens of studies spotlight problems in news coverage of obesity in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to stigmatizing images, journalists use stigmatizing language, according to a 2022 research review in eClinicalMedicine, a journal published by The Lancet.

The research also suggests people with higher weights feel excluded and ridiculed by news outlets.

“Overt or covert discourses in news media, social media, and public health campaigns included depictions of people with overweight or obesity as being lazy, greedy, undisciplined, unhappy, unattractive, and stupid,” write the authors of the review, which examines 113 academic studies completed before Dec. 2, 2021.

To help journalists reflect on and improve their work, The Journalist’s Resource asked for advice from experts in obesity, weight stigma, health communication and sociolinguistics. They shared their thoughts and opinions, which we distilled into the six tips that appear below.

In addition to Puhl, we interviewed these six experts:

Jamy Ard, a professor of epidemiology and prevention at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and co-director of the Wake Forest Baptist Health Weight Management Center. He’s also president of The Obesity Society, a professional organization of researchers, health care providers and other obesity specialists.

Leslie Cofie, an assistant professor of health education and promotion at East Carolina University’s College of Health and Human Performance. He has studied obesity among immigrants and military veterans.

Leslie Heinberg, director of Enterprise Weight Management at the Cleveland Clinic, an academic medical center. She’s also vice chair for psychology in the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Behavioral Health Department of Psychiatry and Psychology.

Monu Khanna, a physician in Missouri who is board certified in obesity medicine.

Jenn Lonzer, manager of the Cleveland Clinic Health Library and the co-author of several academic papers on health communication.

Cindi SturtzSreetharan, an anthropologist and professor at the Arizona State University School of Human Evolution and Social Change. She studies the language people of different cultures use to describe human bodies.

1. Familiarize yourself with recent research on what causes obesity and how obesity can affect a person’s health. Many long-held beliefs about the disease are wrong.

Journalists often report incorrect or misleading information about obesity, possibly because they’re unaware that research published in recent decades dispels many long-held beliefs about the disease, the experts say. Obesity isn’t simply the result of eating too many calories and doing too little exercise. A wide range of factors drive weight gain and prevent weight loss, many of which have nothing to do with willpower or personal choices.

Scholars have learned that stress, gut health, sleep duration and quality, genetics, medication, personal income, access to healthy foods and even climate can affect weight regulation. Prenatal and early life experiences also play a role. For example, childhood trauma such as child abuse can become “biologically embedded,” altering children’s brain structures and influencing their long-term physical and mental health, according to a 2020 research review published in the journal Physiology & Behavior.

“The causes of obesity are numerous and each individual with obesity will have a unique set of contributors to their excess weight gain,” Jamy Ard, president of The Obesity Society, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.

The experts urge journalists to help dispel myths, correct misinformation and share new research findings. News outlets should examine their own work, which often “ignores the science and sets up situation blaming,” says Leslie Heinberg, director of Enterprise Weight Management at the Cleveland Clinic.

“So much of the media portrayal is simply ‘This is a person who eats too much and the cure is simply to eat less or cut out that food’ or something overly, overly simplistic,” Heinberg says.

Journalists need to build their knowledge of the problem before they can explain it to their audiences. Experts point out that educating policymakers, health care providers and the public about obesity is key to eliminating the stigma associated with having a larger body.

Weight stigma alone is so physically and emotionally damaging that 36 international experts issued a consensus statement in 2020 to raise awareness about it. The document, endorsed by dozens of medical and academic organizations, outlines 13 recommendations for eliminating weight bias and stigma.

Recommendation No. 5: “We call on the media to produce fair, accurate, and non-stigmatizing portrayals of obesity. A commitment from the media is needed to shift the narrative around obesity.”

2. Use person-first language — the standard among health and medical professionals for communicating about people with chronic diseases.

The experts we interviewed encourage journalists to ditch the adjectives “obese” and “overweight” because they are dehumanizing. Use person-first language, which avoids labeling people as their disease by putting the person before the disease.

Instead of saying “an obese teenager,” say “a teenager who has obesity” or “a teenager affected by obesity.” Instead of writing “overweight men,” write “men who have overweight.”

Jenn Lonzer, manager of the Cleveland Clinic Health Library, says using “overweight” as a noun might look and sound awkward at first. But it makes sense considering other diseases are treated as nouns, she notes. Journalists would not typically refer to someone in a news story as “a cancerous person,” for example. They would report that the individual has cancer.

It’s appropriate to refer to people with overweight or obesity using neutral weight terminology. Puhl wrote that she uses “people with higher body weight” or “people with high weight” and, sometimes, “people with larger bodies” in her own writing.

While the Associated Press stylebook offers no specific guidance on the use of terms such as “obese” or “overweight,” it advises against “general and often dehumanizing ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the disabled, the college-educated.”

The Association of Health Care Journalists recommends person-first language when reporting on obesity. But it also advises journalists to ask sources how they would like to be characterized, provided their weight or body size is relevant to the news story.

Anthropologist Cindi SturtzSreetharan, who studies language and culture, says sources’ responses to that question should be part of the story. Some individuals might prefer to be called “fat,” “thick” or “plus-sized.”

“I would include that as a sentence in the article — to signal you’ve asked and that’s how they want to be referred to,” SturtzSreetharan says.

She encourages journalists to read how authors describe themselves in their own writing. Two books she recommends: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom and Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon.

3. Carefully plan and choose the images that will accompany news stories about obesity.

Journalists need to educate themselves about stigma and screen for it when selecting images, Puhl noted. She shared these four questions that journalists should ask themselves when deciding how to show people with higher weights in photos and video.

• Does the image imply or reinforce negative stereotypes?
• Does it provide a respectful portrayal of the person?
• Who might be offended, and why?
• Can an alternative image convey the same message and eliminate possible bias?

“Even if your written piece is balanced, accurate, and respectful, a stigmatizing image can undermine your message and promote negative societal attitudes,” Puhl wrote via email.

Lonzer says newsrooms also need to do a better job incorporating images of people who have different careers, interests, education levels and lifestyles into their coverage of overweight and obesity.

“We are diverse,” says Lonzer, who has overweight. “We also have diversity in body shape and size. It’s good to have images that reflect what Americans look like.”

If you’re looking for images and b-roll videos that portray people with obesity in non-stigmatizing ways, check out the Rudd Center Media Gallery. It’s a collection of original images of people from various demographic groups that journalists can use for free in their coverage.

The Obesity Action Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy organization, also provides images. But journalists must sign up to use the OAC Bias-Free Image Gallery.

Other places to find free images: The World Obesity Image Bank, a project of the World Obesity Federation, and the Flickr account of Obesity Canada.

4. Make sure your story does not reinforce stereotypes or insinuate that overcoming obesity is simply a matter of cutting calories and doing more exercise.

“Think about the kinds of language used in the context of eating habits or physical activity, as some can reinforce shame or stereotypes,” Puhl wrote.

She suggested journalists avoid phrases such as “resisting temptations,” “cheating on a diet,” “making excuses,” “increasing self-discipline” and “lacking self-control” because they perpetuate the myth that individuals can control their weight and that the key to losing weight is eating less and moving more.

Lonzer offers this advice: As you work on stories about obesity or weight-related issues, ask yourself if you would use the same language and framing if you were reporting on someone you love.

Here are other questions for journalists to contemplate:

“Am I treating this as a complex medical condition or am I treating it as ‘Hey, lay off the French fries?’” Lonzer adds. “Am I treating someone with obesity differently than someone with another disease?”

It’s important to also keep in mind that having excess body fat does not, by itself, mean a person is unhealthy. And don’t assume everyone who has a higher weight is unhappy about it.

“Remember, not everyone with obesity is suffering,” physician Monu Khanna wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.

5. To help audiences understand how difficult it is to prevent and reduce obesity, explain that even the places people live can affect their waistlines.

When news outlets report on obesity, they often focus on weight-loss programs, surgical procedures and anti-obesity medications. But there are other important issues to cover. Experts stress the need to help the public understand how factors not ordinarily associated with weight gain or loss can influence body size.

For example, a paper published in 2018 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine indicates adults who are regularly exposed to loud noise have a higher waist circumference than adults who are not. Research also finds that people who live in neighborhoods with sidewalks and parks are more active.

“One important suggestion I would offer to journalists is that they need to critically explore environmental factors (e.g., built environment, food deserts, neighborhood safety, etc.) that lead to disproportionately high rates of obesity among certain groups, such as low-income individuals and racial/ethnic minorities,” Leslie Cofie, an assistant professor at East Carolina University, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.

Cofie added that moving to a new area can prompt weight changes.

“We know that immigrants generally have lower rates of obesity when they first migrate to the U.S.,” he wrote. “However, over time, their obesity rates resemble that of their U.S.-born counterparts. Hence, it is critical for journalists to learn about how the sociocultural experiences of immigrants change as they adapt to life in the U.S. For example, cultural perspectives about food, physical activities, gender roles, etc. may provide unique insights into how the pre- and post-migration experiences of immigrants ultimately contribute to the unfavorable trends in their excessive weight gain.”

Other community characteristics have been linked to larger body sizes for adults or children: air pollution, lower altitudes, higher temperatures, lower neighborhood socioeconomic status, perceived neighborhood safety, an absence of local parks and closer proximity to fast-food restaurants.

6. Forge relationships with organizations that study obesity and advocate on behalf of people living with the disease.

Several organizations are working to educate journalists about obesity and help them improve their coverage. Five of the most prominent ones collaborated on a 10-page guide book, “Guidelines for Media Portrayals of Individuals Affected by Obesity.”

• The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health, based at the University of Connecticut, “promotes solutions to food insecurity, poor diet quality, and weight bias through research and policy,” according to its website. Research topics include food and beverage marketing, weight-related bullying and taxes on sugary drinks.
• The Obesity Society helps journalists arrange interviews with obesity specialists. It also offers journalists free access to its academic journal, Obesity, and free registration to ObesityWeek, an international conference of researchers and health care professionals held every fall. This year’s conference is Nov. 2-6 in San Antonio, Texas.
• The Obesity Medicine Association represents health care providers who specialize in obesity treatment and care. It also helps journalists connect with obesity experts and offers, on an individual basis, free access to its events, including conferences and Obesity Medicine Fundamentals courses.
• The Obesity Action Coalition offers free access to its magazine, Weight Matters, and guides on weight bias at work and in health care.
• The American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery represents surgeons and other health care professionals who work in the field of metabolic and bariatric surgery. It provides the public with resources such as fact sheets and brief explanations of procedures such as the Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass.

For further reading

Weight Stigma in Online News Images: A Visual Content Analysis of Stigma Communication in the Depictions of Individuals with Obesity in U.S. and U.K. News
Aditi Rao, Rebecca Puhl and Kirstie Farrar. Journal of Health Communication, November 2023.

Influence and Effects of Weight Stigmatization in Media: A Systematic Review
James Kite; et al. eClinicalMedicine, June 2022.

Has the Prevalence of Overweight, Obesity and Central Obesity Leveled Off in the United States? Trends, Patterns, Disparities, and Future Projections for the Obesity Epidemic
Youfa Wang; et al. International Journal of Epidemiology, June 2020.

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Patients who weigh more than what medical authorities generally consider healthy often avoid seeing doctors for fear of being judged, insulted or misdiagnosed, decades of research find. Meanwhile, academic studies consistently show many health care professionals discriminate against heavier patients and that weight bias can drive people with obesity to gain weight.

Weight bias refers to negative attitudes, stereotypes and discrimination aimed at individuals with excess body fat. When scholars reviewed 41 studies about weight bias in health care, published from 1989 to 2021, they found it comes in many forms: contemptuous language, inappropriate gestures, expressing a preference for thinner patients, avoiding physical touch and eye contact, and attributing all of a person’s health issues to their weight.

“Weight bias has been reported in physicians, nurses, dietitians, physiotherapists, and psychologists, as well as nutritionists and exercise professionals, and it is as pervasive among medical professionals as it is within the general population,” write the authors of the research review, published in 2021 in the journal Obesity.

That’s a problem considering an estimated 4 out of 10 U.S. adults aged 20 years and older have obesity, a complex and often misunderstood illness that the American Medical Association voted in 2013 to recognize as a disease. By 2030, half of U.S. adults will have obesity, researchers project in a 2020 paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Worldwide, the obesity rate among adults aged 18 and older was 13% in 2016, according to the World Health Organization. If current trends continue, the World Obesity Federation projects that, by 2035, 51% of the global population will be living with overweight or obesity.

The harms of weight bias

Weight stigma — the societal devaluation of people perceived to be carrying excess weight — drives weight bias. It’s so physically and emotionally damaging that a panel of 36 international experts issued a consensus statement in 2020 to raise awareness about and condemn it. Dozens of medical and academic organizations, including 15 scholarly journals, endorsed the document, published in Nature Medicine.

The release of a consensus statement is a significant event in research, considering it represents the collective position that experts in a particular field have taken on an issue, based on an analysis of all the available evidence.

Research to date indicates heavier individuals who experience weight bias and stigma often:

• Avoid doctors and other health care professionals, skipping routine screenings as well as needed treatments.
• Change doctors frequently.
• Are at a higher risk for depression, anxiety, mood disorders and other mental health problems.
• Avoid or put off exercise.
• Consume more food and calories.
• Gain weight.
• Have disrupted sleep.

The consensus statement notes that educating health care providers, journalists, policymakers and others about obesity is key to changing the narrative around the disease.

“Weight stigma is reinforced by misconceived ideas about body-weight regulation and lack of awareness of current scientific evidence,” write the experts, led by Francesco Rubino, the chair of metabolic and bariatric surgery at Kings College London.

“Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, the prevailing view in society is that obesity is a choice that can be reversed by voluntary decisions to eat less and exercise more. These assumptions mislead public health policies, confuse messages in popular media, undermine access to evidence-based treatments, and compromise advances in research.”

Weight bias and stigma appear to stimulate the secretion of the stress hormone cortisol and promote weight gain, researchers write in a 2016 paper published in Obesity.

A. Janet Tomiyama, a psychology professor at UCLA who directs the university’s Dieting, Stress, and Health research lab, describes weight stigma as “a ‘vicious cycle’ — a positive feedback loop wherein weight stigma begets weight gain.”

“This happens through increased eating behavior and increased cortisol secretion governed by behavioral, emotional, and physiological mechanisms, which are theorized to ultimately result in weight gain and difficulty of weight loss,” Tomiyama writes in her 2014 paper, “Weight Stigma is Stressful. A Review of Evidence for the Cyclic Obesity/Weight-Based Stigma Model.”

The consensus statement spotlights 13 recommendations for eliminating weight bias and stigma, some of which are specifically aimed at health care providers, the media, researchers or policymakers. One of the recommendations for the health care community: “[Health care providers] specialized in treating obesity should provide evidence of stigma-free practice skills. Professional bodies should encourage, facilitate, and develop methods to certify knowledge of stigma and its effects, along with stigma-free skills and practices.”

The one recommendation for the media: “We call on the media to produce fair, accurate, and non-stigmatizing portrayals of obesity. A commitment from the media is needed to shift the narrative around obesity.”

Why obesity is a complicated disease

It’s important to point out that having excess body fat does not, by itself, mean an individual is unhealthy, researchers explain in a 2017 article in The Conversation, which publishes research-based news articles and essays. But it is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, including stroke, as well as diabetes, some types of cancer, and musculoskeletal disorders such as osteoarthritis.

Doctors often look at patients’ body mass index — a number that represents their weight in relation to their height — to gauge the amount of fat on their bodies. A BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 is ideal, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A BMI of 25.0 to 29.9, indicates excess body fat, or “overweight,” while a BMI of 30 and above indicates obesity.

In June, the American Medical Association announced a new policy clarifying how BMI can be used to diagnose obesity. Because it’s an imperfect measure for body fat, the organization suggests BMI be used in conjunction with other measures such as a patient’s waist circumference and skin fold thickness.

Two specialists who have been working for years to dispel myths and misconceptions about obesity are Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity physician and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and Rebecca Puhl, the deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut.

Cody Stanford has called obesity “a brain disease” because the brain tells the body how much to eat and what to do with the food consumed. One pathway in the brain directs the body to eat less and store less fat, she explains in a February 2023 podcast produced by the American Medical Association.

“For people that signal really great down this pathway, they tend to be very lean, not struggle with their weight in the same way that people that have excess weight do,” she says during the podcast, adding that people with obesity receive signals from an alternate pathway that “tells us to eat more and store more.”

Academic studies demonstrate that a wide variety of factors can affect weight regulation, including sleep quality and duration, gut health, genetics, medication, access to healthy foods and even early life experiences.

For example, a 2020 paper in the journal JAMA Network Open suggests female infants born by cesarean delivery have a higher risk of obesity during adulthood than female infants born by vaginal delivery. The study of 33,226 U.S. women born between 1946 and 1964 found that a cesarean delivery is associated with an 11% higher risk of developing obesity and a 46% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Scholars have also found that traumatic childhood experiences such as abuse and neglect are linked to adult obesity, according to a research review published in 2020.

Income inequality seems to play a role as well. When researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health studied the link between income inequality and obesity for a sample of 36,665 U.S. adults, they discovered women with lower incomes are more likely to have obesity than women with higher incomes.

Their analysis indicates the opposite is true for men, whose odds of obesity rise with their income, the researchers write in a 2021 paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Weight bias among doctor trainees

While scholars have learned a lot about obesity and weight bias in recent decades, the information might not be reaching people training to become doctors. A study published in October finds that some resident physicians believe obesity to be the result of poor choices and weak willpower.

Researchers asked 3,267 resident physicians who graduated from a total of 49 U.S. medical schools a series of questions to gauge their knowledge of obesity and attitudes toward heavier patients. What they learned: Nearly 40% of resident physicians agreed with the statement, “Fat people tend to be fat pretty much through their own fault.” Almost half agreed with the statement, “Some people are fat because they have no willpower.”

The study also reveals that about one-third of participants said they  “feel more irritated when treating an obese patient than a non-obese patient.”

“Notably, more than a quarter of residents expressed slight-to-strong agreement with the item ‘I dislike treating obese patients,’” the researchers write.

Another takeaway from the paper: Resident physicians specializing in orthopedic surgery, anesthesiology and urology expressed the highest levels of dislike of heavier patients. Of the 16 medical specialties represented, residents in family medicine, psychiatry and pediatrics reported the lowest levels of dislike.

Kimberly Gudzune, medical director of the American Board of Obesity Medicine, asserts that doctors and medical students need to be educated about obesity. The topic “is grossly neglected” in medical schools and medical training programs worldwide, research has found.

Many physicians don’t understand obesity, Gudzune explains in a July 2023 interview on the internal medicine podcast “The Curbsiders.”

“I think back to when I was a medical student, when I was a resident, I really didn’t learn much about obesity and how to treat it, yet it’s a problem that affects the majority of our patients,” she tells podcast listeners. “I think there’s a lot of evidence out there showing that primary care physicians don’t really know where to start.”

In 2011, the American Board of Obesity Medicine established a program through which doctors could become certified in obesity medicine. Since then, a total of 6,729 U.S. doctors have earned certification, the vast majority of whom specialize in family and internal medicine.

What health care providers think

The experts who created the consensus statement on weight bias and stigma noted health care providers’ shortcomings in the document. They write that the common themes they discovered in the research include “contemptuous, patronizing, and disrespectful treatment” of patients, a lack of training, poor communication and assumptions about weight gain.

Puhl, the deputy director of the Rudd Center at the University of Connecticut, is a pioneer in weight bias research and one of the experts who wrote the consensus statement. During an episode of “The Leading Voices in Food,” a podcast created by Duke University’s World Food Policy Center, she shares details about what she has learned over the years.

“[Health care providers’] views that patients with obesity are lazy or lacking control, are to blame for their weight or noncompliant with treatment,” she says during the interview. “We know, for example, that some physicians spend less time in their appointments with patients [who] have a larger body size. They give them less education about health. They’re more reluctant to perform certain screenings. They talk about treating patients with obesity as being a greater waste of their time than providing care to thinner patients. And we know that patients seem to be aware of these biases from providers and that can really contribute to patients avoiding health care because they just don’t want to repeat those negative experiences of bias.”

To set the record straight, the experts who wrote the the consensus statement listed the following five common assumptions as being “at odds with a definitive body of biological and clinical evidence.”

1. Body weight = calories in – calories out.

This equation oversimplifies the relationship between body weight and energy consumed and used, the experts write. “Both variables of the equation depend on factors additional to just eating and exercising. For instance, energy intake depends on the amount of food consumed, but also on the amount of food-derived energy absorbed through the gastrointestinal tract, which in turn is influenced by multiple factors, such as digestive enzymes, bile acids, microbiota, gut hormones, and neural signals, none of which are under voluntary control.”

2. Obesity is primarily caused by voluntary overeating and a sedentary lifestyle.

According to the experts, overeating and forgoing exercise might be symptoms of obesity rather than the root causes. There are many possible causes and contributors “including geneticand epigenetic factors, foodborne factors, sleep deprivation and circadian dysrhythmia, psychological stress, endocrine disruptors, medications, and intrauterine and intergenerational effects. These factors do not require overeating or physical inactivity to explain excess weight.” they write.

3. Obesity is a lifestyle choice.

“People with obesity typically recognize obesity as a serious health problem, rather than a conscious choice,” the experts write. “Given the negative effects of obesity on quality of life, the well-known risks of serious complications and reduced life expectancy associated with it, it is a misconception to define obesity as a choice.”

4. Obesity is a condition, not a disease.

The criteria generally used to determine disease status “are clearly fulfilled in many individuals with obesity as commonly defined, albeit not all,” the experts explain. “These criteria include specific signs or symptoms (such as increased adiposity), reduced quality of life, and/or increased risk of further illness, complications, and deviation from normal physiology — or well-characterized pathophysiology (for example, inflammation, insulin resistance, and alterations of hormonal signals regulating satiety and appetite).”

5. Severe obesity is usually reversible by voluntarily eating less and exercising more.

“A large body of clinical evidence has shown that voluntary attempts to eat less and exercise more render only modest effects on body weight in most individuals with severe obesity,” the experts write. “When fat mass decreases, the body responds with reduced resting energy expenditure and changes in signals that increase hunger and reduce satiety (for example, leptin, ghrelin). These compensatory metabolic and biologic adaptations promote weight regain and persist for as long as persons are in the reduced-energy state, even if they gain some weight back^.”

Health care facility improvements

The expert panel also determined that many health care facilities aren’t equipped to treat people with obesity. Examination gowns, blood pressure cuffs, chairs and examination tables often are too small, patients have reported.

When researchers from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Mayo Clinic studied the quality of care that patients with obesity receive, they learned that a clinic’s physical environment can have a big effect on a patient’s experience.

They write in a 2015 study published in Obesity Reviews: “Waiting room chairs with armrests can be uncomfortable or too small. Equipment such as scales, blood pressure cuffs, examination gowns and pelvic examination instruments are often designed for use with smaller patients. When larger alternatives are not available, or are stored in a place that suggests infrequent use, it can signal to patients that their size is unusual and that they do not belong. These experiences, which are not delivered with malicious intent, can be humiliating.”

When medical equipment is the wrong size, it may not work correctly. For instance, chances are high that a blood pressure reading will be inaccurate if a health care professional uses a blood pressure cuff that’s too small on a patient with obesity, a 2022 paper finds.

To create a comfortable environment for patients with high body weights, the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity recommends that health care facilities provide, among other things, extra-large exam gowns, chairs that can support more than 300 pounds and do not have arms, and wide exam tables that are bolted to the floor so they don’t move.

The consensus statement also recommends improvements to health care facilities.

“Given the prevalence of obesity and obesity-related diseases,” the 36 international experts write, “appropriate infrastructure for the care and management of people with obesity, including severe obesity, must be standard requirement for accreditation of medical facilities and hospitals.”

Source list:

Weight Bias Among Health Care Professionals: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Blake J. Lawrence; et al. Obesity, November 2021.

Joint International Consensus Statement for Ending Stigma of Obesity
Francesco Rubino, et al. Nature Medicine, March 2020.

Perceived Weight Discrimination and Chronic Biochemical Stress: A Population-Based Study Using Cortisol in Scalp Hair
Sarah E. Jackson, Clemens Kirschbaum and Andrew Steptoe. Obesity, December 2016.

Weight Stigma is Stressful. A Review of Evidence for the Cyclic Obesity/Weight-Based Stigma Model
A. Janet Tomiyama. Appetite, November 2014.

Association of Birth by Cesarean Delivery with Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes Among Adult Women
Jorge E. Chavarro. JAMA Network Open, April 2020.

Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Obesity: A Systematic Review of Plausible Mechanisms and Meta-Analysis of Cross-Sectional Studies
David A. Wiss and Timothy D. Brewerton. Physiology & Behavior, September 2020.

Income Inequality and Obesity among U.S. Adults 1999–2016: Does Sex Matter?
Hossein Zare, Danielle D. Gaskin and Roland J. Thorpe Jr. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, July 2021.

Comparisons of Explicit Weight Bias Across Common Clinical Specialties of U.S. Resident Physicians
Samantha R. Philip, Sherecce A. Fields, Michelle Van Ryn and Sean M. Phelan. Journal of General Internal Medicine, October 2023.

Impact of Weight Bias and Stigma on Quality of Care and Outcomes for Patients with Obesity
S.M. Phelan; et al. Obesity Reviews, April 2015.

One Size Does Not Fit All: Impact of Using A Regular Cuff For All Blood Pressure Measurements
Tammy. M. Brady; et al. Circulation, April 2022.

The post Weight bias, common in health care, can drive weight gain and prompt people with obesity to avoid doctors, research finds appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In 2022, academic journals retracted more than 4,600 scientific papers, often because of ethical violations or research fraud, according to the Retraction Watch blog and database.

Although retractions represent a tiny fraction of all academic papers published each year, bad research can have tremendous impacts. Some studies involve new drugs, surgical procedures and disease prevention programs — all of which directly affect public health and safety. Also, government leaders rely on scholarly findings to help guide policymaking in areas such as crime, education, road safety, climate change and economic development.

On Nov. 30, The Journalist’s Resource hosted a free webinar to help journalists find and report on problematic research. Three experts who have covered research misconduct or have hands-on experience monitoring or detecting it offered a variety of tips and insights.

For those of you who missed the webinar, here are four of the big takeaways from our presenters, Ivan Oransky, a former president of the national Association of Health Care Journalists who teaches medical journalism at New York University and co-founded Retraction Watch; Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and science integrity consultant who has been called “the public face of image sleuthing;” and Jodi Cohen, an award-winning investigative reporter at ProPublica whose series “The $3 Million Research Breakdown” exposed misconduct in a psychiatric research study at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

1. Retraction Watch and PubPeer are two online resources that can help journalists identify and track research fraud and errors.

Retraction Watch, a blog launched in 2010, is a treasure-trove of information about research papers that have been removed from academic journals. The website features:

• The Retraction Watch Database, which journalists can use to search for retractions connected to a specific researcher, university or research organization. Use it to look for patterns — for example, retractions among groups of researchers who tend to work together or among multiple researchers working at the same institution.
• The Retraction Watch Leaderboard, an unofficial list of researchers with the highest number of paper retractions.
• A list of scientific sleuths, including self-described “data thug” James Heathers and Michèle B. Nuijten, who, along with Chris Hartgerink, created statcheck, designed to find statistical mistakes in psychology papers. Some of these experts use aliases to protect against retaliation and harrassment.

Retraction Watch helped Cohen report on and provide context for a ProPublica investigation into the work of prominent child psychiatrist Mani Pavuluri.

It “was a huge resource in trying to understand this,” Cohen told webinar viewers. “The amount of information there and the ability to use that database — completely amazing.”

In her series, co-published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2018, Cohen revealed that Pavuluri “violated research rules by testing the powerful drug lithium on children younger than 13 although she was told not to, failed to properly alert parents of the study’s risks and falsified data to cover up the misconduct, records show.” The University of Illinois at Chicago, Cohen wrote, “paid a severe penalty for Pavuluri’s misconduct and its own lax oversight.” The federal government required the school to return the $3.1 million the National Institutes of Health gave it to fund Pavuluri’s study.

PubPeer is a website where researchers critique one another’s work. Comments are public, allowing journalists to observe part of the scientific process and collect information that could be useful in a news story.

Bik noted during the webinar that PubPeer is “heavily moderated” to reduce the likelihood of name-calling and speculation about a researcher’s work. The website explains its commenting rules in detail, warning users to base their statements on publicly verifiable information and to cite their sources. Allegations of misconduct are prohibited.

“You cannot just say, ‘You’re a fraud,’” Bik explained. “You have to come with evidence and arguments similar to a peer review report.”

PubPeer played a key role in student journalist Theo Baker’s investigation of academic papers co-authored by Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Tessier-Lavigne ultimately resigned and Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, announced in late August that two of Tessier-Lavigne’s papers had been retracted.

The Journalist’s Resource created a tip sheet on using PubPeer in August. Tip #1 from that tip sheet: Install a free PubPeer browser extension. When you look up a published research paper, or when you visit a website that links to a research paper, the browser extension will alert you to any comments made about it on PubPeer.

2. Early in the reporting process, ask independent experts to help you confirm whether a research study has problems.

Getting guidance from independent experts is critical when reporting on research fraud and errors. Experts like Elisabeth Bik can help you gauge whether problems exist, whether they appear to be intentional and how serious they are.

During the webinar, Bik advised journalists to ask for help early in the reporting process and seek out experts with the specific expertise needed to assess potential problems. Bik specializes in spotting misleading and manipulated images. Others specialize in, for example, statistical anomalies or conflicts of interest.

Bik’s work has resulted in 1,069 retractions, 1,008 corrections and 149 expressions of concern, according to her Science Integrity Digest blog. Journal editors typically issue an expression of concern about an academic paper when they become aware of a potential problem, or when an investigation is inconclusive but there are well-founded indicators of misleading information or research misconduct.

Bik stressed the importance of journalists helping correct the scientific record and holding researchers accountable.

“It seems that there’s relatively very few papers that have big problems that get corrected or retracted,” she said. “Institutional investigations take years to perform and there’s very rarely an action [as a result]. And senior researchers, who are the leaders, the mentors, the supervisors and the responsible people for these things happening in their lab, they are very rarely held accountable.”

Oransky encouraged journalists to get to know the scientific sleuths, some of whom are active on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“You can find dozens of people who do this kind of work,” he said. “It’s like any kind of whistleblower or source that you can develop.”

Oransky also highlighted common types of misconduct that journalists can look out for:

• Faked data.
• Image manipulation.
• Plagiarism.
• Duplication or “self-plagiarism” — when researchers reuse their own writings or data, taking them from a study that has already been published and inserting them into a newer paper.
• Fake peer review — a peer review process that has, in whole or in part, been fabricated or altered to ensure a paper gets published.
• Paper mills — organizations that create and sell fraudulent or potentially fraudulent papers.
• Authorship issues.
• Publisher errors.

3. One of the best ways to get tips about research fraud is to report on research fraud.

Oransky shared that he and other people at Retraction Watch continually receive tips about research misconduct. Tipsters will come to journalists they think will report on the issue, he said.

“You write about it and then people come to you,” Cohen added. “They don’t know you’re there unless you’re covering it regularly. And not even regularly, but like you start writing about it and show it’s something your interested in, you’re going to get more ideas.”

Another place journalists can go to check for allegations of research misconduct: court records, including subpoenas. They can also ask public colleges and universities for copies of records such as investigative reports and written communication between researchers and their supervisors, Cohen pointed out. If the research involves human subjects, journalists could request copies of reports and communications sent to and from members of the Institutional Review Board, a group charged with reviewing and monitoring research to ensure human subjects’ safety and rights are protected.

Cohen suggested journalists ask local colleges and universities for records tied to research funding and any money returned to funders. The National Institutes of Health maintains a database of organizations that receive federal grant money to conduct biomedical research.

“You could just start digging around a little bit at the institutions you cover,” Cohen said. “Be skeptical and ask questions of the data and ask questions of the people you cover.”

4. Discuss with your editors whether and how you’ll protect the identities of whistleblowers and experts who want to remain anonymous.

Many experts who leave comments on PubPeer or raise questions about research on other online platforms use aliases because they don’t want their identities known.

“You can imagine that not everybody wants to work under their full name so some of them are using all kinds of pseudonyms, although recently some of these people have come out under their full names,” she said. “But it is work obviously that doesn’t leave you with a lot of fans. Especially the people whose work we criticize are sometimes very mad about that, understandably so. But some of them have sued or threatened to sue some of us.”

Oransky said he has no issues letting scientific sleuths stay anonymous. They can explain their concerns in detail and show journalists their evidence. As with any source, journalists need to check out and independently confirm information they get from an anonymous source before reporting on it.

“Anonymous sources that are vulnerable — which a whistleblower is, which someone in a lab whose pointing out problems is, especially a junior person — as long as you know who they are, your editor knows who they are, that’s my rule,” he said. “We want to understand why they want anonymity, but it’s usually pretty obvious.”

Download Oransky’s slides from his presentation.

Download Bik’s slides from her presentation.

The post How to cover academic research fraud and errors: 4 big takeaways from our webinar appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.