Talking Points: Starting a discussion between advisers and administrators
to build the case against prior review, restraint
by Lori Keekley
Advisers and administrators should be partners in education, not adversaries.
Advisers must teach principals about the importance of journalism and its relevance to today’s curriculum as well as enlighten them about the pitfalls of prior review and restraint.
We’ve created these Talking Points, based in part on Quill & Scroll’s new version of The Principal’s Guide to Scholastic Journalism (available in print from Quill and Scroll) to help advisers begin to build their cases for a strong, student-driven journalism program.
Most points are further referenced in the Principal’s Guide, which are the page numbers that appear following the main point. Others have links in which advisers can find more information on the topic, including links to the online version of The Principal’s Guide and materials from JEA’s Scholastic Press Rights Commission.
Marshmallow fluff: What learning looks like in Hazelwood’s world
by Candace Bowen
Hazelwood stories: Jan. 14, 1988. As I walked through the main office of St. Charles (Ill.) High School, my principal waved me into his office. “Did you hear that Supreme Court decision?” he said. I didn’t need to ask which one – the whole scholastic journalism community had been worried about Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, and though we hadn’t had time to sort out all it could mean, we knew if wasn’t good. But the best defense is a good offense, so my reply to him, “Sure, I heard, but there’s not enough room in the X-Ray office for your desk, too.”
Our principal didn’t immediately start talking about prior review, but the chilling effect was there. When my staff worked on a spread about teen sexuality, they worried about the interview with a local teen mother. One editor was convinced the Supreme Court said no one could write stories on that topic. Another checked with every health teacher to be sure the “safe sex” advice – actually from Planned Parenthood – was something at least SOME of them had in their curriculum. The spread ran, and the principal wasn’t pleased, but he didn’t move his desk up to Room 217.
He wasn’t pleased about factual reporting about a possible teacher strike or criticism of the district for having far fewer guidance counselors than the American School Counselor Association recommended. But he didn’t demand to see the publication before it went to press.
Sadly, that open forum status did not continue after I left in 1994. With a new adviser, albeit one with a good background and understanding of press law, and then a succession of principals, administrators had a much heavier hand. As I moved to a new state a year later, I found out this was more common than I had feared. Principals in Ohio seemed more than willing to cut articles and predetermine taboo topics, all in the name of Hazelwood. Advisers were threatened for “not having enough control” of their student journalists, and experienced, trained advisers lost their publications to novices when the administration said they wanted to “take the program in a different direction.”
A telling example: When speaking at a nearby press day and drinking coffee with advisers who had just arrived, one asked what my presentation would be. “The educationally sound reason to not have prior review,” I answered. Several across the table said, “Oh, yes, we have that – thank goodness.” “Yes, me, too,” the other said, “and it takes so much pressure off me.” Yikes! Clearly my audience and I would not be on the same page. So…I quickly revamped the presentation and seated them all – about 12 or 15 – in a circle. I told each to tell her status as far as prior review and censorship went. To a person, those whose students had free speech rights told about stories that made a difference, principals who were hesitant but then impressed, awards they won for great content. The others complained they had a hard time recruiting and their students said they “could only write about marshmallow fluff.” By the time they had told their stories, I didn’t need to say much more: The power of Hazelwood, often far beyond even what the Supreme Court said, has taken its toll on student media.
Candace Bowen is a former president of the Journalism Education Association and current director of the Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University.
Read MoreTweet8: Our job is to fight censorship
Understand how and why prior review limits your expression and endangers the school and administrators. #25HZLWD
http://jeasprc.org/tweet8-our-job-is-to-fight-censors
Prior review is not only damaging to the professional practice of journalism, but it also creates a stifling, restricted community. When student voices are marginalized, the educational process suffers, and foundational democratic principles such as truth and transparency are undermined.
Often, it is administrators or school district officials who exercise prior review. However, sometimes advisers take on the ultimate role of editor, thinking this is best for the students, publication, and the school. Not only is this educationally invalid thinking, it creates potential legal issues for the adviser and the school community.
Read more about prior review below to find out why students should have final editorial control, and why advisers and administrators are modeling best practices when they don’t have the final say.
Resources:
• Read JEA’s official statement on prior review
http://jea.org/home/about-jea/statements/
• Find advice to help your administrators understand the damaging effects of prior review
http://www.jeasprc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Foundationadminadvice.pdf
• Analzying prior review
http://www.jeasprc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Fightingpriorreview.pdf
• Key questions to ask of those who engage in prior review
http://jeasprc.org/questions-for-those-who-prior-review/
• Guidelines if facing prior review
http://jeasprc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/2012-Guidelines-if-facing-review.pdf
• Prior review questions
http://jeasprc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/2012-PriorreviewQ.pdf
• As journalism teachers, our job is to fight censorship
http://jeasprc.org/sjw11-as-journalism-teachers-our-job-is-to-fight-censorship/
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How to seek truth from power
By Marina Hendricks
At the recent JEA/NSPA Fall National Convention in San Antonio, members of the Scholastic Press Rights Commission conducted open forums for students and advisers to discuss issues they are having with prior review and restraint.
One discussion yielded a gratifying display of peer mentoring, with students who freely practice journalism in their schools counseling others on how to build sounder journalistic relationships with their administrators. Reflecting on it later, I was reminded of how important it is for student journalists to develop the habit of questioning authority – not as rebels, but as reporters.
“When journalists don’t fully understand how power shapes language to serve its own ends, they inevitably become pawns to those who do. Power then takes the wheel of society, and drives it where it will,” writes Doug McGill, a veteran reporter and author of The McGill Report media blog.
The following lesson plan is designed to help student journalists become more comfortable with interviewing and holding sources accountable – particularly the sources who are considered “authority figures.”
Goals for Understanding:
Essential question:
How can we conduct effective interviews, especially with authority figures?
Critical engagement questions:
• How can we go beyond face value with our sources?
• How can we respectfully push for the information we need?
• When we don’t understand something a source says, how can we ask for explanations or elaborations?
Overviews and Timeline:
Activity 1 (one 50-minute class)
Students will read “A Syllabus for a Moral Journalism.” In small groups, they will review stories from the school publication (chosen in advance by the instructor and the editor) to identify cases where sources could have been more thoroughly interviewed. Groups will consider what information is missing, what information is not adequately explained, what terms are not defined, what points of view are not included, and so forth. For homework, students will read “Handling Tough Interviewees” and “Avoiding the Suits.”
Activity 2 (one 50-minute class)
Groups will present the results of their content reviews. Led by the editor, students will discuss how they would report the stories in light of the three readings in Activity 1. The editor will note key strategies on a board or flip chart, then will use those to create an interview tip sheet.
Activity 3 (one 50-minute class, plus advance preparation time)
The instructor will invite an “authority figure” from the school community to participate in an interview with the class. The editor will moderate the interview, and will work with students in advance to help them develop questions. The instructor may want to record the interview for future reference.
Assessment (one 50-minute class)
Led by the editor, students will discuss the interview with the authority figure. They will review the tip sheet from Activity 2 and update it based on their experience. Grading will be based on participation in group and class discussions, and demonstrated ability to analyze situations in a mature, logical fashion.
A lesson for us all in Washington victory over policy change, and a call to action
by John Bowen and Kathy Schrier
Principals will not have a chance to prior review Seattle School District journalism students because the school board recently withdrew its proposed and controversial policy change.
“As a former journalism teacher, it is important for me — as I know it is for our Board — that we uphold our practice of trusting our teachers to educate our students on the rights and responsibilities that come with freedom of expression and a free press,” Interim Superintendent of Schools, Susan Enfield, a former journalism teacher and adviser, said in a press release.
Supporters of the existing free expression policy will now have a year to convince the Seattle School District board to keep its hands off and continue to encourage students to make final decisions and have responsibility for content.
During the first week of November as part of a system-wide policy overhaul, school officials announced they would seek to change a 2o-year policy of allowing students to make final decisions of content without prior review. The Washington State School Directors Association had recommended the new policy.
Washington students, advisers, media groups and citizens mounted a public and active four-day campaign reporting about and speaking against the policy change.
The press release indicated the school district would revisit the issue in 2012 to see how a policy change might fit with community values.
Students and supporters met Nov. 8 to celebrate and plan
Student journalists from five of Seattle’s high schools (Ballard, Garfield, Nathan Hale, Roosevelt and West Seattle) met Nov. 8 in the Nathan Hale journalism room to debrief following a promise by Seattle interim Superintendent Susan Enfield to leave unchanged the district’s current student press rights policy. The meeting followed a four-day, whirlwind campaign to thwart the passage of Policy 3220, a controversial, restrictive student press policy.
The students came together to celebrate the immediate victory, as well as to talk about how they must work together to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future. The discussion focused on how the district policy-making process appears to be badly flawed, especially since some school board members seem to be ready to approve policies they haven’t even read.
Students plan to create a Facebook page and a website to keep in touch with each other, as well as to co-produce an article and possible insert about procedures used to decide policies in their school district. Students hope to run the piece in all their papers at about the same time. A coalition of Seattle student journalists is now in the works with plans to meet regularly.
Applauded for their efforts in fighting back the passage of Policy 3220 were Katie Kennedy and Kate Clark, Ballard High School editors, who went on the attack with community flyers, letters to school board members and on-air interviews with local talk radio hosts. The group also applauded NPR reporter Phyllis Fletcher, KPLU-FM Seattle (who was in the room covering the meeting), for first discovering the proposed policy change and alerting Mike Hiestand of the Student Press Law Center, who in turn contacted the Washington Journalism Education Association.
Fletcher shared how she discovered the information on the policy. She explained how, as part of her regular preparation for covering upcoming school board meetings, she looks at the agenda and tries to become familiar with the items for consideration. A red flag went up when she discovered the language in Policy 3220 under consideration.
Clearly, her quick action made all the difference in preventing its passage.
Garfield High School adviser Casey Henry shared with the group a late afternoon message to Seattle journalism advisers from Susan Enfield, in which she apologized for the “consternation” caused by the whole ordeal and promised to make sure any future revisions to the scholastic press policy in Seattle will include input from media advisers.
Students in the room added they should be included, as well, and intend to make that known to the superintendent and the board.
This was a close call for student journalists in Seattle Schools, with lessons to be learned about staying vigilant. In fact, the students discussed creating a session for the 2012 National JEA/NSPA Spring Convention in Seattle, a case study on four frantic days for student journalists and their supporters in Seattle that fortunately ended positively.
Coverage from Seattle-area media
Announcing the proposed change
• Stop the presses, let the principal check them first
http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=25002
• Seattle school board moves to censor student newspapers
http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/11/seattle_school_district_moves.php
• Proposed Seattle school-newspaper policy raises censorship concerns http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2016707090_censorship07m.html
• Students say Seattle school board threatens censorship
http://www.mapleleaflife.com/2011/11/05/students-say-seattle-school-board-threatens-censorship/
Announcing the withdrawal of the proposed changes
• Seattle public schools beats hasty retreat
http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2011/11/07/seattle-school-district-beats-hasty-retreat/
• Students say school board ‘setting the stage for censorship’
http://www.myballard.com/2011/11/04/students-say-school-board-setting-the-stage-for-censorship/
• Proposed ‘censorship’ policy for school newspaper withdrawn (Ballard High School)
http://www.myballard.com/2011/11/07/censorship-policy-proposal-for-school-newspapers-withdrawn/
• Ballard High newspaper editor-in-chief Kate Clark on her censorship fight with the Seattle school board
http://www.mynorthwest.com/?nid=577&a=35563
• School board withdraws controversial proposal: free speech maintained for students
http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/newspaperid/4554/view/frontpage/Default.aspx
• Seattle public schools withdraws controversial student newspaper oversight proposal
http://today.seattletimes.com/2011/11/seattle-public-schools-withdraws-controversial-student-newspaper-oversight-proposal/
• Schools back off on policing student papers
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2016713513_censorship08m.html
• KUOW-FM late afternoon story/interview with Ballard editors Kate and Katie
http://www.kuow.org/mp3high/m3u/News/20111108_PF_freepress.m3u
• The Stranger
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/news-clash/Content?oid=10654053
Other coverage
• How Seattle journalist got school censorship scoop
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/als-morning-meeting/152652/how-seattle-journalist-got-school-censorship-scoop/
• Seattle school board pulls controversial publications proposal, will revisit in 2012
http://www.splc.org/news/newsflash.asp?id=2292
• Seattle School District seeks to remove forum policy for prior review
http://www.jeasprc.org/?p=4150
• Seattle school board pulls controversial publications proposal, will revisit in 2012
http://www.jeasprc.org/?p=4150
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