The scar on Russell Contreras’s cheek comes from his high school days, when he tried to help a white classmate escape a pummeling. His school in Houston, Texas, had been integrated in the 1970s, and one unfortunate byproduct was a campus ritual called “white day”—the day that black and Hispanic kids would randomly pick on white classmates and punch them. Thus, for all its good intentions, school desegregation in Houston had backfired in a sad way. While the campus was integrated, there hadn’t been enough attention paid to how the students learned the larger life lesson of how to live, study and work together.
A farmer’s experiment using stuffed toy tigers to frighten away menacing monkeys may prove to be the inspiration that will spark a reinvention of journalism in Bhutan, the remote Himalayan kingdom known for its daring goal to achieve Gross National Happiness (GNH). That’s the hope that sums up my recent trip to Bhutan, where I worked with some of the country’s leading newspaper, television and radio journalists.
Beginning with a cohort of 11 reporters from the West Coast, Renaissance Journalism is launching a two-year national initiative that will examine the educational “opportunity gap.”
The Equity Reporting Project: Restoring the Promise of Education is designed to stimulate compelling, in-depth reporting and robust community engagement on a problem that is becoming ever more critical as the economic divide between rich and poor expands in the United States.
