When education reporter Kristina Rizga first swept through the double doors at San Francisco’s Mission High School in 2009, she fully expected to see the telltale signs of failure and despair. After all, three-quarters of its students came from poor families, and 38 percent were English language learners from more than 40 countries. They had posted some of the worst test scores in the nation, making Mission High a prime candidate for major restructuring or even closure.
But Rizga discovered something entirely different. Despite these great odds, the students were not only learning, but thriving.
Renaissance Journalism has selected 31 talented journalists to participate in its national fellowship program aimed at addressing the educational opportunity gap.
The Equity Reporting Project: Restoring the Promise of Education seeks to stimulate in-depth reporting and robust community engagement about the profound disparity in access to educational resources and opportunities — both inside and outside of schools — between the rich and the poor.
Ride your bicycle down to the end of Bay Road, past the houses, the abandoned supermarket and the metal recycling yards, and you end up at the bay, of course. It’s a place of muck, trash and soggy timbers washed up by the tide. That’s where we used to float a raft like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. And if we fell in, we had to walk home smelling like you-know-what. But that’s what we did when we were kids growing up during the 1950s and 60s in East Palo Alto, on the “wrong side” of U.S. 101.
