Blog / Sean Reardon

The Equity Reporting Project: Restoring the Promise of Education

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.

Growing up on the “wrong side” of the opportunity gap

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.