Behind Bridging the Gap, a report steeped in community journalism

Reflections from the team behind our special report  

The achievement gap is a problem deeply embedded in our city’s social life, making it a challenge for not just educators but also journalists. 

But a central tenant of journalism is to tell these difficult but important stories. Madison Common’s “Bridging the Gap” special report tried to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing Madison’s community today: the achievement gap.

The project began in an upper-level reporting class taught by UW School of Journalism and Mass Communication Professor and founder of Madison Commons Lew Friedland. The class started with the achievement gap as an issue, and the four students and Friedland reviewed reports, including ones from Race to Equity and the state superintendent’s task force, to slowly find focus.

“I think our biggest challenge was figuring out how to tell the story right,” said student reporter Jen Gragg. “We wanted to show the problems, but we also really wanted to emphasize all of the great work that is currently being done to fix those problems. That’s ultimately why we ended up centering the story around the work that the school district, outside community resources and Leopold Elementary were doing to fix the problems.”

Access, in large part, made Leopold Elementary a cornerstone of the project. Reporter Silke Schmidt said that instructional coach Kendra Cerniglia and principle Karine Sloan offered to let Friedland and the team of four students, also including Abby Becker and Polo Rocha, spend a morning at Leopold, observing and interviewing.

“Some of the most memorable conversations happened when talking to the Leopold classroom teachers,” Becker said. “Their passion for the students was so evident even when describing the challenges and struggles they face every day in the classroom… Those moments reset my focus and reminded me of whom we were writing about and trying to highlight in our report.”

The team behind Bridging the Gap (clockwise): Abby Becker, Jen Gragg, Lew Friedland, Silke Schmidt, Polo Rocha and Lanni Solochek

Connecting with those committed to these issues at Leopold and beyond was a highlight for all of the reporters.

Building these relationships, though, is not unique to the Building the Gap project, but instead, part of Madison Common’s emphasis on community journalism. 

“True community journalism gets at the heart of the matter, which is the people affected by the issue,” Becker said. “We really tried to produce a piece of solutions-oriented journalism.” 

Gragg also said that their breadth of coverage helped them achieve the last goal. 

“We focused on many different routes that different organizations are doing to work on the issue, and I think this adds a depth to our coverage that smaller pieces on this issue may be missing. We really did take a multifaceted approach,” she said.

This does not mean the project was without limitations. Almost all of the reporters said time and team size were big constraints. Schmidt noted that “meaningful maps and data visualizations” of factors aggravating the gap became impossible within the timeframe of a semester.

Another challenge, one of the greatest challenges of journalism, was how to capture such a long-standing issue in its full breadth.

“This is an issue that spans decades, and we were tying to boil it down to a handful of stories,” Becker said.

The strengths, though, of in-depth reporting helped the reporters step out of the event-centered and episodic coverage that generally frames issues of the achievement gap.

“Reporting properly on the achievement gap will take years, not months,” Friedland said, "but this group of journalists did a remarkable job in helping to start the conversation.”

The Bridging the Gap report is available at achievement.madisoncommons.org. Individual articles also can be found on Channel3000.com and the Fitchburg Star.