In the 2025-26 school year, 135 New York City high schools offered at least one journalism course, up from about 90 the year before. Nearly 5,700 students completed one, a 76 percent jump. On Tuesday the City Council added $280,000, most of it going to 30 schools at $5,000 apiece to launch or improve a student news outlet.

The case the students made to the council wasn't about journalism. It was about how you learn anything. Madison James, a junior at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, described a story she reported on class-size policy: "I spoke with teachers and students living with those decisions, researching complicated information, listening to different perspectives, and communicating accurately. That is critical thinking. That is effective communication. That is civic engagement." She's now planning a career in public policy, which she says hadn't occurred to her before the story.

Louisville Public Media heard the same thing last week from more than 40 Jefferson County students touring three newsrooms. Love Lee, a student at Seneca High School, put the method plainly: "We actually have to, like, get to know these people and, like, not just make up something. You actually have to, like, get into it." Kaleigh Coleman wants the Flock surveillance cameras out of the city. Nariah Richée noticed the air pollution near the middle school where she picks up her little sister. Those are beats, and nobody assigned them.

The infrastructure for this already exists. PBS Student Reporting Labs started in 2009 with six pilot schools producing video stories for the NewsHour. By 2020 it was in 180 schools with hundreds more waiting, and more than 10,000 people now use its free StoryMaker curriculum. New York's move is to treat the work as a graduation pathway: the state's portrait of a graduate asks for effective communicators, critical thinkers, and global citizens, and a student with a portfolio of published reporting can show all three.

Set that next to this morning's Washington Post. Eric Klopfer, who co-chaired MIT's committee on AI in teaching, says students are turning in better homework and doing worse on exams. He calls it "the illusion of learning." Shawna Dolansky, a humanities professor at Carleton University, describes first-year outlines that read like dissertation proposals, from students who can't explain the ideas in them. Her response was to stop assigning take-home essays, make her classroom tech-free, and require students to annotate their books by hand. She's been teaching for 30 years. What she landed on is a reporting class without the byline.

— Thomas

P.S. I'm in New York City this for UN General Assembly and will be in San Diego next week for ComNet 26. If you'll be at either, let me know!

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