The Press: Boom on the School Beat

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When voters in a Portland, Ore. suburb recently torpedoed a tax increase that would have provided more money for their schools, Superintendent of Schools Floyd Light knew just what the trouble was: Wilma Morrison, education editor of the union-struck Portland Oregonian, had not been around to push for the measure. Said Light darkly: "Her being out definitely hurt us. The story was not brought before the public."

In crediting Editor Morrison with such influence, Light was pointing a finger at what may be the biggest boom in U.S. newspapers: education reporting, long neglected by the nation's daily press but now getting the benefit of better talent and more news space than ever before.

As one part of the new look in education coverage, the New York Times has three fulltime education reporters working under Education Editor Fred M. Hechinger, who last week landed three education stories on Page One (one morning last week, the Times devoted three inside pages to education news). The New York Herald Tribune's Terry Ferrer (sister of Actor Mel Ferrer) has a staff of two, and last week the Trib gave full play to the beginning of her exhaustive, five-part study of U.S. colleges and universities. On the Minneapolis Star, the education beat is covered in depth: one man for higher education, another at the secondary and elementary level, still another staffer who keeps busy supervising the 35 high-school students who work as paid education stringers.

In Chicago the Sun-Times's Education Editor Ruth Dunbar roves a beat that in recent years has encompassed Russia and the Far East, produced effective stories on the public-education systems in the Soviet Union, Korea and Japan. Helen Fleming, of the Chicago Daily News, writes with such telling effect on the local education scene that, after a series observing that the Chicago school system made only seven of 16 basic high-school courses compulsory, and questioning the latitude this left the student, the school board added four more courses to the compulsory list. In Los Angeles, as a public service, the Examiner each week distributes 114,000 copies of a current-events tabloid to 115 high schools. And Portland's Morrison, a tireless crusader for better schools, has helped get teachers' pay boosted, forced the Portland school board and the state board of higher education, which both used to hold closed-door meetings, to open up; in fact, the Portland board passed a resolution guaranteeing the press's right to cover all meetings.

Retiring the Hacks. It used to be that the journalist assigned to education ranked somewhere below the real estate editor and above the chief copy boy.