From school shootings to hazardous chemicals to police misconduct, our health and safety is dependent on information from the government.
That information should be accessible and trustworthy.
It’s not.
We’re on a mission to find out why.
This is the story of Why Don’t We Know.
LATEST BLOG POST
WDWK wins public service award from Education Writers Association
We’re thrilled to say that, in its debut year, Why Don't We Know walked away with top honors in the annual Educational Writers Association national journalism awards. Our podcast was recognized with first place in the Public Service category, which according to the EWA, “recognizes journalism that makes a substantive contribution to the public’s understanding of critical issues of common concern and/or makes a demonstrable positive impact on individuals or a community.” The award specifically recognized the podcast’s coverage of the lockdown secrecy surrounding Title IX sexual misconduct investigations in higher education, which are so obsessively secretive that some complainants
Episodes
Whistleblower
This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year.Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.
Why is data collection so darn difficult?
This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year.Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.
Who are body cameras really for?
This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year.Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.
‘Police say,’
This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year.Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.
Welcome to Season 2
This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year.Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.
SPECIAL: ‘Gag order’ against sexual assault
This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year.Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.
EXTRA: Why don’t we know where all the lead pipes are?
Lead drinking water pipes go all the way back to the Roman times, and even though we’ve known that lead is harmful for the better part of the century, powerful in the U.S. lobbying kept them around — and in some places, mandated they be installed — until the 1980s.So, millions of Americans in thousands of American towns have them.To mitigate the poison, we rely on a calcium called orthophosphate that coats the pipes and protects the lead from contaminating the water that’s flowing through them. Well, in theory, right? Because we’ve seen how that can fail. In the worst of circumstances, like Flint and Newark and Chicago and Washington D.C., kids are poisoned and communities financially ruined.
EXTRA: The human toll of missing data
Depending on where you look, you can find a statistic that will tell you any number you want to hear about how often students are bullied or harassed in school. In my reporting, I found studies that range from 9% to 98%. The national center for education statistics aggregated the findings of 80 different studies and reported that 35% of students are bullied in school. Another 15% are cyberbullied or bullied online. Why is that? Why are bullying numbers all over the place? And why does it cause students like Anna Aslanian to fall through the cracks?
Episode 13: Any Other Law
If any other federal law were as broken as FERPA it would have been fixed by now. I am confident in making that statement. But FERPA has remained vague, broad and outdated for four and a half decades. I wanted to go to the hill to ask people about it. But when I started reporting for this episode, we were in the height of COVID. So, I went to the virtual hill. Last summer, calling folks on the education committees to see if they would join me for this episode to talk about FERPA.
EXTRA: Why Don’t We Know how many kids are attending virtual learning?
This may not come as a surprise but the Federal Department of Education was woefully unprepared in many different ways but one of the most basic failures is a failure of data. There is no federal tracking program for virtual learning, meaning, no way of knowing what students fell behind or couldn’t attend school during this time.Anecdotally, we could guess that the biggest impact was on the most vulnerable — low-income families that could not afford to deal with the new demands on their internet and parental supervision that accompanies virtual learning.
EXTRA: Attacked
This story might sound like a fluke, maybe it sounds like an abnormality. Because it isn’t the kind of story we often read about in the newspapers or hear about on TV. Certainly not the way that headlines about gun violence and bullying grab our attention. That’s what makes this topic a data desert. There is, in fact, no way of knowing how many other teachers there are out there, with stories like this one and how many of them don’t have the support they need. Our requests for this data, from state departments of education in all 50 states, turned up a broken recording system.
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