Conversation WITH MARSHA RYBIN : ‘Journalism Has a Special Role’ in Teaching

Student newspapers in Southern California are dying by the score, killed off by a lack of funding and teacher/adviser burnout. But defying that trend is a journalism magnet program at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys. On the occasion of National Scholastic Press Week, JILL STEWART talked to the program director about what the school is doing. We opened the Journalism and Technology Magnet last fall, the only magnet offering journalism in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Journalism has a special role to play in teaching kids how to succeed and grow and deal with criticism. In what other subject do you learn the struggle of committing thoughts to paper, and then sending those ideas out for the world to applaud or attack? Instead of having one teacher grade a paper, you’ve got the public, particularly your peers. You don’t just research facts, distill information and express it coherently, even though those are key steppingstones to knowledge. You also learn a lot about yourself.

Our program exposes students to an interdisciplinary approach so that kids can create a newspaper in their history class that recounts a specific time in history, which is basically a clever way of getting them to write a history report. They’ve even used newspapers in geometry class.

The kids are 9th- and 10-graders who represent an incredibly wide range. Students are selected randomly from all over Los Angeles. We have kids who are repeating a grade and we have straight-’A’ kids. Some write beautiful essays that could be published as is, while others aren’t as sophisticated as my own children, who are 7 and 12. Some students are teaching the teachers a great deal about computers, while other students have never been near a keyboard.

We’ve run into the same challenges you would find in any school or company bringing in new technology. Technicians are working to set up our 32-computer lab. We are going to go on-line and use the Internet. The anticipation is incredible. Kids ask me every day, “When do we get our computers?”

We’re creating a curriculum and an approach from scratch. Our experience has been a slow laborious process of taking a few steps forward and others back. Our goal is to have a complete computer lab set up before the end of the school year, and to get our kids fully integrated into the existing school newspaper at Birmingham in the next year or two.

We learned last fall that it’s not all that easy to get students and parents to sign up for magnet school. Many parents and kids are reluctant because of long bus rides that mean the kids may have to get up at 5:30 a.m. Last year, we recruited at several locations around the city, but ended up with just 150 students when we had room for 180. We’re working hard on recruiting for next fall. We have room to grow to 360 as we add 11th grade next year and 12th grade the year after that.

Our classes offer a low student-to-teacher ratio, which is important to a good education. We know which kids are having problems at school or at home, and we’re very aware of parents’ concerns.

The teachers are special too. They’re the kind who will work with a kid during lunch or after school. That is, unfortunately, really rare now.

Some of our most innovative ideas came from one of our teachers, Amanda Walzer. Because she’s new to teaching, she’s not the least bit intimidated by the idea that something can’t be done. She’s got her 9th- graders producing a literary magazine that will be published in a few weeks. They’ve been selling advertising, writing articles, learning design--everything that goes into the creation of a magazine. That’s the kind of creativity we’re after.