When CalMatters education reporter Carolyn Jones traveled to Humboldt County in Northern California to report on tiny rural school districts confronting declining enrollment, she encountered a question that went well beyond enrollment figures and school budgets.
In some communities, the school was inseparable from the town itself. “If the school closed, the town would essentially have no reason for being, and residents knew that,” Jones said. But keeping a sparsely populated school operating carries its own consequences. Jones discovered annual costs topping $100,000 per student, raising a difficult question: How much should preserving a school, and perhaps the community surrounding it, cost?
“School closures are a national story, but I hadn't seen many stories about the impacts in rural areas,” Jones said. The experience taught her “how a school can be the very soul and identity of a community.”
It is also an example of the challenge confronting education journalists when some of the biggest forces reshaping American public education are simultaneously national and intensely local. Declining enrollment, aging buildings, uneven school funding, artificial intelligence and changes in who makes decisions about schools can affect millions of children. But their consequences often become clearest far from Washington, in a district budget, school board meeting, classroom or community fighting to keep its school open.
“There are huge regional differences when it comes to how much states and communities pay for public education and as a result, how teachers are paid,” said Bianca Vázquez Toness, a national education reporter for The Associated Press.
She also points to differences in class sizes, students’ ability to attend schools outside their communities and access to public funding for private education. Where a child lives can substantially shape the education that child receives, and the stories journalists need to tell.
When a national trend lands in a community
Declining enrollment illustrates the problem. The National Center for Education Statistics projects public-school enrollment will fall about 5%, from 49.6 million students in 2022 to 46.9 million in 2031. Thirty-five states are projected to experience enrollment declines in pre-K to high school. For an individual district, fewer students can mean fewer dollars, staffing cuts, consolidation or school closures.
Jones expects declining enrollment to reshape California schools for decades. In Humboldt County, she saw the implications at their most intimate: closing a school could alter the future of an entire community.
For journalists, then, the story isn’t simply that enrollment is falling. It’s what happens next.
Jerry Zremski, director of the Local News Network at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and a longtime Buffalo News reporter, argues that discovering those consequences still depends on one of journalism’s oldest practices.
“The way to identify those stories is through good old-fashioned beat coverage,” he said. During his reporting years, Zremski attended countless government meetings and hearings, often not to write about the meetings themselves but to develop sources and find stories. “This is harder to do for reporters at short-staffed news organizations,” he said, “but I think it is still essential.”
Geography shows up in the money
The financial landscape education reporters cover varies enormously. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2024 school-finance data, public-school systems spent an average of $17,619 per pupil nationally. New York spent $31,918 per pupil, compared with $11,060 in Idaho. New Jersey spent $27,234; Arizona, $12,003. The figures aren’t adjusted for geographic differences in cost of living and aren’t direct measures of educational quality. But they demonstrate the scale of geographic variation.
Authority is similarly fragmented. In California, Jones describes decision-making as roughly evenly split. Policy and most funding come from the state, but local school boards retain substantial autonomy over spending and implementation. “There’s a bit of a leadership vacuum in California education,” Jones said.
Her view of local control has evolved. The pandemic exposed some tensions as state and federal money flowed to schools while districts retained considerable discretion over spending and implementation. For reporters, a state policy announcement may therefore be only the beginning. The next story is what happens in individual districts.
Making the seemingly mundane matter
Some of the most important education stories don’t necessarily look dramatic. Jones said readers respond to good-news stories as well as critical examinations of test scores, policies and funding. Budgets are harder.
“Stories that are important but don’t get much reader traction typically are about budgets,” she said. Her solution is to find the person inside the numbers. “To make these stories more engaging I try to lead with a student, just to show how arcane budget maneuvers affect real children.”
Zremski independently arrives at much the same prescription. “Humanizing them is key,” he said. “It’s great to find someone affected by a particular issue and write the story based on that person’s experiences.”
Vázquez Toness did precisely that while reporting on Texas’ rollout of taxpayer-supported scholarships for private schooling and learning at home. She followed an immigrant family dissatisfied with the support their son was receiving at his public elementary school. They sought a scholarship to move him to a Catholic school where they believed he might receive more individual attention and where Spanish-speaking staff could communicate with his parents.
They didn’t receive one. “What I saw close up is that there are real human consequences to these policy decisions,” Vázquez Toness said.
Stories hiding in plain sight
School facilities provide another example. Jones calls aging buildings an under-the-radar issue with potentially escalating consequences. Some districts, she said, struggle to raise enough money locally to replace roofs, upgrade electrical systems or adequately heat and cool schools.
A 2019 Government Accountability Office national survey of school facilities estimated that 54% of public-school districts needed to update or replace multiple building systems or features. Forty-one percent needed HVAC updates in at least half their schools, representing roughly 36,000 schools nationwide. A failing HVAC system isn’t inherently a dramatic national headline. For students trying to learn inside that building, it can be enormously consequential.
Vázquez Toness also points to reading instruction. She credits APM Reports journalist Emily Hanford with drawing widespread attention to differences in how children were being taught to read, an issue Vázquez Toness said many people probably assumed was “too boring to explain.”
Important beat reporting often means recognizing significance before something becomes an obvious crisis. Zremski cautions, however, that reporters don’t need to chronicle every incremental step. “Readers have a limited appetite for process stories,” he said, arguing that journalists should concentrate coverage at key moments when something consequential has happened.
Power is shifting, but not neatly
Meanwhile, the relationship between Washington, states and districts is changing. Vázquez Toness said it remains difficult to know how the Trump administration’s changes will ultimately affect students and families. Reductions in staffing and functions at the U.S. Department of Education and greater state discretion over some spending have altered the balance.
“Trump ceded much more power to the states,” she said. Yet Washington’s influence hasn’t disappeared. A new federal tax-credit scholarship program begins in 2027, while states decide whether to participate. But many decisions families encounter most directly remain closer to home.
“How much individual states pay for education, whether a district adopts a four-day school week, offers pre-kindergarten, transportation and residency policies — those are the things that matter to families, and they’re still largely local,” Vázquez Toness said.
For Zremski, that is precisely why national developments must be translated locally. “If federal healthcare subsidies or SNAP benefits are cut, that’s a local story in every community in the country,” he said. “Sadly, as regional news coverage out of Washington disappears, those sorts of stories aren’t getting done as often as they once were.”
When no one is watching
The difficulty is that the journalism infrastructure needed to report those differences has itself been shrinking. The Medill State of Local News 2025 report found that 212 U.S. counties had no locally based news source and another 1,525 had only one. Nearly 50 million Americans had limited or no access to local news.
Zremski sees institutional consequences. “What is at risk, frankly, is the very integrity of those institutions,” he said. “Without watchful eyes, corruption tends to increase, as do government costs.”
Research supports the financial-accountability portion of that argument. A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Financial Economics found that municipal borrowing costs increased 5 to 11 basis points following local newspaper closures. The researchers also found higher government wages and deficits.
Rebuilding coverage, Zremski argues, requires “innovation and collaboration.” At Maryland, journalism students produce a voter guide covering every school-board race in the state. Zremski said it is consistently among the college’s best-read journalism, a reminder that readers can be deeply interested in local institutions when coverage gives them information they can use.
The next story is already arriving
Even as reporters grapple with longstanding structural issues, another transformation is moving rapidly into classrooms. Both Jones and Vázquez Toness independently identified artificial intelligence as one of the most consequential issues facing schools. Vázquez Toness believes AI is receiving national attention but wants more scrutiny of the urgency districts are showing to adopt it or teach it.
“Schools have not caught up with the technology; students have a better handle on AI than most of their teachers do,” Jones said. If AI can increasingly perform tasks schools have historically taught students to do, Jones believes educators may eventually have to confront a basic question: What are schools for?
For journalists, answering that question, and many of the others reshaping American education, will require looking beyond national headlines. It means following policy into states and districts, sitting through meetings where tomorrow’s story may surface, making budgets and buildings meaningful, and finding the people who reveal what seemingly abstract decisions actually do.
“Most students I interview are sharp, curious, idealistic and motivated,” Jones said. “I feel they’ll be able to handle whatever craziness awaits them, and maybe even solve some of the problems generations like mine have left for them.”
The challenge for education journalists is making sure someone is there to tell the stories shaping the schools those students inherit.
Taayoo Murray is a New York City-based journalist who covers health, wellness and parenting. She is the founder of The Care Capitalist, which convenes off-the-record rooms to think through healthcare’s hardest questions. She welcomes emails at taayoo_murray@yahoo.com.
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