The Notebook: Two decades of reporting on education

We Americans may be passive about politics, even ignorant about history and geography - but we've always been passionate about our children's education. Witness the continued success of the scrappy start-up news organization called the Philadelphia Public School Notebook.

On Tuesday, the Notebook will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a party at the University of the Arts featuring music, exhibits, and an awards ceremony.

First produced in photocopiers and distributed by hand in supermarkets and community meetings, the Notebook has grown into a respected journal providing in-depth coverage of the city's 212 public schools and the system that supposedly holds them together.

The Notebook is not merely a source of information. It has real bite, having broken a number of big stories, including a 2011 investigative report that showed some educators had falsified the results of standardized state tests to inflate their schools' profiles.

"They go beyond being just a watchdog," said Fernando Gallard, spokesman for the Philadelphia School District, which occasionally has tangled with the Notebook. "I sometimes describe them as a junkyard dog ... scrappy and dedicated, and they just won't let go of your pants leg when they're covering public education in Philadelphia."

The Notebook is not one to see eye-to-eye with the district on many issues, agrees Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

"I think [the Notebook] probably has the best coverage of education news in the city," he said. "In the age of Twitter and instant news, they really do their research and offer in-depth reporting."

While most print media companies are under financial assault, the nonprofit Notebook continues to flourish because of its grass-roots approach, said editor and publisher Paul Socolar.

"We weren't started by a bunch of venture capitalists," he said. "From the very beginning, we had diverse revenue streams, including raising money from our readers."

Funded by grants, reader donations, and advertising, the Notebook initially was published four times a year. Today, it releases six print issues a year and maintains a website updated daily.

Former Inquirer reporter Dale Mezzacappa, who has written for the Notebook since 2006, said nonprofit journalism may be the wave of the future.

"The for-profit journalism model that has sustained newspapers for more than a century is falling apart," she said. "I think in its small way, the Notebook is pioneering the nonprofit model of a media company as one way high-quality public-service journalism can survive."

The men and women who helped found the Notebook in 1994 were not philosophizing about the nature of journalism, said Socolar. They were parents deeply concerned about the education their children were receiving.

Socolar, whose two daughters were in elementary school at the time, said he was deeply frustrated with the education system's lack of transparency.

"It was really hard to get information about what was going on in the system - really about anything at all," he said.

"I found myself going to meeting after meeting just to try to make sense out of it all. . . . The idea of having a place to go to get independent, in-depth information was something that made sense."

Beyond information, the Notebook has been committed to promoting social justice, said Socolar - to "activist journalism," which he defines as a form of information-gathering that galvanizes people into improving public education and healing its shortcomings.

The system's greatest shortcoming, Socolar said, has been its perpetuation of social, economic, and racial injustice.

He said that given the state government's unequal funding, "schools in urban areas can only offer bare-bones services and always are looking at the threat of further cuts." Unable to offer high-quality education, schools in urban areas end up reinforcing the economic challenges residents already face, he said.

Charlotte Hall, a former editor of the Orlando Sentinel, served for two years on the Notebook's board of directors. She said she prefers to call the journal's approach "mission-driven journalism." She said the Notebook tries to help improve the city's public schools "by providing a platform and access and transparency to all the stakeholders in education - to parents, teachers, students and administrators."

The most important aim, Hall and Socolar said, was to keep the community fully involved in the process.

Roxborough resident Rebecca Poyourow, whose two sons are in second and fourth grades, agrees.

"They dig down deep and give you the information you need - and without all the jargon," she said. "They're incredibly responsive to readers."

MaryBeth Hertz, a high school teacher who has worked in the Philadelphia school system for a decade, said the Notebook cuts through bias.

"I trust the Notebook to give me the facts and the analysis without having an agenda," she said. "The district has an agenda, the union has an agenda, mainstream news companies have an agenda."

If You Go

Turning the Page for Change: Philadelphia Public School Notebook's 20th birthday

215-854-2736