Since we clicked send on the yearbook and I unplugged the string lights in my classroom, I’ve been following the updates on Pennsylvania’s New Voices legislation. It has taken a few stops and starts, but the phrase on the back of my blue t-shirts, ‘Support New Voices,’ finally has some grounding in the Pennsylvania Student Journalism Protection Act.
You can view the proposed bill here or here, and you can read about how some incredible student journalists and advisers from two well-anchored Pennsylvania high school newspapers traveled to the Capitol this summer to lobby for its progress here.
I want to be excited. I once was excited enough by the prospect of this bill that I secured the website domain, coached students on how to build up the site, and contributed ideas in a slew of conference calls. And I remain enthusiastic about what the bills would mean to students and advisers at schools with established programs.
I’m less confident about what New Voices would mean for the rest of us.
SPLC publishes useful talking points about New Voices on their website. Notably: “This bill allows for the censorship of student media only if it is libelous or slanderous, contains an unwarranted invasion of privacy, violates state or federal law, or incites students to violate the law or school policy or disrupt the orderly operation of a school. The bill also prohibits retaliation against student media advisers who refuse to censor student journalists.”
Also notably, the bill does NOT “stop teachers and administrators from teaching or discussing proper English usage or journalistic ethics. The bill expressly protects this ability.”
What the bill also does NOT do is require Pennsylvania schools to support the production of student journalism in any way, nor ensure that they are learning about journalism anywhere in the curriculum.
Pennsylvania’s Student Journalism Protection Act (and you should read the full bill yourself, without relying on my paraphrases or emphases):
- Defines an adviser as an individual designated to “supervise OR provide instruction” to school-sponsored media;
- Gives a student editor the job to “approve, reject or exclude ALL content of school-sponsored media publications and broadcasts and oversee the operation of the school-sponsored media program”;
- Protects an adviser from being “dismissed, suspended, disciplined, reassigned or transferred” for standing up for the rights of student journalists;
- Even denotes that student journalists “MAY conduct a lesson in media law for student journalists before the student journalists participate in the school-sponsored media program.”
But nowhere in the bill does the bill require or advocate that a school which offers students the opportunity to publish student media—yearbook, newspaper, broadcast, or otherwise—actually teach students the principles of journalism. It does not provide grounding, encouragement, support, nor any insistence that schools offer journalism education in support of a student publication.
Unless I’m missing something that should be obvious, the bill seems to say: “You can teach students about journalism if you want to. But, whether or not you teach students how journalism works, if you sponsor student media, you’re required to allow them to publish any content that is outside the five bullets of unauthorized expression (1503-N (b) in the house bill).
Those ifs are where I’m getting stuck.
For schools like the ones advocating fiercely for New Voices in Pennsylvania and nationwide, journalism seems to be embedded firmly in their course offerings and traditions. It’s not going away. But for the rest of us—the schools that truly could be new voices—this bill does little to build more opportunities for student journalism.
I’m worried that it might even block some of those opportunities.
Whether high schools offer journalism education or student newspapers in Pennsylvania is hit-or-miss. Pennsylvania School Press Association (PSPA) does not have a centralized list. But it is telling that after three years of offering free membership, PSPA’s membership is still hovering right around 100 schools, out of 718 public high schools and 490 private high schools. Anecdotally, when my students participated in the PSPA’s regional student journalism competition in Philadelphia last year, we competed against just five other schools.
Tara George of Montclair State University tackled research on the status of high school journalism in our neighboring state New Jersey with support from the Center for Cooperative Media. She writes in Poynter, “Journalism education in New Jersey, as in many states, is highly decentralized with the power to set curriculum apportioned at the district level. Unlike math or language arts, journalism is not a required subject. Its existence in a school largely depends on an administrator or, most often, a committed teacher with the will to make it happen.”
According to George’s supported research, 55% of high schools in New Jersey were not listed as offering journalism classes during the 2017-18 academic year.
I don’t have the backing of a research institute, but I did some informal and limited digging on the schools ranked in the top 30 for Pennsylvania according to Niche.com. (Yes, I know that my own students debunked Niche a few years ago, but I had to start somewhere.)
Seventy percent of Pennsylvania’s top-ranked schools have a journalism elective listed in their 2023-2024 course offerings, which sounds promising. But only 11 of those schools—37%—state that the journalism class is linked to publication of a school newspaper or online news site. While all of the schools have yearbooks, less than 50% have a yearbook class.
Only six of the schools are members of PSPA, while only four schools had Journalism Education Association (JEA) members on staff, and only four had publications that are part of the National Scholastic Press Association (NSPA).
As a teacher who is dual certified in English and Art, I can tell you that nothing on my certification pathways prepared me to teach journalism or advise a newspaper or yearbook. A colleague who recently obtained his Communications certification told me that to pass the required Speech Communications exam, he had to learn quite a bit about high school forensics and acting, but not a single question addressed his role as a newspaper and yearbook adviser. JEA offers certification, and that preparation was spot-on, but it is not accepted as licensure to teach.
So, we’re left with a hodgepodge. At many schools in my state—and I want to say most, but I don’t have the numbers yet to make that claim—newspapers and yearbooks are produced like they are at my school: based in an extracurricular club. In a club, we teach what we can. But there are no standards, assessments, or criteria to ensure that students are learning what they need to know to be responsible student journalists. I can encourage, I can bribe with candy, I can celebrate—but I can’t promise that I have reached them all.
I’m about as passionate about journalism education as they come. The New Voices bill suggests that students leaders “may conduct a lesson in media law for student journalists before the student journalists participate in the school-sponsored media program.” I picked up the knowledge necessary for this lesson because experience is a good teacher, because I go to journalism education conventions, and because I know to call SPLC when I’m not sure.
But I’m not confident that all of our club members could explain Tinker and Hazelwood, or understand the difference between libel and false light. I don’t formally get to teach students about these topics. I catch the kids that show up, and I try to teach as much as I can without driving them away to join the Taylor Swift fan club because it’s a lot more fun.
I’m not confident that every journalism adviser could explain these important topics, either. No one expects that we do—except us, if we are committed to journalism education despite the fact that it does not exist in many schools’ courses of studies.
In Pennsylvania, a yearbook can be simply a picture book; a student newspaper can consist of a few satire articles and reviews published occasionally; a principal can be the adviser who approves all stories for publication; a club adviser or teacher can have no journalism background or training; and no one expects students to graduate high school with any grounding in how journalism works.
I’ve seen all of these situations without doing any research at all. And if it passes a vote, New Voices legislation would impact just one item on this list—it would block the principal from advising and approving all content.
We have a bill on the table to protect the voices at established student journalism programs. But who is advocating for new programs, new voices at the schools that currently have no support for student journalism at all? And who is taking care to ensure that school districts, faced with a bill that would block school officials from prior review or restraint, wouldn’t simply remove their sponsorship of club-based student media? Or employ club advisers who would not know enough to see the legislation’s impact through?
I’m probably worrying too much. At a recent conference session, an SPLC staffer reassured me that none of these fears have been realized in any of the 17 states that have passed New Voices legislation.
Still—protecting the voices at established schools seems very different than advocating for new voices in the form of journalism education for all.
New Voices feels like putting the cart before the horse. I’d rather be certain that there are opportunities to learn and practice responsible student journalism at every school first, before I stake my advocacy on protecting the programs that are stable.
We need more research like George’s 2020 report, or Geanne Belton’s 2022 research on high school journalism in New York City that found 73% of the city’s schools do not have a student newspaper. Read those reports by clicking the images below.
Perhaps an unpopular statement: If our national journalism education organizations put some of the effort and funding they channel into recognizing the same top journalism programs over and over again into this research, we might have a stronger grounding to ‘support new voices.’
George writes, “In the digital age, every teenager should have the opportunity in high school, to experience the journalistic process, learn media literacy, and understand the vital role good journalism plays in a community and in a democracy.”
It’s wordier than ‘Support New Voices,’ but I think I’d wear this on a t-shirt.
