Excerpts from Minnesota's Graduation Gap project

Initial reporting

We spent nearly a year investigating the reasons behind Minnesota's poor graduation rates for students of color before airing and publishing our first stories in Mar. 2016. The first wave of stories included this documentary length overview:

People-driven narrative

Though our key findings relied on original data analysis, conveying the issue to the audience in the strongest possible way depended on the stories and insights of the dozens of people we encountered. We put kids at risk of dropping out at the center of our storytelling. Diamond Syas was one of those kids:

(Though it's not part of our formal entry, if you're curious about what became of Diamond check out this report.)

Follow up

As comprehensive as those initial stories were, we knew we had only scratched the surface, so we planned for continued reporting and discussions. We followed legislation to provide state funding for support services and kept tabs on the students we met who were heading toward graduation. In this report, we look closely at how the erosion in even successful support programs can occur almost invisibly:

Ongoing discussion

As we came to understand the complexity of the relationship between graduation rates and availability of support services, we realized it would take more than a handful of stories for the audience to grasp this issue. So, we planned a series of regular programming over more than three months. These typically combined a reporter set-up on a specific topic, followed by a call-in show. Here's the show we did on racial dynamics in the classroom: