With a dozen years on the beat under his belt, Cory Turner is one of the most experienced national education reporters out there, and in this new interview he’s generous enough to share his thoughts about covering two important education stories: the Biden-era student debt relief effort and the present-day explosion of school choice.
His most recent major piece is a deep dive into school choice in Iowa, including a universal $8,000 per child allocation that doesn’t necessarily go straight from the public school system to private school but still creates a potentially enormous financial burden for the state.
“It’s not necessarily hurting the public schools” in direct financial terms, says Turner about what he found in Iowa. “But it is essentially putting the state and its general fund on the hook for a new stream of funding.”
Asked about his coverage of the Biden-era student debt relief effort, Turner reminds us that the effort’s questionable legality and usefulness were known and reported from the start — by him, at least — and that the Biden effort shouldn’t be confused with pre-existing Congressionally-approved loan forgiveness and income-contingent repayment programs that had preceded debt relief.
Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple.
While I neglected to ask him whether the questionable politics of debt relief — now much-discussed among Democratic pundits — were also known and reported at the time, Turner has lots of interesting things to say about journalistic fairness, bringing context into coverage, and the importance of focusing on what seems most important rather than what might generate the most interest in a given moment.
“I think one of the things that still I still grapple with is holding multiple truths in my hands at once — and helping listeners and readers do the same,” says Turner.
“I do get a little tired of the overly politicized rhetoric today where borrowers who were hurt don’t even want to talk publicly anymore because the public’s like, ‘boo hoo.’ It can be true that the system sucked and someone got hurt and it’s set them back and also that you you didn’t go to college and you didn’t feel like you could borrow this money. It’s both true.”
As for the federal school choice law, “there’s not one way to do it. There are actually more and less thoughtful ways of rolling out, let’s say a private school voucher or an education savings account program.”
Previously from The Grade
Tough jobs: covering private school choice in 2026 (EdWeek’s Matt Stone)
Full-time reporting on school choice (Josh Snyder of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette)
‘We are the media now,’ says school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis
Inside the Harper’s magazine story about teaching at an ESA-funded micro-school (Chandler Fritz)
The Democratic case for private school choice (DFER head Jorge Elorza)
‘We could have been a lot louder,’ says NPR’s Anya Kamenetz
Claudio Sanchez looks back: Lessons from 30 years covering education for NPR (2019)
