2001 Batten Award Honorable Mention

"The Guinea Pig Kids"
Minnesota Public Radio, St. Paul, MN

For "The Guinea Pig Kids: An Inside Look at Minnesota's Graduation Standards Experiment," radio documentaries that used sophisticated layering of stakeholder voices and an active Web site to produce a conversation that helped delay implementation of new high school graduation requirements..

Len Witt
Executive Director, Civic Journalism Initiative
Minnesota Public Radio

"Guinea Pig Kids" grew out of what the kids are calling themselves because the state implemented this new thing called Profile of Learning, a set of 24 show-us-what-you-know performance assessments that every kid needed to complete before graduating in 2002.

We were starting to get feedback that it wasn't working as well as the state had hoped. Most of the newspapers and TV stations were covering what the official word was, but we weren't getting the real story from the people on the front line, the students, the parents and the teachers.

So we decided to go into three different schools: an inner-city school in Minneapolis, a suburban school, and a tiny farm community school. We set up forums and we had little hand-held voting keypads so that a few people couldn't dominate the conversation. It became really clear that this one-size-program-fits-all [approach] wasn't going to work.

The reporters took this information and did over four months of reporting. Our online team did a special site. You could go in and actually take a lot of the tests that the kids had to take so you'd get real samples of what they were doing.

The outcome of all of this was that they introduced a new bill to change the law and returned implementation to the local level.

Links to Guinea Pig Kids Web Pages

Front Page: http://news.mpr.org/features/200002/07_ newsroom_guineapigkids/index.html