Undercover Reporting

As a companion series to the paper's undercover teacher series, Leslie Linthicum, a twenty-four year-old reporter, posed as a high school student to examine the role of cliques, drugs, bureaucracy and other hidden everyday realities of a local high school."classmates."  

Reporters have presented as teachers or students to get an inside view of what goes on in schools and colleges.

In 1992, as part of The San Francisco Chronicle's reporting on the growing crisis in the public schools and the crippling effect of California state budget cuts on education, the newspaper decided "that readers needed to understand just how dramatically the budget crisis affects the kids."But it would be difficult. Classroom visitors would be greeted by proud teachers putting on their best stiff-upper-lip performances, shy students and administrators complaining loudly. "Either way, I would never be sure I was seeing the unvarnished truth and readers would not get the accurate picture they needed to see. George Washington High School Principal Al Vidal agreed . . . "