Opinion Submission Guidelines
And we are looking for your ideas.
We welcome submissions from a range of perspectives within the K-12 education community. Regardless of your role in education—whether you’re a teacher, student, principal, superintendent, policymaker, education researcher or professor, parent, business leader, or anyone else deeply involved in the field—we want to hear from you.
We encourage you to read some of our recent opinion and first-person essays. (If you’d like to submit a letter to the editor, please see this page.)
Please attach the submission as a Word document to your email (preferred) or paste it in plain text format into the body of your message. Please do not send your submission as a link or .pdf file.
What we want:
- Know your audience: Submissions should be relevant to a national audience interested in pre-K-12 education news. You’re addressing teachers, policymakers, school administrators, researchers, advocates, and the broader education community—or some combination of them. Make it clear whom you’re writing for.
- Get to the point: Keep your writing clear and concise; essays longer than 1,000 words will not be considered. (Your piece also shouldn’t be too short. Do not submit essays under 600 words. Consider writing a letter to the editor instead.)
- Have a point of view: We’re not just looking for you to lay out general arguments for and against any given issue; instead, bring your own distinct perspective to the subject. Tell us how you really feel, but make sure you can back up any factual claims.
- Be solution-oriented or practical: Try to move beyond just diagnosing a problem. Classroom best practices, thoughtful policy recommendations, personal reflections on classroom experiences, productive commentary on the news, and compelling calls to action are all more useful to our readers.
What we don’t want:
- Straight news coverage or scholarly articles: Please be sure you’re offering an opinion—and avoiding any distracting academese and jargon.
- Shameless self-promotion: Drawing on your own experiences is great, but if the essay boils down to a press release, we’re not the right publication for you. Opinion essays cannot be used for promotional purposes, and all potential conflicts of interest must be disclosed.
- Don’t rely on artificial intelligence. Your essay shouldn’t use generative AI for writing or research unless disclosed to the editors beforehand. We want to hear from you, not ChatGPT.
How to submit:
Please submit all essays, along with a short (1-2 sentence) bio and preferred phone number, to Opinion@educationweek.org. It is helpful if you indicate your topic in the subject line. Education Week does not typically pay for opinion essays.
We respectfully ask that you not submit to multiple news outlets simultaneously. Generally, we do not accept essays that have been published or accepted elsewhere.
We will be in touch if we think the essay is a good fit for our publication. If you do not hear from us after two weeks, please consider your essay rejected. (If you would like for your submission to still be considered, refer to the instructions in the submission acknowledgement email.)