News coverage is important to every policy area. While some people have personal knowledge of certain topics, many rely on mass media for direct, up-to-date, and in-depth reporting. This is especially the case with education because only a third of American adults currently have a child in elementary or secondary school. What most people know about schools comes from newspapers, radio, television, the Internet, or blogs--or from memories of their own experiences, often from long ago. Yet despite the importance of media coverage for public understanding of education, news reporting on schools is scant. As the authors note in this report, there is virtually no national coverage of education. During the first nine months of 2009, only 1.4 percent of national news coverage from television, newspapers, news Web sites, and radio dealt with education. This paucity of coverage is not unique to 2009. In 2008, only 0.7 percent of national news coverage involved education, while 1.0 percent did so in 2007. This makes it difficult for the public to follow the issues at stake in our education debates and to understand how to improve school performance. In the conclusion of this report, they make a number of recommendations to improve the coverage of education. The disappearance of education news coverage is so pervasive and rooted in so many different causes that it will take a concerted effort on the part of all involved (news organizations, education administrators, government leaders, school boards, parents, students, and community leaders) to slow, much less reverse, this trend. Study Methodology is appended. (Contains 4 footnotes.)