Billions in federal economic-stimulus dollars are slated to be spent to help improve public education, but Americans relying on traditional news outlets are likely to find out little, if anything, about what that effort might mean for the schools in their communities, a new report suggests. That's because education coverage of any type barely registered in newspapers and on news Web sites, on television news broadcasts, or on the radio airwaves in the first nine months of this year, according to the report, released this week by the Brookings Institution. Between January and September, education stories made up just 1.4% of all top national news, the study found. That number was even worse in the previous two years. Substantive stories about the main enterprise of K-12 schools--teaching and learning--were even more rare. And coverage of higher education, especially community colleges, was virtually nonexistent. For metropolitan dailies, education coverage has always been a key part of their franchises and will likely remain so, said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, who helped collect and analyze some of the data for the Brookings report. But as newsrooms continue to shrink and lose reporters with deep knowledge and long lists of sources, readers will lose out on in-depth stories. Some observers say the advent of online publications holds a lot of promise for education journalism. Those sites are seen as increasingly helping to fill a void in mainstream reporting by providing in-depth coverage of schools.