Heather Vogell is an investigative reporter for ProPublica in New York City.

Prior to her Spencer Fellowship year she was a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, writing primarily about education and has reported on suspect graduation rates, grade inflation and Georgia’s flawed student data system, in addition to falsified test scores. Her stories with colleagues on the Atlanta cheating scandal have won multiple awards, including the 2012 Hillman Prize for Newspaper Journalism. The stories can be found at: http://www.ajc.com/s/news/school-test-scores/.

During her Spencer Fellowship, she explored how and why the corruption of accountability measures became so prevalent in the years following the passage of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. Her work took her inside the world of the standardized test industry. Her Spencer series, “Testing the Tests” was published in the September 2012 Atlanta Journal Constitution. It won the 2013 SPJ Sigma Delta Chi award in the non-deadline category.

Vogell served on reporting teams that received national recognition for chronicling the arbitrary application of Georgia’s death penalty and documenting child welfare agency failures in the Carolinas. Vogell, who has also written for newspapers in Illinois and Connecticut, earned degrees from Georgetown University and Columbia University. She expects to graduate in May from John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s National Online Master of Public Administration Inspector General Program.