Patrick Wall is currently the Newark NJ senior reporter at Chalkbeat.org, a bureau he launched and directs. Previously he was a senior reporter at Chalkbeat New York, the education news website. He covers the 1.1 million-student New York City school system, and has written about special educationstruggling schools, and school segregation, among other topics. In 2015, as an Equity Reporting Project fellow, he wrote a three-part series about the city’s efforts to turn around a low-performing high school. In 2016, he won a national beat reporting award from the Education Writers Association.

Previously, Patrick covered the South Bronx for DNAinfo, a local news website. Before that, he taught fourth-grade at an elementary school on Chicago’s South Side through Teach For America.

Patrick used the Spencer fellowship year to delve into the current state of school segregation. He focused on white privilege in New York City, where the schools are among the most segregated in the country. His work, “The Privilege of Choice,” was published in The Atlantic in April, 2017.