Sara Mosle currently heads the New York Bureau at Chalkbeat.org. Her Spencer supported project, “Can Good Teaching be Taught?” was published on the cover of The New York Magazine on Sept. 6, 2018.

For 25 years, Sara Mosle has alternated between writing about education and teaching in America’s urban core. In 1990, she joined Teach for America in its first year and taught in public schools in upper Manhattan until 1994. Next, she ran a small after-school program at P.S. 128 and began supplementing her experiences with reporting on education for The New Yorker, where she became a staff writer in 1995. From 1996 to 2000, she was a contributing writer and editor at The New York Times. Since then, she has been a freelance writer for the Times, The Atlantic, and Slate, and is the author of a forthcoming book from Knopf about a 1937 school explosion that killed nearly 300 children in the East Texas oil field.

In 2011, she began teaching middle school at Philip’s Academy, a Newark NJ school that converted to a charter in 2013. That same year, she helped introduce the PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs at her school; her students’ work has appeared on the PBS website and NewsHour. At Philip’s, Sara has served as the faculty liaison to the board of trustees, on the board’s budget task force, and on the school’s strategic planning committee

Sara will devote her Spencer year to delving more deeply into the past, present, and future of the national standards movement, including the recent rollout of the Common Core, which she has observed as a reporter and teacher, and as the parent of a child in New Jersey’s public schools. A native of Texas, where she has lived for much of the last decade, she currently resides in Montclair, NJ and tweets @smosle.

Representative sample of Sara Mosle’s education writing over 20 years:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/11/magazine/refugee-students-boise.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/pity-the-substitute-teacher/497519/

Building Better Teachers (The Atlantic):

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/09/building-better-teachers/375066/ 

The Architect of School Reform Who Turned Against It (The Atlantic):

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-counterrevolutionary/309427/

Steve Brill’s Report Card on School Reform (cover review, The New York Times Book Review):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/class-warfare-by-steven-brill-book-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The Educational Experiment We Really Need (Slate):

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/03/the_educational_experiment_we_really_need.html

How Children Stop Failing (Slate):

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2008/09/how_children_stop_failing.html

The Man Who Transformed American Education (Slate)

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2007/10/the_man_who_transformed_american_education.html

Is There A Better Half? (The New York Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/education/edlife/27twins.html?pagewanted=all

The Vanity of Volunteerism (cover story, The New York Times Magazine) http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/02/magazine/the-vanity-of-volunteerism.html

The Stealth Chancellor (cover story, The New York Times Magazine):

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/31/magazine/the-stealth-chancellor.html

Writing Down Secrets (The New Yorker):

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/09/18/writing-down-secrets