2009-2010

Peg Tyre is a longtime education journalist and the best-selling author of two books on education. She is also the director of strategy for The Edwin Gould Foundation, which invests in organizations that get low-income students to and through college. Tyre is currently at work on a book about literacy.

She currently serves on the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship Board.

During her Spencer Fellowship year, Peg worked on the book proposal that was published by Holt as The Good School: How to Get the Children We Love The Education They Deserve, a parent-friendly book that summarizes the best education research for parents of pre-k to 8th grade kids.

Tyre left Newsweek magazine in May 2008 after seven years of covering education and social issues. She is the author of a New York Times best seller, The Trouble with Boys (Crown 2008), which grew out of a Newsweek cover story on the achievement gap between boys and girls. Tyre is also the co-author of Two Seconds Under the World (Crown 1995) and the winner of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for her work at Newsday where she worked from 1989-95. She was an on-air correspondent for CNN from 1995 to 1999.

Published Work:

The Writing Revolution
The Atlantic
The Good School
August 16, 2011, Henry Holt Publishers
A’s for Good Behavior
The New York Times Week in Review
How will the Common Core Initiative Impact the Testing Industry?
Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Watch How You Hold That Crayon
The New York Times
The Writing Revolution
Atlantic Monthly
Winner of EWA Magazine Feature, First Prize

Elizabeth Green  is co-founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Chalkbeat. She previously co-founded GothamSchools, now Chalkbeat New York.

Elizabeth has also written about education issues for The New York Times Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and many other publications.

As a Spencer Fellow, Green published a cover story for The New York Times Magazine in March 2010 titled “Building a Better Teacher.” She later signed a book contract with W.W. Norton for a nonfiction book about teaching based on her widely read piece, which was the culmination of her fellowship.

Green’s  book Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone), was released in 2014, and hailed by the NY Times as one of the year’s top 100 books. Her chapter on math was excerpted in the July 27, 2014 issue of New York Times Sunday Magazine  and was praised by Joe Nocera in a recent column.

In 2011, she was awarded an Abe Journalism Fellowship to study education in Japan.

A 2006 graduate of Harvard University, Green joined the board of the Education Writers Association in January. She served as the lead education reporter of The New York Sun from June 2007 until it closed in September 2008. Before that she covered education for U.S. News & World Report, focusing on the impact of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Green used her fellowship to explore the researchers, teachers, and school leaders who delve inside the “black box” of the classroom and study instructional practice.

Sarah Garland is executive editor at The Hechinger Report.

She started out in journalism reporting on murders and mayhem in New York City for New York Newsday and the New York Times, before joining the New York Sun, where she discovered a passion for the education beat.

As a Spencer Fellow, she wrote Divided We Fail (Beacon Press), a narrative of the landmark enactment and repeal of court-ordered school desegregation in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.

In 2009, Garland published her second book, Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation and Youth Violence Are Changing American Suburbs (Nation Books, July 2009)., about Salvadoran street gangs in the Long Island suburbs. The book was a finalist for the Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Garland is a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul and has a joint master’s degree in journalism and Latin American studies from New York University.

She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.