Alexander Russo, a resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., is a well-known freelance education writer and blogger. A former US Senate education staffer, Russo’s work has appeared in Slate, Miller-McCune, The Washington Monthly, and the Huffington Post. His education blog, This Week In Education, is sponsored by Scholastic Administrator magazine and was recently named one of the best education blogs in the nation by the Washington Post. His blog focused on Chicago schools, District 299, is sponsored by the Chicago Tribune.
Russo signed a contract for his nonfiction book about the effort to fix one of the worst high schools in country, South Central Los Angeles’ Locke High School. The as-yet untitled book covers the three-year period (2007-2010) during which the neighborhood high school was taken away from the local school district, handed over to a nonprofit education group called Green Dot, and “turned around” with a largely new set of teachers — a controversial process that President Obama has made as one of his top education priorities.The effort at Locke high school has been covered in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and on Nightline. A former U.S. Senate aide, Russo is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Slate and the Washington Monthly and whose blogs are sponsored by the Chicago Tribune and Scholastic. Jossey-Bass has scheduled his book for publication in April 2011.
Reviews of “Stray Dogs, Saints and Saviors.”
A Gripping Tale of a Bad School, review by Jay Mathews, Washington Post
Published work:
“Stray Dogs, Saints and Saviors: Fighting for the Soul of America’s Toughest High School”
Jossey-Bass Publishers, March 2011
“Delivering” School Reform
Teaching state education agencies the neglected art of implementation
Harvard Education Letter
Charters and Unions
What’s the future for this unorthodox relationship?
Harvard Education Letter
Extreme School Makeovers
Miller McCune