2008-2009

Claudia Wallis is an education reporter specializing in the science of learning for The Hechinger Report, a health columnist for Scientific American, and an award winning reporter for Time Magazine where she founded Time for Kids and served as editor-at-large from 2003 to 2007.

She teaches journalism at SUNY Stony Brook University, and mentored the Teacher Project Fellows in 2017 and 2018 at Columbia Journalism School.

A two-time National Magazine Award finalist, Wallis used her Spencer Fellowship year in 2008 and 2009 to examine how the rising number of students diagnosed across the spectrum of autism disorders is challenging educators and the solvency of school districts. Her work resulted in a series of articles for The New York Times and Time Magazine.

Nancy Solomon is managing editor of New Jersey Public Radio, which won a 2014 Peabody Award for Chris Christie, White House Ambitions and the Abuse of Power. She serves on the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship Board.

As a member of the first cohort of Spencer Fellows, Solomon produced “Mind the Gap: Why Good Schools are Failing Black Students” for which she won a Peabody Award. The project included an hour-long radio documentary, a two-part series on National Public Radio, a podcast and a website with audio slide shows.  The documentary looked beyond test scores to examine why so many black kids are falling behind by visiting preschools, homes, classrooms and lunch-time student hangouts.

Solomon began her career in radio at KLCC in Eugene, Oregon, in 1995. She moved to New Jersey in 2001 and has been covering the state ever since. She has produced more than a hundred stories for NPR.

Solomon earned a master’s degree in 1986 from Columbia Journalism School and worked for several California daily newspapers before moving to radio. She won the 2005 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for a story that examined the collapse of New Jersey’s state child welfare agency.

Long before becoming a journalist, Solomon was the first woman ever hired to work on the county road crew in Portland, Oregon.

Click here for more of Nancy Solomon’s work on NPR

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