2010-2011

Greg Toppo, a former senior editor at Inside Higher Ed, was previously the national education reporter at USA Today from 2002 to 2018, and at The Associated Press from 2000 to 2002. He served as Education Writers Association president in 2017. He currently serves on the Spencer Education Fellowship Board.

Toppo is the author of two books on education, The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter (St. Martin’s Press, 2015), a book he researched and reported during his Spencer Fellowship year, 2011. His second book is The Trust Machine, co-authored with educator James Tracy, looking at how AI, automation and machine learning are changing the American high school (forthcoming in 2020 from MIT Press).

A graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., Toppo taught in both public and private schools for eight years before moving into journalism. His first job was with the Santa Fe New Mexican, a 50,000-circulation daily. He worked for four years as a wire service reporter with the Associated Press, first in Baltimore and then in Washington, D.C., where he became the AP’s national K-12 education writer.

Greg lives west of Baltimore with his wife, Julie, and their two daughters.

Published  Work:

Investigative series on standardized tests

USAToday, March 2011

Dana Goldstein is  national education reporter at The New York Times. Prior to that she was a reporter at The Marshall Project, a fellow at the New American Fellowship, and an associate editor at The Daily Beast, where she reported on news, politics and social justice.

As a Spencer Fellow, Goldstein reported on Obama administration education reforms in Colorado and New Jersey. Her work, “The Test Generation,”  appeared in The American Prospect. “What Newark Schools Need,” appeared in The Nation.

Goldstein also wrote a book proposal during her Spencer year that was published by Doubleday as The Teacher Wars: The History of the Nation’s Most Embattled Profession, and hailed by the New York Times as one of the year’s 100 best books.

Previously, Dana was a staff writer and associate editor at The American Prospect in Washington, D.C., where she was the education beat reporter and covered social policy, both as a print magazine feature writer and daily on the Prospect’s award-winning blog, TAPPED. She covered the 2008 Democratic primary and general election, reporting from the Iowa caucus and both parties’ conventions.

She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and C-SPAN, and written for The Nation, The New Republic, Business Week, Double X/Slate, and In These Times. She is a graduate of Brown University and traces her passion for education writing back to her 13 years of public school in Ossining, New York.

Dana Goldstein’s lively book explores the roots of our current controversies in the history of the last two centuries of teaching in America. Goldstein, a freelance education writer for Slate, The Atlantic, and the Nation.

 

Published Work:

The Test Generation
American Prospect, April 11, 2011
What Newark  Schools Need
The Nation, January 2011
Grading Waiting for Superman
The Nation, October 2010
The Education Wars
The American Prospect
Disability Advocates Skeptical of Sarah Palin
The Daily Beast
The Charter School Barter
The American Prospect
Can Mayor Bloomberg Pay Poor People to “Be Good?”
The American Prospect
The Innovation Administration
The American Prospect
Shaking Up Suburbia
The American Prospect
Testing Testing
The American Prospect
Meet the New Union Bosses…Women
The Daily Beast

Sarah Carr is an editor at The Boston Globe, heading a team of investigative education reporters. Prior to that, she directed the Teacher Project at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, a reporting and mentoring project dedicated to in depth, enterprise and investigative education journalism whose work was published in Slate and other publications around the U.S.. Carr has also served for many years as a contributing editor and writer at the Hechinger Report.

As a Spencer Fellow, Carr reported on the explosion of charter schools in New Orleans, resulting in her book, Hope Against Hope, an insightful nonfiction account of New Orleans schools post Hurricane-Katrina published by Bloomsbury.

Sarah has contributed to the Atlantic magazine, Slate, New Orleans public radio and numerous other media outlets, winning several national awards. Before coming back to New York as a Spencer Fellow, Carr served as education reporter at the New Orleans Picayune, and before that education reporter at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

She is a graduate of Williams College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Published Work:

The Challenge of Choice, Winner in the 2010 Education Writers Association contest
The Times-Picayune
New Orleans charter schools work to sustain teachers’ energy, results
The Times-Picayune
Behind knock-out of principal lies a sad tale
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Confucius Reenters China’s Schools to Parry Western Ways
The Christian Science Monitor
Lost in Transition: Educating the children of China’s migrant workers
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and The San Francisco Chronicle
Charter schools face unique challenges education students with special needs
The Times-Picayune