2012-2013

Heather Vogell is an investigative reporter for ProPublica in New York City.

Prior to her Spencer Fellowship year she was a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, writing primarily about education and has reported on suspect graduation rates, grade inflation and Georgia’s flawed student data system, in addition to falsified test scores. Her stories with colleagues on the Atlanta cheating scandal have won multiple awards, including the 2012 Hillman Prize for Newspaper Journalism. The stories can be found at: http://www.ajc.com/s/news/school-test-scores/.

During her Spencer Fellowship, she explored how and why the corruption of accountability measures became so prevalent in the years following the passage of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. Her work took her inside the world of the standardized test industry. Her Spencer series, “Testing the Tests” was published in the September 2012 Atlanta Journal Constitution. It won the 2013 SPJ Sigma Delta Chi award in the non-deadline category.

Vogell served on reporting teams that received national recognition for chronicling the arbitrary application of Georgia’s death penalty and documenting child welfare agency failures in the Carolinas. Vogell, who has also written for newspapers in Illinois and Connecticut, earned degrees from Georgetown University and Columbia University. She expects to graduate in May from John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s National Online Master of Public Administration Inspector General Program.

 

Ann Hulbert is literary editor at Atlantic Magazine.

Prior to her Spencer Fellowship year, she served as contributing editor at Slate, where she was literary editor. As Slate’s Sandbox columnist, she focused on child-rearing and education-related issues. She was also a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, regularly producing “The Way We Live Now” columns. She wrote a cover piece about child prodigies and another about Chinese educational reform.

Hulbert used her Spencer Fellowship year to learn about community colleges and the challenges of boosting graduation rates, focusing on the failures of remedial education and on current reform efforts. Her work was published in The Atlantic, in the January/February 2014 edition, called “How to Escape the Community College Trap.” 

She began her career at The New Republic, where as a senior editor she assigned and edited reviews and essays in the “back of the book” and wrote regularly for both the literary and political sections of the magazine for sixteen years. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The American Scholar, the TLS, as well as other newspapers and magazines.

Hulbert is the author of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children and before that, The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford.

Published work:

Can China Re-Educate Its Education System? New York Times Magazine cover story
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/magazine/01China.t.html?pagewanted=all

Can Genius Really Be Cultivated? New York Times Magazine cover story
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/magazine/20prodigies.html?pagewanted=all

Hear the Tiger Mother Roar, review of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/01/hear_the_tiger_mother_roar.html

What Every Child Needs, New York Times Magazine “Way We Live Now” column
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/magazine/28wwln-lede-t.html?pagewanted=print

What Troublemakers Can Teach Us
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/sandbox/2007/11/what_troublemakers_can_teach_us.html

Boy Problems
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03WWLN.html

The New College Try
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/sandbox/2005/09/the_new_college_try.html

Liz Bowie is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, where she has worked for more than a decade covering education.  Her work has chronicled the waves of reform in the Baltimore city schools, from charters to choice. Over the course of a year she documented the lives of two homeless boys as they tried to finish high school, writing the series “On Their Own,” which won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists. More recently, she has turned her attention to the struggles of suburban schools now facing urban issues.

As a Spencer fellow, Bowie researched the growing role of the College Board in public education, particularly in the explosion of Advanced Placement which has become a common curriculum for the nation’s high achieving students.

Liz Bowie’s first story in an ongoing series on Advanced Placement results in Maryland, based on her Spencer Fellow reporting: Maryland’s AP tests under the microscope. This story won first prize for a single story in a large newspaper from the 2014 Education Writer’s Association awards.

Her second story chronicles reactions from parents and educators to the tests.

More published work:

Turnaround of a Suburban High School

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-08-27/news/bs-md-co-dundalk-high-turnaround-20110607_1_dundalk-high-school-troubled-school-new-teachers

Textbooks and curriculum
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-11-10/news/bs-md-co-textbook-purchases-20111110_1_curriculum-language-arts-textbooks

Science education
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-03-09/news/bs-md-science-education-20110308_1_science-education-national-assessment-urban-districts

On Their Own
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-ontheirown,1,2424750.special