2015-2016

Vanessa Romo is the lead education reporter for LA School Report, the only online news site dedicated to closely covering the policies and politics of Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in the nation. Over the last two years she’s covered the district’s mismanagement of the iPads-for-all program, controversies over co-location charter school assignments, and the ongoing fight over the different sides of the public school reform debate.

Before coming to the LA School Report, Romo was a multi-platform education reporter for NPR’s Los Angeles affiliate station, KPCC where she won a first place award form the Education Writers Association for a series of stories on the Los Angeles school district’s school discipline policies. That same year she also won a 2013 Edward R. Murrow Award for a radio piece on a child abuse scandal in one of the poorest pockets of the district.

Over a seven-year career in radio she was a business and labor reporter at NPR affiliate KPLU in Seattle and Tacoma, and has contributed to Marketplace and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Code Switch Blog. She also covered the education beat for TakePart.

As an LA native, Romo grew up in a predominantly Latino neighborhood and attended local public schools. She witnessed her classmates struggle to bridge the chasm between the languages spoken at home and language taught in classrooms. This was one factor that inspired her proposal to spend her Spencer year exploring the connection between language, culture and the achievement gap among foreign language speakers through the lens of LA’s pioneering initiatives.

Links:

Spencer Project: “How White Teachers Can Become Culturally Competent,” Slate Magazine, June, 2016. Part of “Tomorrow’s Test” Series. 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/01/09/261044383/los-angeles-tries-a-new-approach-to-discipline-in-schools

http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2012/02/08/4584/parents-and-students-react-miramontes-all-staff-ov/

http://www.scpr.org/programs/madeleine-brand/2012/05/23/26609/black-and-latino-middle-school-students-get-the-bu/

http://laschoolreport.com/lausd-miscalculated-plan-for-affordable-housing-for-teachers/

http://laschoolreport.com/lausd-offering-chromebooks-as-ipad-option-but-not-a-test-run/

And a fun one: http://audio.californiareport.org/archive/R201205181630/e

Sara Mosle currently heads the New York Bureau at Chalkbeat.org. Her Spencer supported project, “Can Good Teaching be Taught?” was published on the cover of The New York Magazine on Sept. 6, 2018.

For 25 years, Sara Mosle has alternated between writing about education and teaching in America’s urban core. In 1990, she joined Teach for America in its first year and taught in public schools in upper Manhattan until 1994. Next, she ran a small after-school program at P.S. 128 and began supplementing her experiences with reporting on education for The New Yorker, where she became a staff writer in 1995. From 1996 to 2000, she was a contributing writer and editor at The New York Times. Since then, she has been a freelance writer for the Times, The Atlantic, and Slate, and is the author of a forthcoming book from Knopf about a 1937 school explosion that killed nearly 300 children in the East Texas oil field.

In 2011, she began teaching middle school at Philip’s Academy, a Newark NJ school that converted to a charter in 2013. That same year, she helped introduce the PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs at her school; her students’ work has appeared on the PBS website and NewsHour. At Philip’s, Sara has served as the faculty liaison to the board of trustees, on the board’s budget task force, and on the school’s strategic planning committee

Sara will devote her Spencer year to delving more deeply into the past, present, and future of the national standards movement, including the recent rollout of the Common Core, which she has observed as a reporter and teacher, and as the parent of a child in New Jersey’s public schools. A native of Texas, where she has lived for much of the last decade, she currently resides in Montclair, NJ and tweets @smosle.

Representative sample of Sara Mosle’s education writing over 20 years:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/11/magazine/refugee-students-boise.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/pity-the-substitute-teacher/497519/

Building Better Teachers (The Atlantic):

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/09/building-better-teachers/375066/ 

The Architect of School Reform Who Turned Against It (The Atlantic):

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-counterrevolutionary/309427/

Steve Brill’s Report Card on School Reform (cover review, The New York Times Book Review):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/class-warfare-by-steven-brill-book-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The Educational Experiment We Really Need (Slate):

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/03/the_educational_experiment_we_really_need.html

How Children Stop Failing (Slate):

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2008/09/how_children_stop_failing.html

The Man Who Transformed American Education (Slate)

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2007/10/the_man_who_transformed_american_education.html

Is There A Better Half? (The New York Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/education/edlife/27twins.html?pagewanted=all

The Vanity of Volunteerism (cover story, The New York Times Magazine) http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/02/magazine/the-vanity-of-volunteerism.html

The Stealth Chancellor (cover story, The New York Times Magazine):

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/31/magazine/the-stealth-chancellor.html

Writing Down Secrets (The New Yorker):

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/09/18/writing-down-secrets

Erin Richards  is currently enterprise reporter at USA Today. After her Spencer Fellowship she returned to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel to cover education in urban and suburban Milwaukee. She was awarded the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Reporting in 2018, where she and her team of interns launched an online and print series called “Lessons Lost.” It examines the academic impact of student turnover between schools in Wisconsin and across the nation.

Richards’ Spencer supported work on Milwaukee’s Voucher Verdict, about what 26 years of vouchers can teach the private-school choice movement, was published in the American Prospect in 2016. Her piece on School vouchers’ impact on Catholic schools, was published in February of 2017 by USA Today.

Before the fellowship, Richards worked as education reporter and part-time news editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from 2007 to 2018, covering suburban government before moving to urban education and state education policy. She also herded the newspaper’s summer interns and has been a journalism instructor at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wis.

Erin’s 2009 series Beyond the Bell, about the tattered link between a quality education and a sound home life, was a Livingston Award finalist. And Building a Better Teacher, a 2010 series she co-authored that took a sweeping look at efforts to change the ways teachers are trained, paid, assessed and dismissed, won first place in the Education Writers Association annual contest.

A lifelong equestrian and travel enthusiast, Erin has written for numerous national equine sports publications, freelanced for Missouri Life and Smithsonian.com, and worked at Budget Travel magazine.

Erin has a master’s degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia Journalism School and an undergraduate degree from Murray State University in Murray, Ken.

You can follow her work at JSOnline and tweet to her at @emrichards.

Spencer Projects:

“Milwaukee’s Voucher Verdict,” winter 2017 issue of American Prospect magazine.

School vouchers’ impact on Catholic schools, USA Today, Feb. 2017

Some of Erin’s favorite pieces include:

A profile of a young student who rose from poverty and abuse to become a pre-professional ballet dancer, after being adopted by his teacher:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/a-dancers-journey-a-leap-of-grit-and-grace-b99414325z1-286813061.html

A twist on the why-is-Finland so successful story, with an eye toward what Wisconsin could learn from the country’s reforms:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/finland-puts-bar-high-for-teachers-kids-wellbeing-qa2tbfr-134546548.html

The “Changing Classrooms” series, detailing innovations reshaping the delivery of education in a time of tight resources:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/laptops-replace-lectures-in-some-area-schools-ru54mlr-149392325.html

An analysis of how the U.S. government’s immigration policies are playing out in the horse industry, which employs tens of thousands of Mexicans at racetracks and show barns around the country:

http://www.chronofhorse.com/article/disappearing-worker