Alexander Russo

Since 2008, the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship program has given three education writers a chance to spend a year reporting on a story that they might otherwise never have gotten the chance to write. The results have included books by Sarah Garland, Dana Goldstein, Greg Toppo, and me. This year’s fellows — Sara Mosle, Vanessa […]

States turn to college-prep tests for federal reporting SI&A Cabinet Report: New Hampshire has joined a growing number of states opting to use college-prep entrance exams rather than standardized testing to assess high school juniors’ academic progress and meet federal accountability requirements. Maine, Wisconsin and Kentucky are among the states currently using either the SAT or ACT […]

This weekend’s big AP story about Common Core came off as overly negative to me. I’m a big fan of the AP education team (which on this story included Christine Armario, Donna Gordon Blankinship, and Sally Ho). I am so glad that Armario is back on the beat in LA, and still remember her 2012 FOIA piece […]

What a pleasure listening to American RadioWorks’ new hour-long education documentary, Teaching Teachers, which asks us all to step back from all the debates surrounding and look at what makes good teachers and where they’re making them. Some of the things I learned or was reminded about include that what makes good teaching hard is that […]

Presidents Obama, Bush Praise New Orleans’ Schools Education Week: U.S. presidents past and present are visiting New Orleans this week, marking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and discussing the radical reshaping of public education in the city. See also NYT: George W. Bush, Visiting New Orleans, Praises School Progress Since Katrina  Nearly Half of States Opted to Hit Accountability Snooze […]

“School Starts Sept. 9. Resistance is futile. You will be educated” (Not new but still fun.) BEST WRITING New Yorker: The Life and Death of Jamaica High School ow.ly/Rmtzm Enquirer: First day at one of Camden’s new neighborhood charter schools http://ow.ly/RsHaF   ProPublica: Small Group Goes to Great Lengths to Block Homeschooling Regulation ow.ly/RvnXb   […]

What a lovely and much-appreciated thing to come across education writer Sarah Carr’s reflection about New Orleans-related education journalism the other day as we approach what I hope is the end of a seemingly-endless spate of stories, opeds, and blog posts about the disaster that took place a decade ago and the transformation of the […]

White House Seeks HQT Extension for Teachers in Training EdWeek: Critics consider this a major loophole in the law, although the U.S. Department of Education said earlier this year that there were not many such teachers (about 35,000 in all). This would impact an otherwise steady source of new teachers and the millions of students they serve, most of whom are […]

Hidden in this WSJ blog post (Back to School Shopping Is a Digital Holdout) is the revelation that less than 10 percent of shopping is done online. Sure, the back to school figure is lower — just 6 percent. But the comparable figure is 9 percent for the holiday season: “In 2014, 6% of total retail dollars […]

Education reporters and journalists of all kinds have struggled to figure out what if anything to do with the possibility that public officials might have accessed the infidelity hookup site called Ashley Madison, whose user database was hacked and released to the public. What people do on their private time is nobody’s business, goes the […]