2008 Fellowship Recipients Announced

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Arlene Morgan, Associate Dean, 212-854-5377 or am494@Columbia.edu

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Announces the Recipients of the
2008 Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship

March 31, 2008 -- Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism today announced that three veteran journalists have been named as the school’s first Spencer Education Journalism Fellows. Each reporter will receive a $75,000 stipend to begin work next fall on a major education project that requires an academic year residency at the school.

The Spencer Foundation funded the program as part of its commitment to support the high quality investigation of education that it funds through research projects, fellowship and training programs.

Alexander Russo, Nancy Solomon and Claudia Wallis won the fellowships based on “the strength of proposals that combined a unique blend of serious resident university research and study with the execution of an important work of education journalism,” said Arlene Morgan, associate dean who directed the fellowship competition.

Russo, a resident of Brooklyn, New York is a well-known freelance education writer, editor, and blogger. His work has appeared in Slate, The Washington Monthly, the Huffington Post, the Britannica Blog, The National Review Online, Chicago Magazine, Chicago Sun-Times, Indianapolis Monthly, and numerous education, urban affairs, and policy publications. He is a contributing editor for Catalyst Magazine, which sponsors his Chicago schools blog, “District 299.” Russo has won numerous awards for another blog, “This Week in Education,” which is sponsored by Scholastic Administrator Magazine where he is a consulting editor. Russo will use his fellowship to follow the first year of a teacher-led effort to take over a troubled Los Angeles high school and turn it into an independent charter school.

Nancy Solomon, a resident of South Orange, New Jersey, is an award-winning independent radio reporter and producer for National Public Radio. She earned a masters degree in 1986 from the journalism school and worked for several California daily newspapers before moving to radio. Solomon won the 2005 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for a story that examined the collapse of New Jersey’s state child welfare agency. Solomon said she would use her year to produce an in-depth multi-part radio series that would explore the ways race, socio-economic status, youth culture and pedagogy contribute to the minority educational achievement gap.

Claudia Wallis, of Pelham, New York, is currently a contributor to Time Magazine. She has worked at Time as a staff reporter and editor, producing 35 cover stories reporting on education, science, health, psychology, child and family issues. From 1995 to 2003, Wallis served as the founding editor for Time for Kids magazines and then as editor-at-large from 2003 to 2007. A two-time National Magazine Award finalist, Wallis plans to examine how the rising number of students diagnosed across the spectrum of autism disorders is challenging educators and the solvency of school districts.

Morgan said the Fellows would use the fall semester to take courses at Teachers College, the School of Journalism and other university programs relevant to their projects. In the spring they will use their grant to report and write their stories. Throughout the year, the Fellows will be invited to work with a Journalism School professor who will serve as an editor to prepare the work for publication or airing.

Morgan said that one of the features of the fellowship is the requirement to publish the results of the year’s work either in a newspaper, magazine, book or, in Solomon’s case, in a radio series.

Journalism Professor LynNell Hancock, a nationally known expert on covering education, children and families, will serve as executive director of the program. Hancock noted that the fellowship “is designed to elevate the level of education reporting by giving writers the time and resources they so desperately need in today’s environment of tight deadlines and space limitations to produce a long-form work of lasting value that will trigger a national conversation on the status of education in America.”