Too often reporters are thrown onto the education beat with little more preparation than their own school experience. Saying it can help make sense of a bewildering beat, the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, has been founded to offer a wide range of services to working reporters, editors and broadcast producers at Teachers College at Columbia University.
The institute, named in honor of Fred Hechinger, a former education editor and editorial board member of The New York Times who died last fall, will bring together journalists, as well as educators, in a forum, designed to promote understanding, said Gene Maeroff, director of the institute. The institute will be supported, in part, by a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation and by the Teachers College Trustees.
Maeroff, himself a former Times national education correspondent and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, said, “The institute seemed like the natural way to honor him [Hechinger] and the vision he had of trying to make the coverage of education in the media as good as it could possibly be.”
Getting Up to Speed
