Liz Willen is editor of The Hechinger Report and director of The Hechinger Institute. She is a former senior writer focused on higher education at Bloomberg Markets magazine. Willen spent the bulk of her career covering the New York City public school system for Newsday. She has won numerous prizes for education coverage and shared the 2005 George Polk Award for health reporting with two Bloomberg colleagues. Willen is a graduate of Tufts University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and an active New York City public school parent.
Jill Barshay, a contributing editor, has been a radio and print reporter for two decades. She was the New York bureau chief for Marketplace, a national business show on public radio stations. Barshay previously worked at Congressional Quarterly, The Asian Wall Street Journal and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She has also written for The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist and The Washington Post, and appeared on CNN, ABC News and C-SPAN. A graduate of Brown University, the London School of Economics and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Barshay spent the 2010-11 academic year as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in economics and business journalism at Columbia.
Sarah Butrymowicz is a staff writer. She received a bachelor’s degree from Tufts University and an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. As an undergraduate, she worked as a news editor and managing editor for the Tufts Daily, and she interned at both the Green Bay Press-Gazette in Wisconsin and USA Today.
Sarah Carr has written about education for the last 12 years, reporting on battles over school vouchers, efforts to educate China’s massive population of migrant children, and the explosion of charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. Carr has worked as a staff writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. She is the author of Hope Against Hope, a nonfiction account of New Orleans schools, which will be published by Bloomsbury in 2013. She reported and researched the book in 2010-11 with the support of a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at Columbia University. Carr is a graduate of Williams College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Janet Ellis is the Hechinger Institute’s business manager. She manages all financial matters for the Institute and serves as a liaison between the Institute, Teachers College and funders. Included in her role are responsibilities in human resources, project management and operations. Prior to joining Hechinger in 2009, Ellis worked for 15 years with senior executives at Morgan Stanley. She has degrees from the University of North Texas and Texas State University in music and music education.
Sarah Garland is a staff writer. She has written for The New York Times, Newsweek, Newsday, The New York Sun, The New York Post, The Village Voice, New York Magazine and Marie Claire. She was a 2009 recipient of the Spencer Fellowship in Education Reporting at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and received her master’s degree from New York University as a Henry M. MacCracken fellow. Her first book, Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation and Youth Violence Are Changing America’s Suburbs, was published by Nation Books in July 2009.
Joanne Jacobs is a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report and the author of the Community College Spotlight blog. Formerly an award-winning editorial writer and op-ed columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, Jacobs started joannejacobs.com, one of the first education blogs, in 2001. She is the author a book on a college-prep charter school for Hispanic students, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). A graduate of Stanford University, Jacobs has freelanced for newspapers, magazines and websites.
Barbara Kantrowitz, a contributing editor, is an award-winning magazine editor and writer. She worked at Newsweek for nearly 25 years in the magazine’s society section, where she wrote and edited dozens of cover stories on health, education, religion and women’s issues. Kantrowitz has also worked at People, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday and The Hartford Courant, and has freelanced for many national publications. She is a graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Jon Marcus, a contributing editor, is U.S. higher-education correspondent for the Times (U.K.) Higher Education magazine. He has also written about higher education for Washington Monthly, the Boston Globe, and other magazines and newspapers, including CrossTalk, the journal of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. A former editor of Boston magazine, Marcus holds a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor’s degree from Bates College. He teaches journalism at Boston College and Boston University.
Davin McHenry is the news editor and web producer, responsible for managing The Hechinger Report website. As web editor of the Bakersfield Californian, he led the newsroom in changing to a web-first approach and launched the breaking-news blog that became one of the most popular parts of the paper’s site. McHenry also served as assistant city editor and covered county government for the Bakersfield Californian. Prior to that, he was a reporter for The Hanford (CA) Sentinel. McHenry holds a B.A. in dramatic arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Nick Pandolfowrites for The Hechinger Report. A native of New York City, he majored in education at Eugene Lang College and later taught ESL for four years in New York, China and South Korea. Before entering Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Pandolfo spent a year backpacking across Asia and Australia, photographing and writing stories about ferry travel to China and road-tripping across an Australian desert. He has since covered education as an intern for City Hall News/The Capitol, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, WSJ.com, Kaiser Health News and Forbes.com.
Salina Sanchez is the Hechinger Institute’s events & operations associate. She joined the Hechinger Institute in August 2007 after graduating from SUNY Purchase. She majored in literature and founded a literary magazine while at Purchase. A native of the Bronx, Sanchez is the primary contact person for journalists and presenters, handling everything from travel arrangements to reimbursement checks. She is pursuing an M.A. in English at New York University.
Justin Snider is a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report. He is an advising dean at Columbia University, where he also teaches undergraduate writing. Snider’s research interests include school reform, press coverage of education, urban politics, mayoral control and transatlantic relations. Previously, he taught high school English and advised student publications in the United States, Austria and Hong Kong. A California native, Snider is a graduate of Amherst College, the University of Chicago, the University of Vienna and Harvard University.
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