This story also appeared in Mind/Shift Artificial intelligence makes many tasks faster and easier. But a new study suggests that students may learn more when AI makes them slow down. In an experiment involving more than 6,000 middle schoolers in Tennessee, students learned slightly more math when an AI tutor walked them through their mistakes […]
Jill Barshay
What I do: I write the weekly Proof Points column and Hechinger’s weekly newsletter about education research and data. I also pitch in with editing, providing feedback on ideas, drafts and audio features. I love brainstorming headlines.
My background: I joined The Hechinger Report in 2011, after years as a business and economics reporter and a foreign correspondent. I was the New York bureau chief for Marketplace, a national business show aired on public radio stations. I’ve also written for Congressional Quarterly, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Financial Times and appeared on CNN and ABC News. I graduated from Brown University and hold master's degrees from the London School of Economics and Columbia University.
I was a 2016-17 Spencer Education Reporting Fellow at Columbia Journalism School. In 2019, I received the American Educational Research Association’s award for excellence in media reporting on education research. In 2025, I won the Education Writers Association’s Ronald D. Moskowitz Prize for Outstanding Beat Reporting.
I know that teaching is hard: I taught algebra to ninth graders during the 2013-14 school year, and I hope my former students learned to solve for x despite me.
Journalistic ethics: I believe that it’s important to challenge conventional wisdom and educational fads. My favorite stories are the ones where the evidence contradicts my preconceptions. I am always thinking: What if I am wrong? I try to double-check everything, but when I do make mistakes, I am always transparent about them. The most important work I do is documenting successes and failures in the field of education in the hopes that we can learn from them.
My stories are free to read because of donations from readers like you. Whether it’s $15 or $150, consider becoming a member to support our nonprofit newsroom. Every gift helps.
Phone: 212-678-3595
Signal: jillbarshay.35
Bluesky: @jillbarshay.bsky.social
X: @jillbarshay
