Lynette Duncan didn’t expect to spend 20 hours over the past two weeks digging through a mothballed computer system, trying to retrieve admissions data from 2019. This story also appeared in Mind/Shift Duncan is the director of institutional research at John Brown University, a small Christian university in northwest Arkansas, an hour’s drive from Walmart’s […]
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 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. 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.
Phone: 212-678-3595
Signal: jillbarshay.35
Bluesky: @jillbarshay.bsky.social
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