In New Orleans, a few hundred dollars could once help a family buy a “gifted” designation for their preschooler. As an education reporter for the city’s Times-Picayune newspaper several years ago, I discovered that there was a two-tiered system for determining whether 3-year-olds met that mark, which, in New Orleans, entitled them to gifted-only prekindergarten […]
Sarah Carr
What I do: I write about early childhood education.
My background: I have been an education journalist since 1999, when I got my first staff writing job at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Since then, I’ve written a book, “Hope Against Hope,” about charter schools in New Orleans; run a training fellowship for recent graduates of the Columbia School of Journalism; and led an investigative education reporting team at The Boston Globe. I lead the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at Columbia University, where I get to work with journalists from across the country on ambitious reporting projects. I started contributing to Hechinger in 2010, where I’ve done a mix of reporting and editing over the last 15 years. I try to prioritize stories that show how policies and practices affect those who are at the bottom of the power structure, and strive to elevate child, parent and teacher voices. One recent story on how many parents of premature babies miss out on information about critical therapies their children are entitled to helped prompt the state of Illinois to create a new law requiring hospitals to distribute detailed information on the therapies to many more families.
Journalistic ethics: I have been committed throughout my career to featuring the voices of children and those from historically marginalized backgrounds. This takes a special kind of care, and I always start with a mentor’s maxim, borrowed from the medical field: “First do no harm.” As a writer for The Hechinger Report, I also follow its code of ethics.
