Beth Fertig is WNYC’s education reporter, and also covers city affairs. She’s been on staff with the station since 1995, and previously covered City Hall during the Giuliani administration, and the U.S. Senate campaigns of Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton. She also covered transportation and infrastructure. Beth covered education all along, but as the station’s news department grew bigger she was able to spend more time examining the city’s public schools and the reforms of the Bloomberg administration.
"If New York City’s public schools were a city, they’d be one of the ten largest cities in the United States," she says. “With over a million students and another couple of hundred thousand employees the Department of Education is a fascinating microcosm —or macrocosm. And with the federal stimulus dollars, and the Obama Administration’s interest in school reform, there is a lot happening in education right now."
Beth is a New York City native who discovered her love for journalism at her college newspaper at the University of Michigan. She also has a Masters degree in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Her first job after college was as a reporter for a chain of weekly newspapers in Boston. Her boss told her she had a flair for quoting people exactly the way they spoke, so she began interning at the former Monitor Radio network to see if she would enjoy working in radio. She did and she hasn’t looked back since.
Beth is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio. She’s won many local and national awards, including the prestigious Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Award for Broadcast Journalism for her series of reports on an effort to privatize some struggling city schools. She also won an Edward R. Murrow award for an investigation of a subway fire. And she’s won awards from the city's Deadline Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the New York Press Club--which gave her a special award after the 2001 terrorist attacks for a profile on the friendship of two WTC survivors. Beth was also sent on loan to public radio station KRVS in Lafayette, Louisiana in 2005 to cover the cleanup and recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina.
In 2008, Beth took time off from WNYC to write her first book. It’s called "Why cant u teach me 2 read? Three Students and a Mayor Put Our Schools to the Test" and was published in the fall of 2009 by FSG Books. The book grew out of a 2006 WNYC radio series on the low graduation rate for special education students.
We’ve been talking all week about how to make American schools better. Do we increase funding, create better tests or shut down failing schools? This time, we look to learn from two cities experimenting with their own education policy reforms, Baltimore and New York City.
When a school is failing, is it better to invest in improvements or to close the whole thing down?
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, have spent the past eight years betting on the latter. They’ve closed 91 schools since Bloomberg took office in 2002. Most were large, failing high schools with low graduation rates. The city has replaced them with smaller schools that often share the same buildings. So as a school that’s closing stops accepting ninth graders, two or three new schools typically open in the same building by taking about 100 ninth graders each. The new schools then expand each year, taking sophomores and juniors as the old schools phase-out.
The White House has a plan to have states compete for cash prizes for their school systems, funded from $4 billion in stimulus money. It's being called the "Race to the Top." To explain what the program could mean, we speak with Beth Fertig, education reporter at WNYC. She is also the author of the book, “Why cant u teach me 2 read?: Three Students and a Mayor Put Our Schools to the Test.” For a skeptic's view, we also speak to Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform in Washington, D.C.
The show is a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in collaboration with The BBC World Service, New York Times Radio and WGBH Boston.
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