The biggest regret from a 41-year career in education reporting (and a lot more)
John Merrow is an award-winning broadcast journalist who spent 41 years covering public education in the United States for PBS. He retired last year and retired from his Learning Matters production company (which was taken over by Education Week.) In the following piece, Merrow talks about his biggest regret of his career and some things he learned along the way. The interview was conducted by James Harvey, executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable. He helped write the seminal 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” and is the author or co-author of four books and dozens of articles on education.
By James Harvey
By the time he retired last October, John Merrow had had a 41-year bird’s eye view of American schools as a journalist with NPR and PBS NewsHour. Armed with a doctorate in education from Harvard, he’d served as a critical school friend throughout his career, pointing out the flaws in the thinking of defenders and critics of public education alike.
In just a single example of his doggedness in pursuing a story, Merrow once spent six years following superintendent David Hornbeck around Philadelphia for the raw material on a documentary about life as an urban school superintendent, titled, appropriately enough, “The Toughest Job in America.” Merrow, who founded the production company, Learning Matters and won numerous awards in journalism including Emmy nominations, prestigious Peabody Awards, and the Harold W. McGraw Prize in Education, was once hailed by Jim Lehrer, former host of PBS NewsHour, as “quite simply, the leading education journalist in America.”
He was in a reflective mood when he met with the National Superintendents Roundtable late last year, engagingly putting on a PBS hat to play the role of his successor interviewing him about what he’d learned over four decades — and then removing the hat to respond.
Q) What’s your big takeaway after 41 years?
A) Parents used to send kids to school because that’s where the knowledge was. They were also interested in socialization and custodial care. That’s all The biggest regret from a 41-year career in education reporting (and a lot more) - The Washington Post:
