Too often reporters are thrown onto the education beat with little more preparation than their own school experience. Saying it can help make sense of a bewildering beat, the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, has been founded to offer a wide range of services to working reporters, editors and broadcast producers at Teachers College at Columbia University.

The institute, named in honor of Fred Hechinger, a former education editor and editorial board member of The New York Times who died last fall, will bring together journalists, as well as educators, in a forum, designed to promote understanding, said Gene Maeroff, director of the institute. The institute will be supported, in part, by a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation and by the Teachers College Trustees.

Maeroff, himself a former Times national education correspondent and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, said, "The institute seemed like the natural way to honor him [Hechinger] and the vision he had of trying to make the coverage of education in the media as good as it could possibly be."

This article appeared in the June 21, 2007 edition of the Higher Education.

http://www.diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_7656.shtml

Published Friday, Jun. 22, 2007