EWA board member Stephanie Banchero accepts position at WSJ

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 31, 2010 --EWA board member Stephanie Banchero will join the Wall Street Journal as its new national education reporter.

Banchero, a fixture in Chicago journalism, covered state and national education issues including testing, achievement gap and teacher quality for the Chicago Tribune for the past 13 years.  Her last day at the Tribune is Friday, April 2.

Her work has shown the impact of the federal No Child Left Behind Act on students and teachers.

Banchero will assume responsibilities at the Wall Street Journal Monday, April 19 and initially will work out of New York City, but later will report from Chicago.

She joined the Tribune in 1997 and received numerous awards for her reporting including winning second place in EWA’s contest for her 2007 series of articles chronicling one teacher’s effort to raise student achievement in a perennially underperforming school in the wake of a federal takeover “The Toughest Assignment.”  

In 2006, she won a first place feature award from EWA for her magazine profile of a father struggling with the care and education of his children and a 2004 first place award from EWA and the Missouri School of Journalism for her three-part series on a student transferring from school to school. Both years, she was a finalist for EWA’s Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting.

Prior to joining the Tribune, Banchero worked at the Charlotte Observer, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Salt Lake Tribune.

She has a master’s degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and spent the 2008-2009 academic year as a John S. Knight Fellow in Professional Journalism at Stanford University, studying school reform, early childhood education and teacher preparation.

Banchero serves as secretary of EWA’s board and is nominated to be vice president.

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The Education Writers Association (EWA) is the national professional organization of education reporters.