Jill Barshay

Jill Barshay, a senior reporter at The Hechinger Report, writes the weekly “Proof Points” column about education research and data, covering a range of topics from early childhood to higher education. She taught algebra to ninth-graders for the 2013-14 school year. Previously, Barshay was the New York bureau chief for Marketplace, a national business show on public radio stations. She has also written for Congressional Quarterly, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Financial Times, and appeared on CNN and ABC News.

Work by Jill Barshay

From the Field

The Complexities of Tackling Teacher Shortages With Pay Incentives

Authored byJill Barshay

School leaders nationwide often complain about how hard it is to hire teachers and how teaching job vacancies have mushroomed. Fixing the problem is not easy…

From the Field

How Covid Shrunk Enrollment in STEM Courses

Authored byJill Barshay

Universities, philanthropies, and even the U.S. government are all trying to encourage more young Americans to pursue careers in STEM, an acronym for science…

From the Field

New Report Finds Few Federally-Funded Education Innovations Helped Students

Authored byJill Barshay

Education journalism is chock full of stories touting some brand new idea that could fix schools. Artificial intelligence is the current obsession.

From the Field

Building Knowledge Builds Readers

Authored byJill Barshay

A growing chorus of education researchers, pundits and “science of reading” advocates are calling for young children to be taught more about the world around…

From the Field

The Power of Students Studying Their Mistakes

Authored byJill Barshay

For a few weeks in the spring of 2016, nearly all the eighth graders at a small public school affiliated with Columbia University agreed to stay late after…

From the Field

New Reading Research Shows the Power of Connecting Letters and Sounds

Authored byJill Barshay

Educators around the country have embraced the “science of reading” in their classrooms, but that doesn’t mean there’s a truce in the reading wars. In fact…

From the Field

School Attendance Percentages Can Mask Chronic Absenteeism

Authored byJill Barshay

Why is it that only 15 percent of public school leaders say they’re “extremely concerned” about student absences, according to a recent Education Department…

From the Field

What the New PISA Results Really Say About U.S. Schools

Authored byJill Barshay

Numbers don’t lie, right? But they also don’t always tell the whole story. That’s the case with the most recent results from a key global education test…