Editorial Projects in Education
/OVERVIEW: EPE prioritizes journalists reporting on K-12 education. It also publishes Education Week, chronicler of important education news.
IP TAKE: This funder takes K-12 education seriously and supports professional journalists working on significant education news projects. Applicants will want to make sure their proposed project aligns with Education Week’s editors’ and readers’ priorities, so read them closely to determine whether your work is a fit.
EPE is laser-focused on supporting journalism dedicated to K-12 education. Rather than give grants to PreK-12 education projects, it funds projects that report on this focus area. To secure funding, your work must serve education news. EPE’s also considers eligible for its Chronister Fellowship “freelancers whose primary body of work is for independent news outlets.” In keeping with its commitment to balanced reporting and transparency, EPE welcomes contact from interested applicants.
PROFILE: Based in Bethesda, MD, Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) publishes Education Week, the leading source of “news, information, and analysis on American pre-collegiate education.” With origins in the Sputnik era, the organization began in 1957 as a response to anxiety about American education’s ability to compete globally. EPE initially grew from an experiment by “15 editors of leading university alumni magazines to speak with one voice to their readers as higher education sought to respond to the deep national concerns of that time.”
EPE’s storied past follows the launch of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which EPE’s editors sold to its editors in 1978. With support from the Carnegie Corporation and a handful of other philanthropies, EPE began publishing Education Week in 1981. Since then, waves of K-12 measures known as “the reform movement” helped to establish Education Week as a preeminent source of PreK-12 news.
The EPE seeks to raise “the level of understanding and discourse on critical issues in American education.” EPE continues its dedication to advancing the quality of “K-12 education through a variety of tools both old and new” by gathering, through its Education Week Research Center, authoritative data for the news organization’s “Counts reports and works in tandem with the Education Week newsroom on “data journalism” projects around such issues as corporal punishment, school policing, and cyber charter schools.” It conducts grantmaking through the Chronister Fellowship.
Grants for Journalism and K-12 Education
Education Week Gregory M. Chronister Journalism Fellowship supports journalists reporting on a significant issue in Pre-K-12 education, either national or local. The fellowship honors the now-retired Gregory M. Chronister, who helped lead Education Week as executive editor for 11 years, and as managing editor, associate editor, and Commentary editor for 21 years before that.
Fellows receive up to $10,000 to “produce a deeply reported investigative or enterprise package or series of stories.”
Education Week will publish the finished project.
EPE limits its grantmaking to individual journalists whose primary professional activities “involve reporting, writing, producing, editing, or otherwise preparing the news and other editorial content of independent media organizations, regardless of platform.”
Important Grant Details:
The Chronister Fellowship offers $10,000 per individual. Interested applicants can check their eligibility and further details here, and use the online application form to apply.
For more information about the fellowship, contact Scott Montgomery of Education Week/Editorial Projects in Education, at fellowship@epe.org or (301) 280-3100.
Education Week also maintains a rich presence of more than 1.5 million followers overall on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
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