Merrow's Work Exposes the Inside of Education

John Merrow's desire for the public to give attention to education and strive for its improvements--and his commitment to making it happen--makes him more than just a reporter covering a beat. 

Beginning on National Public Radio (NPR) in 1974, Merrow, Ed.D.'73, has spent the past 30 years creating interesting and lively radio and television broadcasts that expose the vital issues lurking below education's surface. Most known for his work on The Merrow Report, as well as The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, in 1995 Merrow established Learning Matters, a nonprofit corporation that produces television, radio, and Web programs.

Merrow's work has not gone unnoticed in the journalism and education fields. During his career, he has received the George Foster Peabody award, 11 consecutive awards from the Education Writers Association, and several Emmy nominations. Despite success that would indicate a lifelong passion for the field, Merrow admits that he didn't realize the direction he would take until he started studying at HGSE in the 1970s. "It was Harvard that put [education and societal issues] together for me and changed my life," Merrow says.

Prior to entering HGSE, Merrow could be described as something of a lost soul. Although he had written for newspapers as early as high school, in college, he became unsure about his goals and dropped out. "I felt I was wasting time and money," he says. "So, I got a job in the Midwest writing for a newspaper."

He eventually returned to college earning his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth. Soon after, Merrow found himself exploring traditional and nontraditional aspects of the U.S. education system. A job teaching high school in New York was followed by one teaching in a federal prison. While there, Merrow says, he was struck by the inmates' intelligence and started to question where things went wrong for them. "I wondered how these guys end up in prison when they should be running stuff," he says. "It is a waste of talent."

Merrow's work at an African American college in the 1970s raised similar disappointments and questions. Why were these young men and women encouraged to work as barbers and key-punch operators when they were capable of so much more?

Relying on his prior work as a newspaper reporter, Merrow began to seek answers to the social issues blanketing him as an educator. His investigation led him to HGSE where, Merrow says, for the first time he noticed a college looking at the big picture of how schools play a role in society.

Upon earning his doctorate, he used his Harvard contacts to land a job working at the Institute for Educational Leadership in Washington D.C., where he developed an educational radio program broadcast on NPR. Merrow still questions the popularity of the two-hour program on school finance. "I'm sure no one listened to it," he says. But it was the start of a long and successful broadcasting career.

In 1974, growing tired of interviewing overly scripted politicians in Washington, Merrow left the confines of the studio to cover a Virginia textbook burning which would end up a turning point in Merrow's career and forever change the way he conducted radio reporting. "I went [to the event] and got the protestors singing[John Denver's] 'Take Me Home Country Roads'," he remembers. "I put together a neat essay that presented several sides to the story and it was good radio."

"Through NPR I could explore the issues," Merrow says, noting that his work at the Institute for Educational Leadership and his teachers at the Ed School, specifically Warren Research Professor Patricia Albjerg Graham, helped him get the important information out in public.

In the news world at the time, the education beat seemed trivial to many reporters and wasn't the biggest page turner. However, Merrow says he never viewed education reporting as a way station. "Because of Harvard," he says, "I saw and still see education as this incredibly large umbrella of anything that has to do with family and children."

Armed with that belief, Merrow's passion for education reporting has never slowed down. Merrow quiets when asked to comment on specific stories he feels have made an impact in education. Instead, he says he hopes his next story is the one with the most impact. When forced to answer, however, he recalls a piece he worked on 23 years ago about education and the juvenile justice system called "Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice." The piece won him a George Polk Award for journalism in 1982.

Merrow also mentions his most recent documentary, Declining by Degree, which--despite his past concentration on issues in K-12 education--investigates higher education in America. The multimedia project released in June 2005 includes a book, website, and video.

"This [project] is having an impact in colleges," Merrow says. "We are in two ways falling short in academic standards and public commitment to access. I wanted to be part of that wake up call that some places seem to be heeding."