Contributor

Richard Whitmire

Veteran newspaper reporter, Author of "On the Rocketship: How High Performing Charters are Pushing the Envelope"

Richard Whitmire, a veteran newspaper reporter and former editorial writer at USA Today, is the author of the just-published The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District (Jossey Bass: February 8, 2011). He is also the author of Why Boys Fail (AMACOM: January 2010), which explores why boys are falling behind in K-12 schools. He writes the Why Boys Fail blog for Education Week and comments on urban school reform issues at thebeeeater.com.

Whitmire’s commentaries appear frequently in publications including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. For the boys book, he was interviewed by both Good Morning America and Fox & Friends. Education Next featured a reading from his book and a debate between Whitmire and a skeptic of the “boy troubles,” and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof made his book the centerpiece of a Sunday column.

Whitmire is the immediate past president of the National Education Writers Association. In 2009 he was the Project Journalist for the Broad Prize for Urban Education.