IndyKids reporters interviewed Amy Zimmer, the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York, back in the fall of 2024 about her career in education reporting.
AIDA: What inspired you to become a journalist?
AMY ZIMMER: I went to high school in Queens—a really big high school—and we had a newspaper and a journalism program. When I was a junior, I took a journalism class and worked on my high school newspaper, and then, when I was a senior, I became the co-editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper, and I really loved it back then. Back then, we literally had to print out the articles and cut them and paste them onto big sheets of paper, and then take those big sheets of paper to a printing press in Manhattan, and they would print out our newspapers.
I was pretty shy when I was in high school, and I loved how journalism gave me an excuse to talk to people. I was really curious, and I always wanted to learn about other people and places and things, and I felt like this gave me sort of my key to do that. I could talk to anyone. I could go anywhere, because I was writing a story about it. I could ask anything. And it was really empowering.
I went to college, and I didn’t do any journalism, because I thought, “Oh, that was something I did in high school,” and I wanted to learn new things, but it always was sort of inside me that I had enjoyed that experience in my life. And so, then, after college, I did a whole variety of jobs. I worked in museums. I taught math. But I always thought about what made me happy, and it was actually working on a newspaper. So, eventually, I went to graduate school for journalism, and I’ve been doing local reporting for the past 20 years.
EM: What got you into education reporting, specifically, as your beat?
AMY ZIMMER: There were many reasons. Number one, I grew up in New York, graduated from New York City public schools, [and] going through the system myself, I was always curious about it. And then the other part of it, I grew up in a household of educators. My mom was a teacher initially, and then, later, was a guidance counselor in New York City. My brother taught, and so I always cared about it. I was [also] lucky in that when I started working full time as a journalist, I covered everything. I covered crime, I covered fires, I covered city politics, and I kept coming back to education. I felt like the stories about schools and young people were the most important to me. And I also thought it’s a place where you can have a lot of impact.
At Chalkbeat, we do a lot of things. Number one, we cover daily news, the announcements from the chancellor or the mayor that affect the school system. Number two, we’re very equity-focused, and part of that means giving people information they need to navigate the system. So we cover things like how to apply to kindergarten or middle school or high school, because knowledge is power. And then, number three, we do a lot of accountability work and investigative work. And so that means if the mayor or the chancellor says we’re going to change how math is taught in middle and high schools, then we write about that, but it’s our job to follow up and find out: Well, how is that going? Are teachers prepared to make the change? How do they feel that the curriculum is? How are kids faring? How are they performing? Do they feel like they’re learning more? So it’s on us to then go back and investigate, are these policies working, and things like that.
