Ronald A. Wolk, Education Week Founder Who Launched New Era for K-12 Journalism, Dies at 86

Ron Wolk in Providence, R.I., in 2015.

—Gretchen Ertl for Education Week

Ronald A. Wolk, a pioneer in education journalism whose publications and passions helped inform and elevate the conversation about K-12 schooling in the United States, died on Saturday at age 86.

Wolk, who lived in Warwick, R.I., had been in and out of the hospital frequently in recent months and died of congestive heart failure and kidney failure in East Sandwich, Mass., said his daughter Suzanne Wolk.

Wolk was the founding editor-in-chief and publisher of Education Week, which launched with a splash in 1981 by running a scoop about efforts by President Ronald Reagan’s administration to downgrade the U.S. Department of Education, which was then still in its infancy. The administration’s efforts fizzled.

Wolk had been an editor of the alumni bulletin at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore when he became instrumental in an effort among college magazine editors and publicists to establish a national newspaper. That was the Chronicle of Higher Education, founded in 1966.

In 1978, when the Chronicle was sold to its editors and became a for-profit publication, Wolk took over as president of the nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education Inc., and he soon began efforts to study the possibility of a similar national publication to cover precollegiate education.

That led to Education Week, as well as later EPE endeavors such as Teacher Magazine and the annual Quality Counts report, which grades the states on a number of metrics of their education systems and has helped foster the standards-based movement to improve schools.

“There was no source of information like Education Week when we started,” Wolk said in January 2018 during an interview for an oral history. “Most of the people who were getting any information in education were … getting it from their local newspapers.”

Besides newspapers, there were just a few national and professional magazines that provided some larger perspective on K-12 education, such as Time magazine, Phi Delta Kappan, and Educational Leadership, Wolk said in the interview with Bethany Rogers, an education history professor at City University of New York at Staten Island.

“And none of those was providing the kind of information that we thought people who were making decisions in public education need,” Wolk said. “So, we provided it, and it was an instant critical success.”

Today, Education Week provides in-depth news, analysis, and opinion on pre-K-12 policy and practice to 1.4 million unique visitors each month through edweek.org, live and virtual events, and its weekly print publication.

Wolk retired from Education Week and EPE in 1997 and moved to Rhode Island, where he remained active in efforts to improve public education nationally and in the state, such as serving as chairman and later chairman emeritus of Big Picture Learning, an organization devoted to creating small, innovative schools.

But to merely detail Wolk’s professional resume does not quite capture the forceful personality of a man with a booming, baritone voice who rarely minced words when it came to dealing with his reporters, policymakers, or anyone else.

“He was a gentle bear in many ways, but we always knew when he was in the house because he would be barking out orders,” said Virginia B. Edwards, who succeeded Wolk as editor and publisher of Education Week and as president of EPE in 1997. “He really demanded intellectual rigor from his colleagues, from his opponents, from anyone he wanted to engage in verbal sparring with.”

“He had his foot in the education policy world, but he was also a journalist,” added Edwards, who retired from that position in 2016. “He really appreciated the role of the public square, and the role of journalists feeding strong data and information into the policymaking arena.”

Arrangements were incomplete on Sunday morning, but Wolk’s daughter said a memorial service would be planned for Washington, D.C., sometime in the near future.

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Mark Walsh

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