Steve Drummond
Senior Education Editor, NPR News
Highlights from Steve Drummond
Steve Drummond heads up NPR's new education reporting project. NPR Ed launched in March 2014, providing deeper coverage of this vital issue and extending it to audiences across digital platforms. It's a nine-member team within the network, working in partnership with member stations around the country.
Drummond brings to this initiative more than 20 years' experience covering education issues, and more than a decade at NPR in a variety of roles. Prior to this assignment, he was the network's Senior National Editor. In that role, from 2007 through 2013, he oversaw domestic news coverage and a team of more than 60 reporters, producers and editors in Washington, DC, and 18 bureaus around the country. In 2012, he also served as acting Senior Editor for Investigations, managing a team of six reporters and producers on investigative projects.
In addition to his journalism credentials, Drummond has also spent some time in the classroom. In the early 1990's, he left journalism temporarily, for a graduate degree in education and a brief career as a middle and high school teacher. His journalism and education interests merged in 1993, when he joined Education Week, where he spent six years as a senior editor and writer.
Drummond joined NPR in 2000 as an editor on the national desk. In 2003, he became the senior editor of All Things Considered. He returned to the national desk in 2004 to edit coverage of poverty and welfare, education, religion, and crime and punishment.
At NPR his work has been honored with many of journalism's highest awards, including three Peabody Awards, two Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Award.
Drummond's work with NPR Correspondent Laura Sullivan and Producer Amy Walters on an investigation into sexual assault of Native American women earned a 2009 duPont Award. The next year, Drummond edited a series by Sullivan, "36 Years of Solitary: Murder, Death and Justice on Angola," which also earned a Peabody, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award. A three-part series, "Bonding for Profit," exposed deep flaws in the bail bonds system in this country. The series, reported by Sullivan and edited by Drummond, earned a 2010 Peabody and a 2011 duPont award. A series examining South Dakota's system for handling Native American children in foster care won a 2011 Peabody Award.
Drummond has been a reporter with The Tampa Tribune and The St. Petersburg Times in Florida and at the Associated Press in Detroit. He has written for a variety of publications including The Detroit News, The Detroit Free Press, The New York Times, and Teacher magazine.
Drummond holds a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, in journalism and education, from the University of Michigan. In the fall of 2013 he was a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
