Welcome

I was born in Chicago in 1952 and named after my grandfather, Joe Jacobs, who’d been a police reporter for the Omaha Bee-News. At the age of eight, my best friend and I decided that The Weekly Reader was “dumb” and that we could do better. As co-editors-in-chief, we produced The Wednesday Report for four years. It was just the beginning.

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I attended public schools in Highland Park, Illinois and was graduated from Stanford University in 1974 with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. I worked for Suburban Newspaper Publications and for Super8Filmaker magazine before joining the San Jose Mercury News in 1978 as editorial pages copy editor. After two years, I became an editorial writer. I began writing a regular op-ed column in 1984.

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My columns received local, state and national awards, including National Headliner (1996) and Best of the West (1999). With two colleagues, I won a Casey Medal in 1999 for the series “Making Welfare Work,” which followed six welfare families in their struggle for independence.

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In 2001, I left the Mercury News to create joannejacobs.com, freelance and write Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds.

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I’ve served on the board of the Stanford Daily and the Women’s Freedom Network. I was a Michigan Journalism Fellow in 1991-92 and a Casey fellow in 1994.

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Currently, I freelance for Education Next and other publications and write for foundations. I wrote a chapter in Education for Upward Mobility, published in December, 2015.

 

I live in Silicon Valley with my husband, John Wakerly. My daughter is a literary agent in New York City.

— Joanne Jacobs