WSJ’s Pratt departs for Washington Post

Washington Post national editor Phil Rucker and deputy national editor Amy Fiscus sent out the following on Monday:

We are thrilled to announce that Chastity Pratt, a veteran journalist and dynamic leader with decades of experience covering schools, is joining The Post as our national education editor.

Chastity will drive ambitious coverage of this consequential topic at a critical moment in education, with tensions roiling campuses over the war in Gaza and free-speech debates; students and teachers adjusting to a post-pandemic world; statehouse legislation affecting diversity initiatives and curricula on race, sexual orientation and gender identity; and more.

Chastity, who will report to the deputy National editor, brings a record of motivating reporters, building teams and fostering cohesion to execute illuminating coverage about education across America. She is passionate about the subject, tenacious in finding innovative ways to explore it and has a compelling vision for ensuring our report maintains urgency and covers the issues that readers are talking about.

She joins The Post after four years at the Wall Street Journal, where she served as its first education bureau chief. She led a team of reporters who covered elementary and higher education around the country, chronicling such issues as pandemic schooling, learning loss, the aftereffects of school shootings and the culture wars.

Under Chastity’s direction, her team produced distinctive reporting on education finance. She also helped redesign the WSJ College Rankings coverage, which helped drive subscriber growth.

Before she joined the Journal in 2020, Chastity reported on schools at the Detroit Free Press, Newsday and The Oregonian, reporting that won her several awards. She studied inequity in education finance as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard in 2019-20 and was a producer for the documentary “Gradually, Then Suddenly: The Bankruptcy of Detroit,” which won the 2021 Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.