Our staff experts are available for media interviews and panel participation on the topics below. To contact our experts, email them individually or contact Lesli Maxwell at lmaxwell@educationweek.org or by calling 301-280-3100.
Michele J. Givens
President and CEO
Michele Givens is an experienced and strategically focused publishing executive who has helped lead the nonprofit media organization, best known for publishing Education Week, in a time of profound and often difficult change.
She joined EPE as general manager in 2001 and formally received the concurrent title of publisher in 2009. In June 2016, the EPE Board of Trustees announced her appointment to succeed her longtime colleague Virginia B. Edwards as the organization’s president and CEO, effective August 1, 2016.
Previously in her career, Givens was the consumer marketing director for Outside magazine in Santa Fe, N.M.; associate consumer marketing manager at Rodale Press in Emmaus, Pa.; and circulation director at McGraw-Hill in Washington, D.C.
Givens earned an M.S. in the Management of Information Technology from the University of Virginia, an M.B.A. from the University of New Mexico, and a bachelor’s degree from George Mason University.
She serves on the board of directors of the Center for Teaching Quality and is a member of the National Press Club.
Beth Frerking
Editor-in-Chief
Beth Frerking, a veteran journalist and newsroom leader who has worked as a top editor, reporter, and journalism educator, currently serves as editor-in-chief for Education Week.
Frerking’s achievements include being named a magazine innovator by the Folio: 100 Awards and two National Headliner awards for her work covering children, families, and education. While at The Dallas Times Herald, she was part of a reporting team that covered the crash of Delta Flight 191. This work was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.
Her other accomplishments include helping to launch and oversee the Education Lab, a community-funded reporting team created to expand in-depth education coverage at The Dallas Morning News, and helping to establish The Politico Network, a content-sharing network that included more than 100 news organizations, two-thirds of which were newspapers.
Frerking’s previous experience includes editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal; senior editor and assistant managing editor at Politico; news vertical editor at The Dallas Morning News; national correspondent for the former Newhouse News Service; Washington bureau chief and congressional correspondent for The Denver Post; director of the Journalism Center on Children & Families, previously part of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, and editor of The Daily Texan.
Frerking is an honors graduate of University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism.
