Chris Papst
Chris Papst uses education as an accountability beat, focusing on how Maryland’s public school systems spend money, report results, and treat families and staff. He reports for Fox45’s Project Baltimore, an ongoing investigative series on Maryland’s public education system, and builds many of his stories from records, data, and on-the-ground complaints about school performance and transparency.
Project Baltimore and systemic oversight of Maryland schools
Papst is the lead investigative reporter for Project Baltimore, Fox45’s long-running investigation into Maryland’s public education system. The franchise gives him a clear mandate: examine whether school districts, state education officials, and elected leaders are delivering on their promises to students and families. His reporting frequently centers on statewide or multi-district issues rather than isolated incidents, treating schools as systems with budgets, policies, and accountability gaps.
In coverage of senior leadership, he tracks high turnover and what it means for stability, as in his report on Baltimore County Schools naming Dr. William Heiser as the district’s fifth superintendent in ten years. He also scrutinizes state-level decision-making, including a story on a Maryland school superintendent whose state-issued phone was set to auto-delete text messages after 30 days, raising questions about public-record retention and accountability. Across these pieces, he frames education news around structures — contracts, mandates, and governance — rather than classroom anecdotes alone.
Test scores, data redaction, and performance transparency
Papst’s work returns repeatedly to test scores and reporting practices, treating academic data as a core transparency issue for the public school system. In a Project Baltimore piece on test score transparency, he compared how decisions to redact data were handled in 2011 versus now, highlighting shifts in what information parents and taxpayers can see about student performance. His reporting has been cited in legal and academic discussions of “educational homicide,” including coverage noting that at 13 Baltimore City high schools, zero students tested proficient on a 2023 state math exam.
These stories cast standardized test results not just as performance metrics but as evidence in a larger accountability debate. He questions whether data practices obscure or reveal problems and shows how changes in reporting rules affect the public’s ability to judge whether reforms are working. The through-line is that numbers matter only if people can see and understand them, and he often contrasts official narratives of progress with documented results.
Health, safety, and conditions inside school buildings
Another recurring focus is the physical and safety conditions in schools, especially where families say systems are slow to respond. In a report on classroom health hazards, he covered a proposed bill that would force schools to release air quality reports, tying parent concerns about mold and sickness in classrooms to legislative efforts to require public access to indoor air testing. The story tracked how a parent’s experience and earlier coverage led a state lawmaker to introduce a transparency bill, underlining the link between individual complaints, media scrutiny, and policy change.
His work also examines school safety and violence, including investigations into incidents in Baltimore County schools that raised questions about whether administrators and district leaders responded adequately to threats and fights. These pieces typically combine video or documentation with internal emails or records, placing responsibility not only on student behavior but on how adults in the system manage risk and communicate with families.
Investigative style, authorship, and public role
Papst’s reporting style is explicitly investigative and often adversarial toward opaque institutions. Fox45 describes him as the lead investigative reporter for Project Baltimore, emphasizing that the series is dedicated to ongoing scrutiny of Maryland’s public education system rather than one-off stories. He uses tools such as records requests, data analysis, and internal correspondence, and he often follows individual stories through to policy responses, legislative hearings, or administrative changes, as seen in his coverage of air quality legislation and communication practices by top education officials.
Beyond nightly newscasts, he extends this work into other formats. He is a National Emmy-winning investigative journalist and the author of the bestselling books “Failure Factory” and “Capital,” which draw on his reporting on institutions and accountability. He appears as a guest and speaker to discuss Project Baltimore and his research on Maryland schools, reinforcing his role as a specialist in systemic problems in public education. Across platforms, his coverage is defined less by general education features and more by a consistent focus on what goes wrong in school systems, who is responsible, and how the public can see the evidence.
4 more education journalists.
Abdul Latif Jameel
Abdul Latif Jameel publishes long-form, research-led pieces on how emerging technologies and scientific advances reshape education, industry, and society. He writes for the Abdul Latif Jameel masthead at the intersection of learning, innovation, and applied science, with a focus on technology, skills, and the future of learning. He explains complex fields such as quantum sensing in clear, accessible terms, breaking down frontier science and tying it to real-world applications. His coverage links breakthroughs in sensing, data, and automation to training, curriculum, and lifelong learning. He treats education as an applied system connected to industry, policy, infrastructure, and human development. He reports in an analytical, explanatory style, using research, pilots, and large-scale initiatives to examine how technologies are implemented, evaluated, and scaled in learning and training environments.
Adria Iraheta
Adria Iraheta is a community-focused reporter at Denver7, distinct for centering students, families and residents in every story about schools, neighborhoods and public services. She covers how decisions by school districts, local agencies and public institutions land in daily life, with a particular focus on Aurora and Arapahoe County. Her beat sits at the intersection of education, community issues, public services, safety, infrastructure, health and climate, from job cuts in a school district to a new transit safety app, DMV outages, street changes and record heat waves. With a decade of local television reporting experience, she reports on the ground in specific local scenes, using plain language, direct questions to officials and clear explanations to show how policies, programs and changes affect the people who live, study and work in Colorado communities.
Alan J. Borsuk
Alan J. Borsuk stands out for connecting what happens in schools to the policy and political decisions behind them. He writes in-depth K-12 education analysis for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and serves as a senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. His work focuses on Milwaukee Public Schools, school choice, literacy, teacher pipelines, and school accountability. He uses long-range perspective, detailed reporting, and structured analysis to explain how reforms unfold, why they stall, and what they mean for students and leaders. He has also written on vouchers, Teach for America, discipline, and teacher evaluation, drawing on decades as a reporter and editor on education and public policy.
Alexandra Hardle
Alexandra Hardle brings a watchdog lens to K-12 schools, using concrete incidents to map how district power, oversight and accountability work in real life. She covers K-12 education for The Arizona Republic, focusing on school systems, governance and the lived impact of policy on students, families and educators. Her reporting shows how school governance can fail students and staff and what that reveals about district culture. She often covers flashpoints, such as the Nazi salute fallout in the Deer Valley district, as windows into deeper dysfunction, tracking how leadership responds, how trust breaks down and how conflicts unfold in public meetings. Her work sits at the intersection of accountability reporting and community stories, grounded in public records, formal rules and multiple stakeholder perspectives, with clear, direct language that explains how institutions make decisions and how ordinary people experience them.