Dylan Berman
Dylan Berman covers education and campus life for The Spectator, treating campus events as stories about power, dissent and whose experiences are centered in institutional decision-making. His reporting links policy and administration to the lived realities of students, highlighting how official choices play out at ceremonies, in classrooms and in public forums. Across news, opinion and cultural coverage, he brings an investigative impulse and a concern for how learning environments include or exclude different communities.
Commencement conflict and campus climate
Berman’s recent work on the struggle around commencement, Palestine and the treatment of Muslim students shows how he handles flashpoints where ceremony, identity and politics collide. He focuses on a single, high-stakes milestone in the academic calendar and uses it to explore how an institution responds when students and families challenge the terms of celebration. The emphasis is on students who feel marginalized by the way leadership manages references to Palestine and Muslim communities, and on the friction between administrative messaging and on-the-ground sentiment. In this mode, he treats education coverage as campus climate reporting, tying symbolic events like graduation to broader questions of belonging, free expression and institutional accountability.
Prison education and disrupted dialogue
In his news story on a “Red Talk” about prison education reform that is disrupted by a protestor, Berman follows what happens when a conversation about access to education inside prisons is itself interrupted. The piece sits at the intersection of criminal justice, educational equity and campus discourse, tracking how a planned discussion on reform is challenged in real time. He frames the disruption as part of the story, not a sideshow, using it to probe how contentious issues are mediated in academic spaces and who gets to set the terms of debate. This reflects a consistent interest in educational access beyond traditional classrooms and in the limits and possibilities of dialogue in institutional settings.
Books, research and creative work
Berman also writes about literature and reading, contributing to The Spectator’s “Totally Booked” coverage with a review of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”. In that review, he engages closely with a demanding literary text, which signals comfort with complex narratives and moral ambiguity in his cultural criticism. Alongside journalism, he publishes creative work, including a historical fiction piece titled “Gold Fever” in the Seattle University Undergraduate Research Journal, where his story appears as part of the journal’s tenth edition. His presence in a research journal that also carries creative writing shows an interest in the overlap between scholarship, historical imagination and narrative technique. These assignments add a reflective, text-focused strand to his portfolio that complements his campus reporting.
Investigative and opinion leadership at The Spectator
Within The Spectator’s newsroom, Berman holds a hybrid role that blends investigative work with opinion editing. He is identified in the paper’s staff materials as the investigative and opinion editor, placing him at the center of stories that require deeper digging as well as pieces that shape the outlet’s argumentative voice. He has also been selected as the paper’s next editor-in-chief, underscoring his influence over how the student newspaper sets its agenda and allocates reporting resources. The Spectator functions as the student newspaper of Seattle University, so that leadership position effectively makes him a key shaper of how education, policy and campus life are covered for the community the paper serves. Taken together, his staff roles and bylines point to a journalist who approaches education coverage as both reporter and editor, with an eye on impact, argument and the institutional structures behind each story.
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.