Eileen Buckley
Eileen Buckley is a senior reporter at WKBW 7 News who concentrates on how education policy and school decisions play out in real classrooms, with a focus on accountability, student experience, and community impact. She uses broadcast storytelling built around direct quotes and on-the-ground visits to explain changes in schooling, from statewide exam requirements to everyday lessons in responsibility. Her work blends long experience in radio and television news with a consistent emphasis on how students, educators, and families live through institutional decisions.
Eye on education, from policy shifts to the school day
Buckley’s education beat runs from high-level policy debates to what happens inside individual schools. In her coverage of New York’s move to phase out the Regents exam requirement for graduation, she centers the story on the voices of people affected, using their words in the headline and framing the change through their reactions rather than treating it as an abstract rules update. She also reports for WKBW’s “Eye on Education” coverage, including a segment titled “Students learn lesson in accountability and responsibility,” where she follows a classroom project that teaches students about journalism, deadlines, and ownership of their work. Across these pieces, she treats policy and pedagogy as connected, showing how shifts in standards, assessment, and curriculum translate into what students and teachers actually do in school each day.
Student achievement and school accountability
A recurring thread in Buckley’s reporting is how schools are measured and held to account, and what those measures mean for students. In her “Students learn lesson in accountability and responsibility” story, she focuses on how educators build a culture where meeting expectations and meeting deadlines are part of learning, not just grading. She also highlights school performance and recognition, such as covering a district’s celebration after all of its elementary, middle, and high schools received Top 10 rankings, bringing attention to both the pride and the pressure that come with public scorecards. Her social reporting around school board meetings and the release of formal reports shows an interest in how oversight, data, and community scrutiny shape the work of educators.
Classroom access and community voices
Buckley often reports from inside schools rather than from a distance. In the accountability and responsibility piece, she is invited into a classroom where students are learning about journalism itself, giving her access to their process and reflections as they work toward deadlines. Her coverage of school rankings and board meetings similarly foregrounds the people involved — students, teachers, administrators, and families — using their perspectives to explain why policies and results matter. The consistent pattern is close access: she appears in classrooms, at ceremonies, and at public meetings, and then packages those scenes for television with straightforward, plain-language scripts that match the voices of the people she interviews.
Veteran broadcast reporter with an education lens
Buckley brings decades of broadcast experience to her current education beat. Before joining WKBW 7 News in March 2019, she worked for many years in radio news, where she built a reputation as an award-winning reporter. She is a member of a regional broadcasters’ Hall of Fame, underscoring how long she has been on air and how firmly rooted she is in the profession. At WKBW, she carries that background into television by structuring education stories around strong soundbites and clear narrative arcs, while favoring topics that show schools as institutions accountable to their communities. The result is education coverage that is both policy-aware and grounded in the everyday realities of students and teachers.
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.