Jaweed Kaleem
Jaweed Kaleem treats education as a front line for larger fights over power, identity and access, with a beat built around the University of California and the wider higher education landscape. His coverage follows how campus decisions on admissions, governance and speech collide with politics, race and religion. He brings long experience on national race, justice and religion reporting to stories about schools and universities, so education reads as a proxy for broader social change.
University of California and higher education policy
Kaleem is an education reporter at the Los Angeles Times, covering the University of California and higher education as his core assignment. He reports on UC leadership and strategy, including interviews that probe how system presidents think about talent pipelines and access to opportunity. His work tracks high-stakes debates over admissions policy, such as the UC regents’ timetable for decisions on standardized testing requirements, and what those choices mean for students and campuses. He writes about pressures on international enrollment, using data and policy analysis to show how shifts in foreign student numbers affect California institutions and their finances. Across this coverage, he treats UC as a national bellwether, using individual decisions on admissions, funding and enrollment to illustrate wider tensions in American higher education.
Schools as battlegrounds for culture and politics
Kaleem specializes in campus activism and culture, focusing on how free speech, religion, race and politics play out in school settings.
His education brief explicitly emphasizes the intersection of America’s culture wars with K-12 systems and colleges, including clashes over race, LGBTQ+ issues and partisan political narratives moving through classrooms and governing boards. He reports on student and faculty activism, documenting how protests, speech fights and equity campaigns reshape campus norms and test institutional commitments to inclusion and academic freedom. He pays close attention to how national debates over policing, civil rights and immigration surface on campus, drawing lines between headlines on protests or disciplinary actions and longer histories of inequality in schools and neighborhoods.
His stories often show administrators, trustees and lawmakers responding to cultural conflict, making clear how political pressure and public opinion influence policy inside education systems.
Race, religion and a national reporting toolkit
Before moving full-time onto the education beat, Kaleem worked as a national correspondent and a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. As a national reporter, he covered presidential elections, civil rights, race, policing, religion, the environment and health, building a portfolio that treated race and justice as core lenses on American life. He has served as a national race and justice correspondent, writing about how race and ethnicity shape evolving definitions of what it means to be American, frequently reporting on policing, civil rights, immigration, prisons and religion.
His prior work includes stories on controversies over Confederate monuments, refugee resettlement debates, Black police leadership and religious communities, such as a Spanish-speaking mosque in Texas, showing a consistent interest in how institutions respond to demographic and cultural change.
Earlier in his career, Kaleem reported on religion for HuffPost and the Miami Herald, producing enterprise and feature coverage on how faith and spirituality, or the absence of them, influence politics, institutions and personal relationships. This background in religion reporting continues to inform his education work, where he follows how religious identity, belief and church–state questions arise in campus speech disputes, curriculum fights and university culture. His foreign correspondence included anchoring coverage of the Ukraine war and writing on European politics, economics, tourism and culture, experience that adds comparative context when he looks at global students, international programs and cross-border academic ties.
Reporting style and recognition
Kaleem’s education stories draw on breaking news skills and long-form narrative techniques developed across national and foreign assignments. He frequently pairs policy reporting with human voices, using interviews with students, faculty and officials to ground abstract debates in lived experience.
His work has contributed to Los Angeles Times projects recognized as Pulitzer Prize finalists, including reporting on the Monterey Park Lunar New Year shooting and earlier coverage of Haiti. He has received first-place honors from multiple journalism organizations, including the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society for Features Journalism, the Asian American Journalists Association, the South Asian Journalists Association, the National Headliner Awards and the American Academy of Religion.
He has also held leadership and fellowship roles within religion-reporting organizations, underscoring a sustained engagement with the ethics and craft of covering belief and its impact on public life.
4 more education journalists.
Abby Russchen
Abby Russchen ties education, community institutions and individual stories together, showing how policies and decisions register in people’s lives. She reports for CBC on education and community life, working across text, video and photography for different CBC platforms. Her education coverage centres student achievement, provincial and national test results, classroom technology and the forces shaping learning conditions, connecting policy language and expert analysis to observable changes in performance. She treats AI, screens and digital tools as part of the education beat, focusing on their impact on student well-being. She also reports on community institutions and local services, from bank closures and changing city status to small-business growth. Her human-interest features follow people, public memory and recognition, and her long-form background supports detailed, fact-grounded narratives across formats.
Alexa Phillips
Alexa Phillips reports on education as a financial system, tracing who pays, who benefits and who bears the risk when policy changes reshape schools and universities. She covers education policy, funding and regulation for The i Paper, with a consistent focus on money, power and their impact on students and staff. Her reporting follows fees, budgets and reform into classrooms and lecture halls, using concrete figures to show how tax changes, funding mechanisms and loan reforms translate into course cuts, job losses and access. Phillips brings wider experience on public services and regulation, including work on gambling oversight and healthcare access, so education sits in a larger accountability story. She writes straightforward, reported news pieces that combine policy detail, financial data and case studies, built from official records and regular call‑outs to readers affected by the systems she covers.
Alexandra Holyk
Alexandra Holyk is a multi-skilled journalist at CTV News who reports on education and youth issues through the daily lives of students, families, and local communities. She covers school and campus decisions, student safety, youth behaviour, and neighbourhood incidents, with a focus on how they affect the people directly involved. Her work includes stories on graduation choices, concerns about Black students in a school board, federal research funding at the University of Waterloo, and students who helped after a cyclist collision. She also covers vandalism and other local disruptions around schools and neighbourhoods. Holyk pitches, researches, shoots, writes, edits, and presents stories for broadcast and digital platforms. Her previous work includes video journalism for provincial coverage, along with reporting for campus and regional outlets and major Canadian newspapers and business media.
Annabelle Olivier
Annabelle Olivier ties system-level themes in Quebec’s school system to the immediate realities of parents and students, treating education as a lived experience rather than an abstract policy field. She is a digital journalist with CBC News, covering education and related public policy. Her work spans data breaches and digital privacy in schools, institutional conflicts and labour disputes that disrupt study plans, education on the campaign trail, and school infrastructure and land use. She reports on incidents like mass emails exposing sensitive parent data, suspended classes that leave students feeling like bargaining chips, and proposals to turn racetracks into schools. Her background in digital production at another major Canadian broadcaster shapes an online-first reporting style, grounded in specific incidents, clear descriptions, and detailed, verifiable facts drawn from documents, statements and interviews.