Jonaki Mehta
Jonaki Mehta reports on how education systems treat students with disabilities and learning differences, tracking the policies, civil rights decisions and classroom tools that determine what support these students receive. Her beat is narrower than a general education reporter, concentrating on how schools, districts and federal officials include or exclude students with learning differences from resources, rights and opportunities. She works at NPR as an education correspondent focused on this community.
Students with disabilities and learning differences
Mehta’s core subject is students with disabilities and learning differences and the barriers they face in school. NPR describes her role as covering education with a focus on students with learning differences, and she consistently follows stories where those students are at risk of being overlooked. In coverage of special education and civil rights, she explains that her beat is students with disabilities, underscoring that this group is her primary lens on the education system.
Her reporting highlights how policy choices translate into daily experience for these students, including whether they receive necessary services, protections and accommodations. In stories on discrimination and exclusion, she surfaces the voices of students with disabilities and learning differences who feel left out of broader debates about schooling and reform. That sustained focus sets her apart from more general education coverage that might treat disability as an occasional subtopic rather than the center of the story.
Federal decisions on special education, civil rights and funding
Mehta frequently connects classroom conditions for students with disabilities to decisions made in Washington about money, mandates and oversight. She has covered efforts by the Trump administration to move oversight of special education and civil rights away from the Education Department, detailing how those shifts could weaken protections for students and families. In related coverage of cuts to the department, she reports on how reduced funding threatens money that schools rely on, again with an emphasis on what that means for special education services.
Her work in this area distinguishes itself by treating civil rights structures as part of the education beat, not only as legal or political stories. When federal leaders change who enforces special education law or how civil rights complaints are handled, she traces the consequences for students with disabilities who depend on those systems. This allows her to follow a policy through-line across multiple stories, rather than covering each announcement as a discrete event.
Technology, AI and classroom tools
Another recurring strand in Mehta’s reporting is the role of technology in special education and how new tools can both help and harm students with disabilities. She has produced a piece asking whether artificial intelligence can improve special education, interviewing special education teachers and experts about both the opportunities and the risks of using AI in classrooms. In that work she examines how AI might personalize instruction or ease paperwork while also probing concerns about bias, privacy and overreliance on automated systems.
Mehta has also reported on technology that already helps some students with disabilities excel, while showing how those same students feel left out when decisions are made without them. In coverage of schools moving away from screens, she highlights the tension for students who rely on devices and digital tools as accommodations, even as broader efforts push to remove them from classrooms. Across these stories, she focuses less on gadgets themselves and more on whether technology decisions include the needs and voices of students with learning differences.
Audio reporting and production background
Mehta’s education work builds on years in audio reporting and production at NPR. Before taking on the education beat, she worked as a producer for All Things Considered, shaping daily news segments and feature stories for the national program. Earlier in her career she held a National Desk internship at NPR West, giving her experience with breaking news and national storytelling.
She has also produced documentary series and talk shows in the audio space, bringing long-form narrative and conversation skills into her education reporting. This background shows up in how she structures her stories: short scenes built around specific students, teachers or experts, followed by clear explanation of the policy stakes. Her pieces often pair concise policy analysis with tightly edited tape from classrooms, advocates and researchers, reflecting her training as both a reporter and a producer.
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.