Josh Kristianto
Josh Kristianto is an education-focused reporter and multimedia journalist for ABC15 Arizona whose work centers on how institutions treat students, families, and communities. He has reported for the station since November 2023, bringing an accountability lens to stories that combine education, legal detail, and community impact. His coverage ranges from alleged abuse and retaliation inside schools to new faith-based education models and justice-driven investigations.
Retaliation and abuse in special education
Kristianto’s education reporting includes detailed coverage of allegations that former staff faced retaliation after speaking up about abuse of students with disabilities at Mountain Ridge High. He frames such stories around the experiences of vulnerable students and the staff who work closest with them, treating special education as a central accountability issue rather than a niche concern. That focus gives weight to internal school culture, discipline practices, and how administrators respond when workers raise concerns about student safety.
First Orthodox classical school in the Valley
Beyond traditional public school coverage, Kristianto reports on the creation of new education models, including the first Orthodox classical school opening in the Valley. In those stories he follows the founding process, highlighting the school’s religious and classical orientation and the community effort behind it. His approach treats faith-based education as part of the broader education landscape, showing how religious communities build institutions that reflect their values while still serving local families.
Deep legal dives into major criminal cases
Kristianto also works as an investigative reporter, producing “deep legal dive” segments on major criminal cases, such as the 2020 Tate Bomar murder case. In this line of work he examines court records and legal proceedings in detail, translating complex case histories and legal arguments into accessible narratives for a general audience. His criminal-justice pieces extend his accountability focus beyond schools, connecting legal outcomes back to public safety and trust in institutions.
Community-led pushes for justice
In addition to formal legal coverage, Kristianto reports on grassroots efforts by volunteers who seek justice and closure in difficult cases. He has covered groups that organize search and advocacy efforts around specific victims, interviewing participants about why they see their work as both personal and civic responsibility. These stories situate community action alongside institutional processes, showing how ordinary people respond when they feel official systems have not yet delivered resolution.
Taken together, Kristianto’s work is defined by an interest in how power, law, and belief play out in the everyday lives of students, families, and local communities. He moves between classrooms, churches, courtrooms, and volunteer gatherings, maintaining a consistent emphasis on accountability and lived experience. For education stories that intersect with disability rights, religious schooling, and the justice system, he brings a blend of reporting on policy, legal structures, and the people most directly affected.
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.