JT Moodee Lockman
JT Moodee Lockman tells the story of Maryland’s schools through data, policy, and the conflicts that unfold in and around classrooms. She is a digital producer and reporter for CBS News Baltimore, focused on education and wider local news across the state. Her coverage tracks school systems as institutions that affect graduation, staffing, safety, civil rights, and community trust, rather than treating education as a narrow beat.
Maryland school systems and leadership
Lockman follows the internal workings of school districts, with particular attention to leadership decisions and their impact on classrooms. She reports on moves such as Baltimore County’s decision to name a former Anne Arundel County Schools chief operating officer as superintendent, treating the appointment as a system-level change with consequences for students, staff, and families. Her reporting on Harford County details how an investigation into alleged theft of school property concluded that student data was not compromised, underlining the stakes around information security and institutional accountability. In Carroll County, she covers proposals to cut dozens of school positions in order to comply with Maryland’s Blueprint education plan, tying staffing choices to state mandates and long‑term strategy for public schools.
Education policy, funding, and outcomes
Policy and performance metrics are a recurring spine in Lockman’s work on education. She reports on Maryland’s statewide high school graduation rate, highlighting that the 2024 figure of 87.6% was the highest since 2017 and examining what that means for different student groups and districts. Her coverage of a proposed bill requiring Baltimore City schools to report on chronic absenteeism shows how lawmakers are using legislation and reporting requirements to push districts on student engagement and attendance. In stories about potential position cuts tied to the Blueprint plan, she connects budget pressures and compliance mandates to the lived reality inside schools, explaining how resource decisions shape class sizes, services, and support. Across these pieces, she uses official data, legislative proposals, and state frameworks to show how policy translates into outcomes that matter to families and educators.
Schools at the intersection of safety and civil rights
Lockman’s education coverage frequently sits at the intersection of schooling, public safety, and civil rights. She reports on Baltimore school officials rejecting federal claims that they coordinated immigration arrests during a graduation ceremony, framing the story around student and family protections at school events and the tension between local and federal authorities. In coverage of a school board meeting where antisemitic and racist content prompted a hate crime investigation, she shows how governance forums can become flashpoints for broader social conflicts that spill into education spaces. Her work also extends to incidents where a man was killed and a Baltimore police officer was injured in a shooting, documenting community reactions and accountability questions that affect trust in local institutions, including schools. These stories position education not as an isolated sector but as a central setting where debates over safety, discrimination, and enforcement play out.
Wider Maryland civic and community coverage
Alongside the education beat, Lockman covers wider civic and community issues that shape the environment in which schools operate. Her reporting on key races to watch in Maryland’s 2026 primary election walks through the major leadership contests and explains how shifts in political power could influence statewide priorities, including funding and oversight of public services. She has covered the expiration of SNAP benefits and the declaration of a state of emergency, laying out implications for families who also depend on school‑based nutrition and support programs. In stories on historically low oxygen levels in the Chesapeake Bay after heavy rain, she documents environmental stress on a defining regional resource and the long‑term concerns it raises for coastal communities, students, and local economies. This broader portfolio reflects her dual background as a digital producer and storyteller, and a reporter who ties policy, environment, and social safety nets back to everyday life in Maryland.
Background and approach
Lockman’s professional profiles describe her as a creative multimedia storyteller with experience producing both long‑ and short‑form content, which informs the way she packages complex education and civic issues for digital audiences. Before joining CBS News Baltimore, she worked as a morning reporter and multiskilled journalist at 13News Now, an experience that shows in her ability to move between breaking news, enterprise pieces, and explanatory coverage. Across her work, she relies on state reports, legislative texts, district communications, and community voices to build straightforward stories that show how decisions in boardrooms and government offices reach into classrooms and homes.
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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.