Leqi Zhong
Leqi Zhong follows the money and power in local school systems and shows how those decisions land on students, families and classrooms. She is the Clovis accountability and enterprise reporter for The Fresno Bee, focusing on education and its overlap with local politics and public finance. She joined The Fresno Bee in 2023 as an education reporter.
School districts, bonds and budget decisions
Zhong’s core work tracks how school districts grow, spend and cut, with particular attention to long-term building plans and bond measures. Her coverage of Clovis Unified’s plan for a 37th elementary school and related bond proposals examines both the scale of the expansion and the case district leaders make to taxpayers. She reports on Fresno Unified budget cuts that put an Ethnic Studies course mandate at risk, showing how financial choices jeopardize state curriculum requirements and the promises made to students. Across the region, she covers funding flows such as a $21 million grant for community schools in Merced, explaining how new dollars are meant to reshape campus services and support. She writes on college students living in poverty despite unused support funds, connecting higher education policy and budget design to basic needs on campus. Together, these stories build a clear picture of how public money moves through schools and where that movement breaks down.
Accountability coverage of education and political influence
Zhong uses the education beat to scrutinize political influence and conflicts of interest around local school systems. She reports on a Fresno schools official who simultaneously works for a $1.5 million political action committee he helped create, detailing the dual roles and the questions those ties raise for district governance. In Central Unified, she covers a district spokesman’s connections to a PAC that sparked concern in Fresno, laying out the relationships, timelines and decision points for readers. Her stories often sit at the edge of education and elections, including coverage of campaign-related activity and traffic debates in Fresno County where school communities and voters are both in play. When hundreds of Fresno High School students walk out, she documents the protest, the student grievances and the district’s response, treating the action as both a civic event and an education story. The through-line in this work is a steady focus on accountability: who holds power around schools, who pays for their campaigns, and how that affects policy in the classroom.
Student experience and curriculum equity
Alongside finance and politics, Zhong writes closely about what students experience on campus. Her reporting on the Ethnic Studies mandate shows how course offerings tied to identity and history can be undermined by budget decisions, centering the impact on students whose classes are at risk. She profiles individual students at key turning points, including an 18-year-old high school senior nearing graduation and an “exciting new chapter” before life changes intervene, bringing human detail to broader debates over safety and opportunity. Her work documents student protests and walkouts, giving space to student voices and the specific issues they raise with administrators. She also covers controversies around progressive education initiatives in Fresno Unified, tracing how ambitious ideas play out in practice and what they mean for the daily reality of teaching and learning. This strand of her reporting keeps equity, voice and lived experience at the center of the education beat.
Enterprise reporting beyond daily beat coverage
Zhong takes on enterprise projects that extend beyond routine school board stories. She has contributed to work on “Bitwise & Betrayal: Inside the fraud scandal that shook” her area, digging into corporate misrepresentation and its fallout for workers and the local economy. She brings the same investigative habits to education and public institutions, using records, timelines and source work to show how complex schemes and governance failures unfold. Her regional reporting for sister mastheads such as The Modesto Bee and the Merced Sun-Star applies this approach across K-12 and higher education, from college poverty to district-level funding initiatives. The result is a body of work that combines daily accountability coverage with deeper explanatory stories on how institutions function and how they fail.
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.