Mariana Dale
Mariana Dale reports on how education policy and classroom practice shape the daily lives of children and their families, with a sustained focus on early childhood and K-12 schools. She serves as a senior K-12 education reporter at LAist, building on several years of reporting that treat education as a continuum starting well before kindergarten. Her coverage stands out for turning complex district decisions and broad policy debates into clear, service-oriented stories and guides that help families understand what those changes mean in classrooms.
Screen time, classroom tech and the digital divide
Dale covers how technology policies in schools are rewritten and enforced, using detailed reporting on screen time limits to show what changes look like period by period and grade by grade. Her coverage of the Los Angeles Unified School Board’s decision to limit student screen time explains the unanimous vote, the timeline for implementation starting in August, and the requirement for grade-based maximum daily and weekly screen time limits. She highlights how the policy bans screens for the youngest students until second grade and imposes strict caps through high school, giving concrete examples of how classrooms are expected to shift back toward more pen-and-paper assignments. In this work she brings together boardroom resolutions, classroom practice and family concerns about devices, framing screen time not only as a question of instructional quality but also as part of the broader digital divide in public education.
Early childhood and the start of school
Dale’s reporting is rooted in early childhood education, a focus she carries forward into her current K-12 beat. She has been with LAist since 2019, starting as an early childhood reporter and emphasizing that education begins well before a child enters formal schooling. Her own bio notes years of reporting on early childhood education for public media outlets, underscoring long-running attention to childcare, preschool access and the systems that support young children and their caregivers. Even as she covers district-wide policy and high school issues, she keeps the early years in view, connecting decisions about funding, staffing and curriculum to their impact on children at the very start of their schooling.
School climate, immigration and democracy in the classroom
Dale frequently reports on how wider political and social pressures show up inside schools, focusing on school climate and student well-being. Her work has highlighted concerns from high school principals nationwide about students from immigrant families, including reports of bullying and increased absences tied to immigration policy. She has also written about a South Los Angeles school that teaches the “nitty-gritty” work of democracy, tracing how civic education is built into everyday classroom practice rather than confined to textbooks or occasional events. In these stories she blends on-the-ground reporting with voices from school leaders and students to show how policy debates about immigration and democracy translate into emotions, attendance and engagement in specific school communities.
Service guides and parent-facing explainers
A defining feature of Dale’s coverage is the way she produces service journalism aimed directly at families navigating school systems. Her “school game plan” series offers easy-to-follow guides to help parents decide what school to select for their child, positioning her work as a practical tool for making sense of enrollment options and program differences. Those guides sit alongside policy explainers that walk readers through district decisions, such as new technology rules, in plain language that spells out what will change for students day to day. Across beats and formats, she consistently pairs policy detail with actionable information, making her reporting especially useful to parents, caregivers and others closely involved in students’ lives.
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.