Maureen Sullivan
Maureen Sullivan writes about education for MassLive, with a focus on how decisions in school systems affect daily life in classrooms. Her work tracks concrete changes in policy and practice, using specific district examples rather than abstract debate. She concentrates on K–12 issues and the way students, teachers and administrators navigate new rules and expectations around learning.
Cellphone use in class
A recent piece on a Central Massachusetts school district’s new approach to limiting cellphone use in class shows how she treats a policy shift as a lived experience, not just a rule change. She highlights the tension between students’ reliance on personal devices and educators’ efforts to preserve focus and order in the classroom. The story frames cellphone restrictions as part of a broader question about attention, classroom management and the boundaries between school and students’ digital lives.
Her coverage in this area looks closely at the mechanisms districts use to enforce technology rules, such as where and when phones are allowed and what happens when students break the rules. She is attentive to the trade-offs for teaching, from reducing distractions to the practical challenges of implementing new systems in real time. The reporting stays grounded in what happens during the school day, keeping the emphasis on instructional time and student behavior rather than on technical jargon.
Education beat reporting
Across her education coverage for MassLive, Sullivan works at the level of the school district and the individual school, rather than treating education as a purely statewide or national policy arena. She follows how superintendents, principals and school committees respond to emerging issues and translate broader guidance into local practice. Her stories tend to center on specific initiatives or changes, such as classroom rules, district programs or shifts in how schools handle student conduct.
She writes in a straightforward news style, geared to readers who need to understand what a change means for teaching, learning and school culture. The emphasis is on clear explanation of what is new, why it is happening and how it will work in practice, with particular attention to rules that shape student experience during the school day. Her work is useful for anyone looking to follow how education policies and trends are playing out inside classrooms and hallways in real schools.
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.