Phil Prazan
Phil Prazan covers how Texas politics and government shape public education, focusing on the policies, bills, and standards that change what happens in classrooms and lecture halls. He reports for NBC 5, where he concentrates on politics, policy, and government and helps lead the public affairs program Lone Star Politics. His work on the education beat is distinguished by close tracking of legislative and regulatory decisions and clear explanations of how those moves affect schools, students, and school funding.
Texas education policy and legislation
Prazan follows major education bills from committee hearing to floor vote, making the mechanics of policymaking understandable without losing detail. He has covered pushes to improve public education, including briefings where Texas lawmakers hear from top education officials about below-average per-student spending and outcomes and outline how they want to change the system. When the Texas House took up school choice vouchers after Senate approval, he reported on the plan to expand private school funding and the pressure from the governor to move the bill forward.
He stayed with the story as lawmakers debated Senate Bill 2, a sweeping education bill allowing families to use public school tax dollars on private and home schools, documenting the controversy and the bill’s progress through panels and floor debates.
Funding debates recur across his coverage, and he treats the numbers as central to the story rather than background.
In reporting on the first major school funding bill to clear a key hurdle at the State Capitol, he highlighted the Texas House’s passage of a measure aiming to send billions of dollars into public school districts and explained how it fit into a larger package of education legislation. He has also examined proposed changes to statewide testing, covering a special session where the governor put elimination of the STAAR test on the agenda and speaking with teachers and former superintendents about why many schools still need some form of assessment and how high-stakes testing affects individual campuses.
Across these pieces, he consistently anchors policy detail in the lived impact on districts, educators, and families, with particular attention to the Texas Education Agency and its role in implementing lawmakers’ decisions.
Curriculum, culture and religion in schools
Prazan treats curriculum fights as political stories with direct consequences for classroom content and for communities’ sense of representation. His reporting on the Texas State Board of Education’s consideration of curriculum changes that would expand Bible instruction and revise social studies standards lays out the arguments from supporters who say the changes add important historical context and opponents who warn they place too much emphasis on Christianity. In covering the run-up to a vote to overhaul social studies standards, he has shown how religion becomes a central point of contention, explaining the proposed changes and the stakes for students learning about history and civics. These pieces distinguish his education work by moving beyond headline controversy to explain who sits on the board, how they are chosen, and how their decisions filter down into district-level curricula.
He extends this focus on curriculum into higher education, tracking how universities respond to legislation and legal challenges.
In coverage of Texas universities revising curriculum as debate continues over Texas Senate Bill 37, Prazan reports on systems consolidating and removing courses and ties those moves to ongoing legal and political disputes. The framing in these stories shows an interest in how culture, law, and religion intersect in education policy, whether in public schools or university lecture halls, and presents curriculum changes as part of a broader struggle over what counts as core knowledge in Texas.
Public affairs programming and political framing
Prazan brings his education reporting into a wider political context through his work on Lone Star Politics and election coverage for NBC 5.
He co-hosts Lone Star Politics, a public affairs program that examines Texas politics, where he discusses legislative sessions, statewide races, and policy issues with other political journalists. Episodes have paired debates over school policy with broader topics such as AI and the workforce, voter registration concerns, and key legislative contests, underscoring his habit of tying education issues to shifts in political power and economic trends.
In segments on the incoming law to ban cell phones in public school classrooms, he connects the classroom-level mandate - districts must keep phones off campus or in safe storage - to the legislative session that produced it, and then places the law within a recap of that session’s larger themes.
Beyond education, his political reporting includes Decision 2026 coverage of races such as Texas House District 112 and the Paxton–Talarico Senate campaign, as well as stories on opposition to AI data centers and statewide immigration debates.
That broader portfolio informs his education beat: school voucher bills, funding measures, and curriculum fights are presented not as isolated school concerns but as core elements of state politics and election platforms. His background as an award-winning reporter on policy, politics, and government shows in the way he combines Capitol sources, agency data, and affected communities, giving his education coverage a distinct blend of legislative detail and political analysis.
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.
Abril Preciado
Abril Preciado is an Emmy award-winning bilingual television journalist at FOX6 News Milwaukee who focuses on education, school crises and policy decisions affecting students, families and staff. She follows school communities over months, from emergency response through investigations, relocation plans and the first day back in class. Her reporting on the Lincoln Avenue School fire covers displacement, safety changes, rebuilding and the move to temporary space. She also uses public records to examine local officials, test official claims and connect government conduct to public trust. Before joining FOX6, she reported for Univision in Sacramento, covering the Farm Workers March, wildfires, politics and the Latino community, and contributed border reporting for a national radio network. She centers families, explains complex decisions clearly and focuses on the human effects of policy.
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.