Sadie Dittenber
Sadie Dittenber follows the trail from policy decisions to real classrooms, showing how data, funding choices and local power struggles shape education on the ground. She covers education for The Tribune and is a California Local News Fellow through the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Her reporting blends public data, document-driven accountability work and on-the-ground school coverage, often linking K-12 districts, Cal Poly and local government into a single narrative.
School data: ‘See how your district compares’
Dittenber returns often to district-level performance and progress stories, using public education data as the backbone of her coverage. In pieces such as her breakdown of SLO County school data, framed around “See how your district compares,” she turns test scores and other indicators into clear, district-by-district snapshots rather than abstract statistics. She has also tracked post-COVID academic recovery across local schools, asking “See how your district measures up” and emphasizing what the numbers mean for families in specific communities. Her work on the most competitive majors at Cal Poly in 2026 applies the same approach to higher education, ranking programs by selectivity and giving prospective students a concrete sense of where the bottlenecks are.
Funding, foundations and transitional kindergarten
A second strand of her beat follows the money that flows into local schools and what that money can, and cannot, be used for. In her coverage of the education foundation built on a $10 million payment from PG&E, Dittenber explains how the fund was created and lays out the debate over whether it should backfill budget cuts or support new initiatives. She gives space to the arguments on both sides while keeping the focus on how the foundation’s choices affect classrooms and programs. In a separate story on a bill that would have funded transitional kindergarten in the San Luis Coastal school district, she details how state-level legislation stalled and what the loss of that funding stream means for local early childhood offerings. Across these pieces she treats budgets, endowments and state bills as central education stories, not sidebars.
Book challenges, school boards and superintendent races
Governance and political fights around schools sit at the core of her coverage. Dittenber reports closely on school boards, including a high-profile vote in which a board rejected a push to ban two books from a school library. In that story she focuses on the specific titles at issue, the arguments made by residents and trustees, and the policy standards the board applied in reaching its decision. She also follows education leadership contests, such as the campaign of an education figure running for SLO County schools superintendent, explaining what the role controls and how the candidate’s priorities connect to long-running local debates. Her work in this area tends to highlight how values fights over curriculum, books and leadership translate into concrete policy and resource choices for districts.
Cal Poly, records and power around campus
Higher education figures prominently in her beat, with Cal Poly serving as a recurring anchor. Dittenber’s examination of the most competitive majors at Cal Poly gives readers a ranked view of programs where demand far outstrips available seats, tying admissions numbers to broader questions about access and capacity. In another direction, her reporting on the SLO mayor leaking a grand jury report to Cal Poly shows her interest in how university leadership intersects with city politics and legal processes. That story leans on public records and emphasizes accountability for both civic officials and campus leaders. Together, these pieces show her tendency to treat the university not just as a campus, but as a powerful institution whose decisions ripple through the wider education landscape.
Beat approach and background
Across her Tribune work, Dittenber’s reporting centers on education but regularly crosses into policy and government accountability when those forces touch schools. Her fellowship role underscores that focus, with an explicit emphasis on education, policy and holding public institutions to account. She often “merges beats” by connecting school board actions, city hall decisions, state legislation and campus governance within a single narrative about how students, families and educators are affected. Before joining The Tribune, she reported for an education-focused newsroom, adding experience with school and state policy coverage that informs her current beat. The result is a body of work that treats education as a full ecosystem, from classroom outcomes and book lists to funding structures and the power networks around them.
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.