Thad Moore
Thad Moore is an investigative reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who covers education and the institutions around it through an accountability lens. He follows what happens when schools, colleges and public systems break down, focusing on the consequences for students, families and communities rather than treating each story as an isolated incident. His reporting is built around documents, expert sources and clear explanation, turning complex institutional failures into readable narratives.
Investigating colleges in crisis
Moore’s education coverage often centers on colleges under scrutiny, especially where leadership decisions intersect with allegations of sexual abuse or misconduct. In his reporting on Truett McConnell University facing a lawsuit from the president removed in the wake of a sex abuse scandal, he traces how the institution handled the allegations and the power struggle that followed, treating the case as a test of governance and accountability in a faith-based school. He uses lawsuits, internal records and on-the-record responses to show who knew what, when, and what that meant for students and staff caught inside the institution. The work is less about a single personnel dispute and more about how a college’s promises to protect people stand up when its own leaders are implicated.
Explaining how public systems affect daily life
Alongside campus-focused stories, Moore reports on the infrastructure and public services that shape daily life for the same communities his education beat serves. In coverage of Metro Atlanta’s smelly, odd-tasting drinking water in the fall, he connects residents’ complaints to seasonal changes in the lake that supplies the region, explaining how the slow autumn turnover of that reservoir affects the water system. He breaks down technical processes in plain language, distinguishing what is a nuisance from what poses a safety risk, and pressing officials to explain what they are doing in response. The result is service-oriented accountability reporting: readers see both why a problem is happening and who is responsible for fixing it.
Background in statehouse and accountability reporting
Before joining The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Moore reported for The Post and Courier, where he covered South Carolina’s state government. That statehouse experience gives his education and infrastructure reporting a clear sense of how policy, budgets and oversight structures actually work. He tends to follow decisions from boardrooms and legislative chambers down to classrooms, campuses and local utilities, showing how formal votes and bureaucratic choices play out in real people’s lives. His stories often map out chains of responsibility, making it harder for powerful institutions to deflect blame when systems fail.
Award-winning local investigations
Moore’s work has been recognized with a National Headliner Award for local news beat coverage as part of a team at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That recognition reflects his ability to sustain coverage over time, returning to the same troubled institutions as new documents emerge, lawsuits advance or oversight failures come into sharper focus. His reporting style favors careful accumulation of facts over sweeping rhetoric, building pressure through detail and follow-up rather than through opinion. Across education and related public systems, he treats each story as another piece in a longer-running examination of how institutions live up to the responsibilities they claim to hold.
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.