Todd Wallack
Todd Wallack examines how education systems affect the choices, costs and outcomes facing students and families, with a particular focus on higher education and the programs that promise credentials and credits at speed and low cost. He is a national education reporter for The Washington Post, with an emphasis on accountability reporting across colleges, tests and alternative providers.
Higher education choices and pathways
Wallack’s recent work includes an interactive feature that follows three students weighing multiple college offers and deciding where to enroll, highlighting how tuition, financial aid and personal fit shape their final choices. In that piece, he uses narrative reporting and clear explanations of competing financial packages to show how complex and high‑stakes the decision can be for students navigating today’s admissions and affordability landscape. He also engages directly with students and parents to understand how they approach major milestones, such as choosing between standardized tests like the SAT and ACT for college entrance, drawing on their experiences as he reports on test selection and its consequences. Across this strand of his beat, he focuses on practical decisions and trade‑offs rather than abstract debates, grounding policy issues in the real paths that individual learners take through the system.
Education accountability and fast‑track programs
Wallack reports on institutions and companies that market accelerated or low‑cost routes to college credit, scrutinizing what they promise and what those pathways actually mean for students. One Washington Post investigation looks at organizations that are not accredited colleges but advertise fast, cheap ways to earn college credits, examining the gap between marketing language and the realities of credit transfer and academic oversight. Another story centers on a public university program where students complete degrees in unusually short time frames, prompting questions from readers and highlighting how compressed timelines can shape perceptions of rigor and value. By pairing these cases, his coverage explores whether education offerings deliver on their promises, what risks accompany shortcuts through the system and how institutional incentives intersect with students’ need for affordability and speed.
Investigative background and data‑driven reporting
Before joining The Washington Post, Wallack worked in investigative roles in other newsrooms, including reporting as a correspondent on an investigative team and serving in newsroom leadership. At WBUR, a public radio station, he worked on an investigative unit and later held a deputy managing editor role overseeing coverage, experience that gives him a deep familiarity with complex projects and long‑form accountability work. He has spoken publicly about the challenges journalists face obtaining, analyzing and explaining data, including in discussions of reporting on the covid‑19 pandemic, underscoring his comfort working with large datasets and technical material. These experiences inform his education coverage, which combines narrative case studies with close attention to evidence, documentation and the fine print in programs and policies, bringing an investigative lens to stories that are directly relevant to students and families.
National education beat
Wallack’s remit at The Washington Post is national, and his stories move across institutions and issues that matter to learners around the country rather than focusing on a single district or state. His author page presents him as a national education reporter, reflecting a beat that spans college choice, test selection and alternative routes to earning credits, all framed through the concrete decisions and trade‑offs facing students and parents. Whether following individual students through the admissions process or examining programs that promise to compress time and cost, he keeps the focus on how policy and market choices play out in everyday educational 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.