Linda Lutton is an award-winning education reporter at Chicago’s NPR-affiliate station, WBEZ, where she covers major news, issues and debates in education as they play out in Chicago and the suburbs.

Her Spencer-supported project aired at WBEZ radio in 2016. “The View From Room 205” is an hour-long radio documentary in 10 parts about the impact of poverty on Chicago schools, past and present.

Lutton’s enterprise reporting has examined Chicago’s dropout crisis, race and segregation in schools, and school performance. Linda worked on the 2013 This American Life episodes “Harper High School Parts 1 and 2,” which documented life in a school located in a neighborhood racked by violence. The broadcast won the 2014 Peabody Award, Columbia’s duPont Award, among others.

Linda’s radio work has been broadcast on This American Life, NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things ConsideredThe World and Marketplace. Her print reporting has appeared in the Chicago ReaderIn These TimesEducation Week, the Chicago Tribune, and others. Her investigation into a corrupt south suburban school superintendent won a national 2005 Education Writers Association grand prize. The year earlier, she won the Studs Terkel Award for reporting on Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods. 

Lutton used her Spencer year creating a one-hour radio documentary examining the intersection of poverty and education through the lens of a high-poverty Chicago elementary school.

Prior to joining WBEZ in 2008, Linda worked for three years as a freelance reporter and radio producer in Michoacán, Mexico and as the lead education reporter at the Daily Southtown, where she covered education issues across 85 school districts in Chicago’s south suburbs.

Linda has a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was born and raised in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. She currently lives in Chicago with her husband, artist-muralist Hector Duarte, and their three children.