2021-22

Kavitha Cardoza is a freelance journalist and has covered education and poverty for almost 20 years.

She is a frequent contributor to NPR and previously worked at Education Week/PBS Newshour, WAMU, (the NPR affiliate in Washington, D.C.) and Illinois Public Radio (the NPR affiliate in Springfield, Illinois). She’s worked on podcasts, written print articles and has published academic papers.

She has received multiple national awards for her work, including Public Radio News Directors Incorporated (PRNDI) first place award in 2015 for her documentary, Breaking Ground: Lower Income, Higher Ed, and a 2013 Education Writers Association award for investigative Reporting on Adult Education. Her documentary series ‘Breaking Ground’ aired on more than 150 public radio stations.

Kavitha has previously taught journalism courses at Berkeley, American University and the University of Illinois at Springfield. She has a master’s degrees in broadcast journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master’s degree in communication from the Manipal Institute of Communication in India.

With a Spencer Fellowship, Kavitha plans to look at the growing inequality among children living in Washington, D.C. looking into how much further behind is the pandemic, coupled with remote learning, leaving behind poor and minority children in D.C.? And whether the federal infusion of money will directly and substantially address educational challenges like teacher quality and test scores.  Can schools even address these challenges and if not, what else will it take?

Kavitha lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and puppy. Her stepsons, who are away at college, cannot understand why she’s so excited about being a student again.

Nirvi Shah is senior deputy editor at POLITICO, where she oversees coverage of education and cannabis policy news, among other work, and has covered education, including about the pandemic. She is the founding editor of POLITICO Pro Education, a subscription news service, created in 2013. She also worked as expansion editor for POLITICO’s operation in Europe, overseeing the launches of countless policy news products and editing policy and politics news from across the continent.

Prior to joining POLITICO, she worked at Education Week, The Miami Herald and The Palm Beach Post, covering local and national education for most of her career.

Nirvi will spend her fellowship year reporting on and researching the role of teachers unions during the pandemic and their future role in education policymaking.

Patrick O’Donnell was a reporter at The Plain Dealer for more than 27 years, the last nine covering the Cleveland Municipal School District and state education issues in Ohio. He spent much of the last year covering the effects of the pandemic on Cleveland’s schools for The 74 Million.

In his time at The Plain Dealer, he covered two teacher strikes, three school shootings, and expansion of the Say Yes to Education college promise program to Cleveland. He won state awards for his 2015 coverage of attempts by Ohio’s online charter schools to evade the consequences of their poor performance and for his overall coverage of schools in 2019.

He was an Education Writers Association fellow in 2018, allowing him and a colleague to visit Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands to learn how European models of apprenticeships and internships could be adapted here in the U.S. His fellowship project will expand on that work and look at how Cleveland and the country can provide more meaningful career pathways for young people, particularly through work-based learning.

Sara Ganim Cevallos is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, and the current Hearst Journalism Fellow at the University of Florida’s Brechner Center, where she hosts the podcast Why Don’t We Know. 

Ganim Cevallos started her career as a newspaper reporter and won a Pulitzer Prize at age 24 for breaking and covering the investigation into former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of young boys.

Ganim Cevallos then spent seven years at CNN, focused on investigative reporting and other important stories, such as drinking water issues in rural america, the rise of Antifa, and conflicts and ethics issues in former President Trump’s cabinet.

In 2020, she made her first independent film, No Defense, which garnered film festival recognition, and she has consulted or reported for several other films, including the Emmy-nominated films, Deadly Haze and Paterno.

Sara plans to spend her time as a Spencer Fellow researching and writing about the weaponization of privacy laws in public education, and how often times laws that were meant to protect students are instead used to keep them in the dark about critical information.