2025-2026

Eleni Schirmer writes about social movements, public education, and how ordinary people create power. She has written about the rise of aging student debtors, the crisis of debt-financed education, fast-food workers’ fight for living wages, and the unfolding power of teachers’ unions, with bylines in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Nation and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she wrote a political biography of the state’s largest public-sector union, the Milwaukee teachers’ union, which was awarded the Frank Zeidler Labor History award. From 2022-2025, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Concordia University’s Social Justice Centre in Montréal, Quebec.

As a Spencer fellow, Eleni will explore the crisis of aging student debtors. In an era of declining wages, faulty relief mechanisms and compounding interest, Americans are not aging out of their debts—they are aging into them. A supposed pathway into the middle-class has snared millions into a lifetime of debt, for which death may currently be their only relief option.

Brandi Kellam is an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist covering higher education at the intersection of housing inequality. Most recently, she was a reporter for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, where she led the series “Uprooted”, investigating how universities expanded campuses by displacing Black and marginalized communities. The series also exposed limited oversight of Virginia’s college presidents, allowing much of their correspondence to remain indefinitely shielded from public view. It further explored the present-day implications of university-led displacement in Black communities, including ongoing campus expansion resulting in complete erasure and the implementation of administrative policies that limited opportunities for Black student enrollment. “Uprooted” prompted the creation of a Virginia state legislative commission and a separate local task force in Newport News, both exploring redress for impacted families.

Brandi has received a Gracie Award, Columbia’s Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award, and top honors from the Education Writers Association, including the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize. She also received a Regional Emmy for directing the companion mini-documentary to “Uprooted.”

Brandi was previously a producer for NBC and CBS News. Her work has also appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education and ESSENCE. She began her journalism career co-hosting a public affairs radio program in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region.

As a Spencer Fellow, she will expand on her work in Virginia while further investigating how American universities across the country displaced marginalized communities.

Tara García Mathewson covers education for CalMatters; she joined the California nonprofit newsroom through its merger with The Markup, a nonprofit, investigative outlet challenging the tech industry to serve the public good. She has been writing about schools for more than a decade, first as a local reporter in Chicago’s northwest suburbs and then nationally. Her reporting has informed local and statewide policy as well as academic research and helped parents and educators better serve and advocate for the children in their care.

Before joining the staff at The Markup, Tara worked at The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit newsroom focused on innovation and inequality in education, where she explored the “Future of Learning” in K-12 schools and helped establish Hechinger’s investigative team.

Tara has been recognized for her beat reporting as well as features and investigations into Internet censorship, the edtech industry, punitive school discipline, and other topics. Her work has appeared in a variety of regional and national news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, USA Today, and Wired.

As a Spencer Fellow, Tara will examine the politicized history of bilingual education in the United States and how using English-only instruction to assimilate immigrants has hurt all of us.

Colette Coleman is a writer telling stories about what it means to belong. Her writing spans diverse topics, including education, real estate, wellness, race, equity, and the places where they intersect. Colette is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. Her articles there include an op-ed making the case for six-figure teacher pay; investigations into the hidden in plain sight racism that countless Black real estate agents face and the blatant discrimination that many women developers must overcome; and a feature on the “Blaxit” trend of African-Americans relocating to nations across Africa. Colette has been interviewed about her writing on CBS News, Brian Lehrer’s WNYC show, and others.

Prior to becoming a journalist, Colette worked at the Federal Reserve investigating bank fraud, with ed tech startups advising them on the K-12 market, and as a school teacher in Los Angeles and Central Java, Indonesia. A Brooklyn native, she has lived, worked and traveled in many countries across the globe, everywhere from Venezuela to Vanuatu. Colette is an alumna of Yale University and Teach For America. She is fluent in Spanish.

As a Spencer Fellow, Colette will examine what the end of affirmative action means for students, the legacy it leaves, and how the K-12 world should proceed in this new landscape.