Columbia Journalism School Announces 2025-2026 Spencer Education Fellows

Four accomplished education writers will join Columbia Journalism School for the 2025-2026 academic year as the newest group of Spencer Education Journalism Fellows to study and produce significant works of education journalism. 

The group includes one residential fellow, Tara García Mathewson, a long-time, award-winning education journalist for outlets including The Markup, The Hechinger Report and CalMatters. García Mathewson will use her year to investigate the history and significance of bilingual education in the United States.

There will be three non-residential fellows. Colette Coleman, a former teacher and regular contributor to The New York Times, will examine what the end of affirmative action means for students. Eleni Schirmer, a scholar with a Ph.D. in educational policy studies who has also contributed to The New Yorker and The Nation, will write a book about the crisis of aging student debtors. And Brandi Kellam, an investigative journalist, will continue her award-winning work on how university expansion has displaced Black and marginalized communities in Virginia – and beyond.   

A distinguished board of scholars and journalists selected the winners earlier in the spring from a record number of applications. The Spencer Foundation awards each fellow with project expenses plus a stipend ($85,000 residential, $43,000 non-residential). In addition, the fellows receive research and journalistic support from Columbia professors at the Journalism School as well as throughout the university. 

“We are thrilled to welcome this talented, driven group of writers, scholars, and journalists to our Spencer Fellowship network,” said Sarah Carr, director of the Spencer Fellowship who, as a fellow in 2010-11, reported the book “Hope Against Hope,” about New Orleans schools. “Each of their projects is timely and deeply resonant in this moment in our country’s history. We look forward to welcoming them to a network of over 50 fellows who have produced impactful books, documentaries, magazine articles, podcasts, and more.”
 

Colette Coleman’s writing spans diverse topics, including education, real estate, wellness, race, equity — and the places where they intersect. Coleman 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. Coleman has been interviewed about her writing on CBS News, Brian Lehrer's WNYC show, and others. 

Prior to becoming a journalist, Coleman worked at the Federal Reserve investigating bank fraud, with ed tech startups, 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. Coleman is an alumna of Yale University and Teach For America. 

As a Spencer Fellow, Coleman 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.

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, García Mathewson 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.

García Mathewson has been recognized for her beat reporting as well as her investigations of bilingual education, Internet censorship, corporal punishment and other topics. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, USA Today, and Wired.As a Spencer Fellow, García Mathewson 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.

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.

Kellam 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.”

Kellam 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.  

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, Schirmer 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.

For more on the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship visit: https://spencerfellows.org