I'm thrilled to announce that Jaden Edison is rejoining The Texas Tribune as our next K-12 education reporter. He starts on June 20. Jaden comes to us from the nonprofit Connecticut Mirror, where he has covered criminal justice and voting rights. He wrote about a women's prison that halted Muslim prayer services as war in the Middle East escalated; chronicled the impact on Black residents of a landmark police accountability law; and revealed how the state's lack of early voting has hurt Black and Latino residents.
Jaden graduated with honors from Columbia Journalism School in May 2022, with a focus on investigative journalism, and spent the next three months at the Tribune. Here, he covered breaking news — including the deaths of 53 migrants whose bodies were found in a tractor-trailer abandoned in the San Antonio area — and contributed to our early Uvalde coverage. Jaden also wrote movingly about the concerns of Black Texans two years after the murder of George Floyd.
Jaden grew up in Chicago until fourth grade, when his family moved to the Spring and Conroe area, just outside Houston. (He continued to spend many summers in Chicago after moving.) Jaden studied electronic media at Texas State University in San Marcos, graduating summa cum laude in 2021. He spent three years at the student paper, The University Star, rising to the position of editor in chief. He was a reporting intern at the Poynter Institute in the summer of 2021.
Jaden will be taking on one of the Tribune’s most urgent and high-profile beats. He'll be our lead writer on the school voucher debate, school boards' restrictions on instruction, school funding and teacher pay, school nutrition, school safety, and the intersection of the education system with the foster care, juvenile justice, mental health and immigration systems. He'll also head into classrooms to look at how technology continues to transform pedagogy and examine the complex and diverse expectations that Texas parents and communities have for their kids. This is a job that will blend mastery of policy as well as a passion for connecting policy stories to the lives and experiences of ordinary Texans.
Jaden joins a superb education team led by Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera and will work alongside Kate McGee, our higher ed reporter, and Sneha Dey, who covers pathways from education into the workforce.
We’ve got big things in store for you at The Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Join us for three days of big, bold conversations about politics, public policy and the day’s news.
