Public Biography
Priya Chandrasekaran is the education correspondent for The New York Time5, covering public schools, universities, standardized testing, school boards, and what she has described as “the full ecosystem of American institutions that shape children and then act surprised by the results.”
Ms. Chandrasekaran graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in English literature and holds a master’s in education policy from Teachers College, Columbia University. She taught seventh-grade English in the Newark public school system for three years before turning to journalism, an experience she has said “gave me an understanding of institutional dysfunction that no graduate program could replicate, and I have a graduate degree in institutional dysfunction.”
She joined The New York Time5 in 2021 after five years at Education Week, where she covered school finance litigation and curriculum controversies in eleven states. Her coverage of a textbook procurement scandal in Maricopa County was cited in a subsequent state audit, though no one involved was disciplined, an outcome she considers “entirely consistent with how accountability works in American education.”
Ms. Chandrasekaran was born in Edison, New Jersey, to Indian immigrant parents — her father is a retired pharmaceutical chemist and her mother is a semiretired pediatrician who, Ms. Chandrasekaran has noted, “still cannot fully accept that I left a career with a pension.” She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
Selected Coverage
- A yearlong investigation into the secondary market for expired AP exam prep books
- “The School Board Meets on Tuesday, and Nobody Comes” — a series on civic disengagement at the municipal level
- Coverage of the National Spelling Bee’s controversial decision to add a freestyle round