Jackie Mader

Jackie Mader is an award-winning journalist based in Austin, Texas. She currently covers early childhood education with an emphasis on policies and programs that impact young children and their families. She also writes a bi-weekly early ed newsletter for The Hechinger Report and supervises all multimedia elements of The Report. In her nine years at Hechinger, she has covered a range of topics including teacher preparation, special education and rural schools. She previously worked as a special education teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, and trained new teachers in Mississippi. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, USA Today, TIME and NBC News and has won several awards, including the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Nellie Bly Award from The New York Press Club and a Front Page Award from The Newswomen’s Club of New York. In 2021, she was one of two American journalists chosen for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma’s Early Childhood Development Fellowship.