Where they are now: Mandy McLaren

August 19, 2026

An occasional series on former IRW interns.

Ten years ago, Mandy McLaren had a choice: Stay in New Orleans, where she'd spent seven years as a teacher and administrator. Or put the journalism degree she earned years earlier at Boston University to work.

McLaren was on track to becoming a principal, and said it would have been an opportunity to have more impact. But the complexities and challenges of the school system made her wonder if she could instead combine her areas of expertise and make a bigger difference as an education reporter. 

So on a whim one morning in 2016, McLaren thought: Why not just try? After encouragement from a friend, she applied to the journalism master’s program at American University, and before she had a chance to apply to other schools, she heard she had been accepted. McLaren was moving to Washington, D.C. 

“I knew that I needed something to sort of fast-track me back into the industry, and everything that I had learned about AU and the opportunities at the Investigative Reporting Workshop really led to that,” McLaren said. 

She arrived in the city in the thick of a presidential campaign and threw herself into the work, joining the Investigative Reporting Workshop as a graduate researcher and reporter. Her work led to an IRW collaboration with San Diego’s inewsource and KPBS to report on the burgeoning refugee population in their public schools. McLaren split her time between classes, IRW, and The Washington Post, where she was part of a graduate practicum working on in-depth stories, and later served as a dean's intern on the Metro desk.

Years of managing high-poverty urban classrooms, she said, had prepared her well for graduate school and her hectic schedule.

"Teaching was like the hardest thing I will ever do in my life," McLaren said. "And so after that, everything else sort of felt like a breeze."

Today, McLaren is the Enterprise and Investigations Editor at the Louisville Courier Journal. Before that, she was a reporter on The Boston Globe’s Great Divide team, an investigative unit covering educational inequities, where she won the Education Writers Association's Ronald Moskowitz Prize for Outstanding Beat Reporting and investigated special education access and literacy instruction across Massachusetts. Earlier, as an education reporter at the Courier Journal, she examined the improper use of mental health assessments by Kentucky's largest school district, stories that earned best investigative reporting of 2020 by the National Awards for Education Reporting. She was also a 2023 Goldsmith Prize semifinalist for her series "Between the Lines," and a 2022 Livingston Award finalist for "Magnetic Pull" and its podcast, "A Bad School."

“With my roots at AU and IRW, there's been just this progression of experiences that you can look back on and realize ‘Maybe I am prepared for this, maybe I can do this, maybe I can be the one to take this role,’ ” McLaren said. “You have backing from IRW and AU that says ‘... you do belong there, and you can do this.’ ”

—Profile by Luisa Clausen