Finalist: Bianca Vázquez Toness and Sharon Lurye of the Associated Press

Bianca Vázquez Toness joined AP’s Education Reporting Network in 2022. She is the 2020 winner of Education Writers Association’s top award for beat reporting for her work at The Boston Globe. Toness, who is bilingual in English and Spanish, has worked as a radio and text reporter. She’s been based in several U.S. cities, along with Mexico City and New Delhi. She has covered everything from tech to agriculture to immigration, but keeps coming back to stories about kids. She has held both the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at M.I.T. and the International Reporting Project Fellowship at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. She is based in Boston.

Sharon Lurye is AP’s education data reporter. Previously, she covered education as a freelancer for The Hechinger Report, EdSurge and others, and served as a data fellow for U.S. News & World Report. She also worked for the Columbia Journalism School’s Teacher Project, where she contributed to award-winning education investigations. Lurye, a former math teacher, is based in New Orleans.