EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: 4 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2017

EVENT: “Failure Factories: When Education Policies Desert our Children”

Livingston Award-winning journalists and education policy experts will discuss the 2015 Tampa Bay Times’ investigative series about a Florida school board that voted to abandon racial integration. They will address the policy changes prompted by the news report and the current shape of racial segregation in schools across the country.

In 2007, the Pinellas County School Board abandoned integration, promising schools in poor, black neighborhoods more money, staff and resources. None of those things were delivered. Eight years later, Tampa Bay Times reporters Lisa Gartner, Michael LaForgia and Nathaniel Lash analyzed data from seven years of school disciplinary records and found a precipitous decline in student performance as well as alarming rates of violence in five elementary schools following the 2007 decision. Their investigative series received attention from the U.S. Education Secretary and led to several reforms.

Brian Jacob, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy and director of the Ford School of Public Policy’s doctoral program, will moderate the event.

Panelists:

• Lisa Gartner is a writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. In 2016, she and Times reporters Cara Fitzpatrick and Michael LaForgia won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for “Failure Factories.” The series also won a Livingston Award.
• Michael LaForgia is investigations editor at the Tampa Bay Times. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting—in 2014 for exposing problems in a Hillsborough County homeless program and in 2016 for the “Failure Factories” series, for which he also won a Livingston Award.
• Nathaniel Lash is a data reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. He was a fellow at the Center for Investigative Reporting, an intern at Newsday and a news applications developer at the Wall Street Journal. In 2016, he won a Livingston Award for “Failure Factories.”
• Tabbye Chavous is the director of the National Center for Institutional Diversity and a U-M professor of education and psychology. She is also co-founder, co-director and principal investigator at U-M’s Center for the Study of Black Youth in Context.

The Livingston Awards for Young Journalists are the most prestigious honor for professional journalists under age 35. Livingston judges, drawn from the most accomplished figures in the profession, select winners in local, national and international reporting. The Livingston Awards are a program of Wallace House at the University of Michigan, home to the Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists.

The event is free to the public. A reception with the speakers follows the discussion.

PLACE: Annenberg Auditorium (Weill Hall), Ford School of Public Policy, 735 S. State St., Ann Arbor

SPONSORS: Wallace House, Ford School of Public Policy, Education Policy Initiative, School of Education

INFORMATION: Wallace House, Failure Factories