 Thank you for coming. My name is Lynette Clemetson and I'm the director of Wallace House here at the University of Michigan. Wallace House is a program for journalists here at the University. We run two programs. We have the Night Wallace Fellowships for Journalists. That is an academic year-long fellowship. We bring roughly 20 fellow journalists a year, mid-career journalists, here to the University for a year of immersive study and research and fellowship with one another, working on areas of journalism that they as individuals are specializing in. We have our Night Wallace Fellows in the room. If you could all just stand so people know who you are. And our fellows every year come from around the world and so we always enjoy a wonderful mix. Some of them may have moved in and out of your classes and they move around campus because they're taking courses here at the University and oftentimes we find that people are unaware of our program and so I want to be very deliberate about saying we are Wallace House and in fact from here we are just down the street. We are downhill past the rock, make a left on Oxford and we sit right on Oxford Road in a beautiful house called Wallace House hence the name of our program. The other program that we administer from Wallace House is the reason we are here today. It is the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. It is an annual awards program that recognizes excellence in journalists under 35 and despite what suggestions to the contrary might be there is an enormous amount of really excellent journalism being done in the United States right now and it is not just by seasoned journalists, the young journalists working around the country at newspapers, at websites, at broadcasts, local stations, at national stations, at networks. People are doing incredible work focusing on accountability, storytelling, spotting trends in society and starting conversations and we at Wallace House, part of our mission is elevating the work of journalists to spark civic engagement and conversation that extends beyond someone's engagement with an individual story. So we have brought here today winners of our local prize for local journalism from the Livingston's last year and you will meet them in a moment but we want to bring Livingston Award winning conversations to this campus every year and so you will be hearing more about it. We do a range of events around campus and I would like to invite you all to one we have coming up later in the month. The topic I think is as interesting as the one we will have a conversation about today. It is called Leaks, Whistleblowers and Big Data, Collaborative Journalism Across Borders. The event is going to be held on February 20th at 3 p.m. in the Rackham Amphitheater and we hope to see some of you there as well and to increase your engagement with our programs at Wallace House. I would also like to thank our co-sponsors for this event. One of the things that we prize and what makes it so special for us to have this home for journalism at the University of Michigan is our ability to collaborate with schools and departments and units across the university to bring different departments together because it sparks more interesting conversations and so I would like to thank our co-sponsors for this event, the Gerald R. Forst School of Public Policy, the Education Policy Initiative and the School of Education and I'm going to turn things over to our moderator who comes from the Education Policy Initiative here. Brian Jacob has agreed to moderate the conversation with this group of journalists and policy experts here today. He's the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy. He's a professor of economics, co-director of the Education Policy Initiative and Youth Policy Lab and director of the Ford Schools Doctoral Program. He leads ongoing research collaborations with policy makers and practitioners including the State of Michigan Department of Education, the D.C. Public Schools and the Miami-Dade Public Schools. I thought he was the perfect person to jump in the weeds and make this conversation lively for you. Those of you who are coming in, please come in. I think we have some seats scattered through the middle here. There's a few down here. And with that, I'll turn it over to Brian Jacob. Thank you all for coming. Good afternoon. Thank you, Lynette. It's my pleasure to serve as moderator for this panel. And I would also like to thank the various co-sponsoring organizations and also some of our distinguished guests. We have Martha Darling, who is a longtime friend of the Ford School who is able to join us here today. And so today we're going to hear a story about how local education policies can dramatically affect school climate, student experiences and academic outcomes, and the role that the community, local school boards, administrators, teachers, parents in the press can play in making positive or not so positive changes in policy. We are pleased to welcome our guests from the Tampa Bay Times who authored the Failure Factory series. It's won multiple awards, including the Livingston Award now. I'm going to introduce our speakers shortly. The format will be each of the panelists will speak for five or 10 minutes, and then we'll open up the floor to kind of audience questions and have a discussion. So to facilitate the questions, we're asking you to please write your questions on note cards that will be available when you came in. We have folks to pass out more if we need some. Is that right, Julie? Do we have people passing out things? You can either write your questions on note cards or post them via Twitter using the hashtag, hashtag Wallace House. We'll have some of the Night Wallace Fellows will collect and collate the questions and ask them to our panelists. We'll move kind of to moderate the Q&A at that point. So with us here today, starting at my left here, we have Michael LaHorgia. He's an investigations editor at the Tampa Bay Times where he heads up a dedicated investigations team. He's twice won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 2014 for exposing problems in the Hillsborough County Homeless Program. And then in 2016, for the Failure Factory series, he joined the Times in 2012. To his left, we have Lisa Gardner is a writer on the Enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times where she previously covered Pinellas County Schools in higher education. She joined the Times in 2013 and started her journalism career on the education beat for the Washington Examiner in the D.C. metro area. And she attended Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. To Lisa's left, we have 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. Nathaniel holds a degree in news editorial journalism from the University of Urbana-Champaign. And finally, to Nathaniel's left, we are pleased to have Professor Tabby Chavis to join us. She's a professor of education and a professor of psychology here at the University. She's the co-founder and one of the current directors of U of M Center for the Study of Black Youth in Context. And currently the director of the National Center for Institutional Diversity. Her work is, you know, over the years has touched on many kind of the pressing education policy issues that will be discussed in the context of the failure factory. So we felt it would be great to have her voice in the discussion as well. So with that, I'm going to kind of give the lectern to Michael who will start off our panel discussion. Thank you. First, I want to say that I want to say thank you to Wallace House for having us out and to the Ford School for hosting this event. I know that I speak on behalf of the whole team when I say that we are delighted to be here. So thanks. So okay, we're going to jump in. I don't have a lot of time for my section here, but what I'm going to try to do is steer you guys through two sort of separate things. And that is I want to let you in a little bit to the reporting process. And I also want to kind of go over briefly what it is that we uncovered in the course of about 18 months of reporting on this series in Pinellas County, Florida. So to begin, I'd like to show you a chart, an interactive sort of trailer that we put together to kick off our series. And this was done by Nathaniel with some input from other people. So the title is why Pinellas County is the worst place in Florida to be black and go to public school. Nathaniel is a pretty good coder usually. Okay, here we go. 84% of black elementary school students in Pinellas are failing state exams. Almost every other county does better. Only seven of Florida's 67 counties do worse. All are poor, rural places. Pinellas has four times as many students as all of them combined. Pinellas was much better off in 2007. These lines show how integrated South County elementary schools used to be. Then the school board abandoned integration. The schools in South Pinellas started changing. Five schools changed the most. They became a little more segregated. And a little more segregated. Until they became extreme outliers. Today, Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo and Melrose are the most segregated schools in Pinellas. As the schools became more separate, they became less equal. Their test scores got steadily worse. Today they score worse than any school in the county. They score worse than almost any school in the state. Ten Florida elementary schools have similar failure rates. Takeaway privately run charters, and there are eight. Takeaway schools for children with disabilities or behavior problems, and there are six. Takeaway a non-traditional early learning center, and look what's left. The five elementary schools in Pinellas County's black neighborhoods. Melrose is the worst performing school in Florida. In 2014, 160 children there took state exams. 154 failed reading or math. Only six passed both. Who's responsible? And that was the question that really sort of launched our series. Right here we had a coming Thursday hashtag failure factories. Sort of transformer style. We wanted to engage people and sort of build a little bit of buzz for our series ahead of time. And it worked. We got a lot of advance attention for the first part of the story, which was good. It helped the impact of the series. So here's how it got started. As was said earlier, I'm on the investigations team at the Tampa Bay Times. But this story was really one that came out of the beat. The daily grind where Lisa was laboring along with my wife, Kara Fitzpatrick, who is not here with us today. Each of them had sort of been encountering trends in their day-to-day beat coverage that were raising larger questions about what was going on with black students in Pinellas County schools. For her part, Kara, who had covered schools in four other large school districts in Florida by the point or by the time she arrived at the Tampa Bay Times in 2012, was noticing that black kids were doing worse on standardized tests in Pinellas than they were doing in any of the other school districts that she covered, which was a little odd. It didn't make any sense because she had worked in places like Broward County and Palm Beach County, which has communities like Belglade in it, some of the most impoverished places in the U.S. And she had experience looking at test scores in places like Duval County, which has some of the highest rates of violence, violent crime in Florida. There's a neighborhood there that is so violent it's nicknamed Lil Bagdad, right? And those kids in those schools were doing two and three times as well as black kids in our schools. And we didn't have the same types of broad brush societal problems that these other places had. So the question of what was going on was a big one. And interestingly, Lisa, who had come from Washington, was interested in looking at the punishment of black children in our schools, and particularly young black kids. She requested some data like this here that showed that young black kids in our school district were being punished at rates that far outstripped the rates that white kids were being punished. And it seemed like they were being punished more harshly for minor sort of hard to define offenses. And so that was a second question that sort of really begged answering. At that point, we on the investigations team sort of got involved. If you guys have seen the movie Spotlight, that's sort of what we do only. We don't have a dorky name. We brought us in and we decided that, okay, this is probably two sides of the same story. And rather than treating it as a separate issue, we should put it together and explore it as sort of inquiry into one school district's attitude toward their black students. And that's how we approached it from that point on. We fanned out to find the answer. We brought in Nathaniel to analyze millions of rows of data from all over the place, all different sources. And we conducted hundreds of interviews with children, parents, teachers, administrators, policy experts, and a bunch of others. These are some photos sort of behind the scenes of the time when we were doing it. That's Kara interviewing a kid in a credit recovery class at one of our high schools. That's the photographer on the project, Dirk Shad, clowning around with one of the kids he was photographing. That's Nathaniel figuring out what he wants to order for lunch. That's how data guys work. That's me. That's my Al Pacino face. It terrifies public officials whenever I'm around. I was at a meeting with black community leaders. It was a lot of off hours. It was a lot of working around the clock. This is us on a weekend trying to tease out the answer to a data problem. That's Nathaniel. And my colleague and friend, Adam Playford, who is the director of data, the data editor at our newspaper, sitting at my kitchen table with my daughter trying to work out a thorny problem. And the irony is it looks like she's the only one who was working at this time. There's Lisa in the midst of an interview with a child that featured in one of our stories about over-disciplining kids. 18 months later, you can see I just grabbed a screenshot of the folder on my computer where this data is stored. The data, the interviews, the documents that we used. And it was over 26 gigabytes of information that we had pulled together. What we learned, so what we came away with after doing all of this sort of intensive scrutiny of this problem, was that this was not an inevitable occurrence. This wasn't a product of some sort of immutable truth about the world that black kids, when you concentrate them in a place, are just going to do worse at school. This wasn't like a product of single-parent homes or low-parent engagement, or any of the normal sort of excuses that are held up to explain away problems like this. What we found was this was, you know, completely set race aside for a second. This was a story about policymakers making concrete decisions in the real world and deciding where to devote their money and resources and time and attention. And I can explain to you a little bit how we reached that conclusion over the next couple of slides. The first story, so the story came out in five parts. The first one focused on a decision by the Pinellas County School Board to step away from a controlled-choice system of school zoning for boundaries, boundary attendance, and toward a system of neighborhood schools. That had the result of making the schools that were immediately proximate to the black neighborhoods in St. Petersburg majority black, and that included these five elementary schools that we ended up focusing on. At the time, the policymakers who were debating this measure, they knew what they were getting into. I mean, that was one thing that was very clear from the record, from the minutes that we perused, from the clips and from the recordings that we polled. There was no question that this was going to be an issue that they needed to focus on if they were going to make this decision. And that is, what are you going to do when you have a population of kids, forget race, who have higher needs? There's higher rates of poverty. There are higher rates of all sorts of things that need extra counselors or behavior specialists or resources in the classroom. And those kids previously were distributed across 18 different schools. Now you're going to collapse those down into five schools. So they're going to go from a place where they had 18 schools worth of guidance counselors or behavior specialists or resource people, and suddenly, boom, they're down to five. So to get around that, what the school district promised was we are going to flood these schools with extra money and resources. We're going to hire more teacher's aides. We're going to devote what we need to devote to make sure that there aren't any of these problems that you all are predicting will happen. And that didn't come to pass. For a variety of reasons that we can talk about. Basically, what did come to pass less than a decade later was that 95% of the black kids tested at these schools were failing reading or math, making the black neighborhoods in South St. Pete the most concentrated site of academic failure in all of Florida. I mean, all of these schools were the 15 worst schools in Florida, and they were concentrated within a six square mile area. You could walk from one to the other. Teacher turnover was a chronic problem, leaving some kids to cycle through a dozen teachers in a single year. In 2014, more than half of the teachers in these schools asked for transfers out, and at least three of them walked off the job without giving any notice. As I said before, this all tied back to a decision that the school board made in 2007. It was a recent phenomenon. By 07, when the board ended integration, black students at the schools had posted gains on standardized tests in three of the four previous years. None of the schools was ranked lower than a C at the time of the decision. At the time that we published this story, all had F ratings. After reshaping the schools, the district funded for them erratically. Some years they got less money per student than other schools, including those in more affluent parts of the county. In 2009, at least 50 elementary schools got more money per student than Campbell Park, one of the five schools that we're going to talk about. Other districts with higher passing rates were doing way more to aid their black students, including creating special offices to target minority achievement, tracking black students' progress in real time, and offering big bonuses to incentivized teachers to come and work in the schools. Pinellas was doing none of those things when we reported this. The second part of the story was something that came out of our outreach to sort of the people in the community. We had done a lot of data work that Nathaniel is going to talk about, but we needed to supplement that with real stories from the community. We found out and interviewed more than 100 parents and families of more than 100 students in these schools. One of the things, as we were doing this, as we were sort of envisioning what types of stories we might tell, we hadn't really pegged violence in the schools as a potential area of focus. But one of the things that families kept telling us over and over again was, well, my kid can't learn because of the disruptions and the violent behavior of one or two other kids in the school, to the point where we decided we had to take a look at it. The little girl in the picture here is a prime example of that. Her mother told us a story. Her name is Alana Crawford. Her mom told us a story about how she was so bullied and tormented at the school, at one of these five schools, that she ended up laying down in the car pickup line in the path of oncoming cars and telling a teacher that she didn't want to live anymore. When we started looking into these reports of violent incidents, we found that in Pinellas County's most segregated elementary schools, the five schools that we were focused on, violence was a part of daily life. Now, the thing that you got to keep in mind when we're talking about elementary schools is that these are kindergarteners through fifth grade. We found that children at these schools had been shoved, slapped, punched or kicked more than 7,500 times since 2010. The equivalent of eight times a day, every day, for five years straight. It was more violent incidents at these five schools than in all of the county's 17 high schools combined during the same period that we looked at. The incidents at the schools had more than doubled since 2010, which was when the sort of fallout from the decision to abandoned integration in the school district really started hitting terminal mass. And this was happening even as other schools in the county were seeing drops in violent incidents. So what was causing it, we found that for years district leaders gave the schools the same number of employees to handle eight times the amount of violence faced at the other elementary schools. We talked to teachers in these schools who described calling for help in their classrooms only to be ignored because there was nobody on hand to respond. Those same teachers often were overwhelmed. Many said that they didn't have the training and the types of techniques that they needed to keep control of a classroom or to intervene when bad behavior was happening. And part of that tied back to the rampant turnover that was going on in these schools. Let's see here, what do we have? More than half of the teachers at the schools requested transfers out in 2014. And we also heard several accounts of teachers being taken away from these schools in ambulances after they had suffered attacks from students or panic attacks from the stress of what was going on. Part three built on what we learned about teachers. This is a picture of a kid named James Sampson who is in the second grade at Melrose, the worst elementary school in Florida, with his mom. And this kid was in rough shape when we met him. He could barely read the back of a rice and rony box. And part of the reason for that was the sort of progression of teachers that had been in front of him during his time at Melrose Elementary School. This is an excerpt from the story, but on his first day of his second year in second grade he had a teacher named Ms. Davis, but by the fourth day of school he had Mr. Ware and Ms. Flint, Ms. Schick, Mr. Gravely and Ms. Smith. At the end of the year basically he had had a dozen different teachers between August 2014 and June 2015. More than a quarter of his school year was taught by substitutes. So we built on that and we did an analysis with the help of Nat and some others that showed basically that black kids in the county's most segregated schools got worse teachers than children anywhere else in the county. The teachers in the wider schools were more experienced. They were more likely to stay in their jobs and more likely to have clean employment records than the ones who are in the segregated schools. The teachers in the mostly black schools were less experienced, more likely to quit in the middle of the year and more likely to have been flagged for incompetence or misconduct. The fourth part of our series had to do with discipline, over-disciplining black students compared to white students. And it's important to note here that we weren't looking at how the district handled incidents of violence like we had reported on in part two. In fact, we exclusively concentrated in this story on very minor sort of vague, hard-to-define offenses like defiance or disobedience or possession of an electronic device. Things that sort of can be interpreted in different ways by different administrators and teachers. And what we found was that black kids in Pinellas were suspended at rates seen in virtually no other large school district in Florida. It wasn't for acts of violence like I said, not even for borderline infractions, but for hard-to-define infractions such as not cooperating, unauthorized location, and minor class disruption. In the five years that we looked at, black kids lost a combined 45,942 school days to suspensions for these and other minor offenses. White kids who outnumber blacks in the district three to one lost 28,665 days by comparison. So this just gives you a little insight into sort of the process and the pressure that we were under as we were bending toward December in the production of these series. That's a stack of every draft that we had produced so far. And you can see it's almost a foot tall. This is a picture of my daughter editing our story on the day after Christmas. The final piece ran on December 27th. And that piece was this. It was about access to magnets and special programs. There's a program that we use in Pinellas County. It's a little bit of a holdover from the way things were done in the 70s. It's called a fundamental school. And what it is, is it was introduced back in the 70s alongside magnet programs. As a sort of back to basics, get tough sort of parental engagement at a premium model of schooling. And in Pinellas County, they are widely viewed as the best schools in the district. They perennially turn in the best standardized test scores and they report the lowest problems with behavior, excuse me, etc. What we found is that basically they were off limits to black kids because of a variety of sort of structural policy decisions that the school board had made. Probably the biggest of which had to do with the fact that they wouldn't provide busing to these schools. And not only did they not provide busing to these schools, but they also moved the ones that had been close to the black neighborhoods, away from the black neighborhoods, into predominantly white places. And that was it. So that's my overview. We'll turn it over to Nathaniel to do the rest. Michael did the slides for this one. So it's about as descriptive as he's going to get on that particular case. Wow, this doesn't pick up very far. I have to really lean into it. All right. So yeah, my name is Nathaniel Ash. I was the data reporter who worked on this along with Adam Playford, who was our data director. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how we approach kind of trying to get all this information, most of which isn't stuff that the school district was particularly interested in publicizing. Now we turned it into the foundation that we kind of built the series off of. So a lot of that was finding the proof on a few different levels. So we wanted to explain a few things, show that this was a unique and kind of tremendous problem. And we were drawing attention to that because this was something that we had been kind of covering for a long time, even before the schools became fully segregated. But we were kind of throwing them as kind of like, well, black student achievement is down and that sort of thing. So those were all kind of one offs, but we wanted to find a way to kind of capture the full scope of the problem and how bad it had gotten. So this map isn't, this map, which we kind of launched the series with, was a way of showing, hey, Pinellas, black students specifically are doing worse than black students in other districts around this state. And that was, we kind of alluded to that, where Pinellas is a fairly affluent county. You weren't seeing these sorts of things in other places. So we wanted to, we wanted to find a way to kind of prove that this was a unique problem and not just something like, well, some county is going to be the worse eventually, you know, if you rank them all up. But we wanted to find out how bad it was. And we kind of went about that by kind of cutting away from what people typically used for measuring student achievement. So when everything's published at the end of the day, everyone looks at reading, how, what percentage of the students by whatever way you want to slice and dice them, how many of them are passing reading according to state standards. And then they look in another bucket and they go to math scores and that sort of thing. They're like, well, how well are these students doing in math? But there wasn't, once we, once we started looking at it, we realized that, hey, maybe the thing that we need to be looking at is how, how many students are coming out with a good math, with a good mastery of reading and math. So that kind of thing, we kind of have to go to the state and say, we need you to show us how many people are passing both of these subjects. When we looked at that, it was kind of terrifying what we ended up seeing. We saw things like this, where a lot of schools, maybe up to three quarters of the kids, were passing both reading and math. And this is a class from Melrose. Was this just a third grade class? I don't remember. This was a third grade class at Melrose Elementary School, where literally only six people were actually being taught both reading and math. So when we look at something like this, we're seeing every school in the state and we're seeing how far away our schools are, not just in the county, but everywhere else in the entire state, by looking at this particular thing. This was something that the school district had never published before, and no one in the state had ever published before, and something that took hours and hours, probably actually weeks, and it ended up costing about $500 for the state to actually produce this kind of report. So this is the kind of approach that we kind of take in trying to find what's the best way to actually highlight the problem, to show how unique this problem is. As you saw in the chart that we started out with, the other schools that are performing below 10% of the students actually passing are kind of marked by charter schools, children with disabilities, and those were going against the students that we had in just our normal neighborhood schools in South St. Petersburg. So once we kind of got there, we went after the idea that a lot of this could have been explained away by the poverty, and as Michael kind of talked about, we had to look into the neighborhood and see if there was something unique. We go over reams of census data. We go over all these things that kind of point to this is a community that has some longstanding problems of poverty, but are kind of pale in comparison to things that you'd see in like Belglade, Florida, or in places in Jacksonville. But the thing that kind of made us feel when we started moving forward on the story that this wasn't something that could just be explained away by something that's going on at home, not at the school, was when we found, again, another one of those little data sets that nobody really pays too much attention to, which was the kindergarten readiness. So what ended up happening was every school basically did tests with their students before they were really taught how to read. And they measured certain things. Lisa, do you have a good idea of what they kind of covered in the fair readiness? So you would think that going into kindergarten, it's all like how many blocks can they stack on top of each other. But they actually do collect data on phonics, visual recognition. It's not like a written down test, but as anyone familiar with education policy knows, you can be on track or off track entering kindergarten. And what we found was that kids entering Pinellas were just as ready as kids anywhere else. Yeah, especially compared to... So students in other communities where there were worse problems as far as what we could tell from census and just by ground truthing and just sending reporters out there and that sort of thing, these students were entering better prepared, better ready to learn in ways that you would predict like, oh, these students are not going to be performing as the worst cohort of students, the most poorly performing cohort of students in the state. And that was kind of what kind of put the nail on the coffin for us as far as we were thinking, well, this really can't be explained away by something that's unique about Pinellas County in some other way. So those were the things that we start off. We were looking for proof that this is a tremendous problem. We have proof that this can't be explained away by a lot of the other factors that people in the community just kind of got used to saying like, well, everyone knows South St. Petersburg has always had these problems. It's always been this way. And if you've lived in St. Petersburg for a long time, you just kind of get used to that as the explanation for why this was happening. Then we finally came down to trying to find ways to measure... I don't know why this slide isn't here... to measure the effects of it. So I'm just, because we're a little bit pressed for time, we're going to talk about how we got after the idea of... we talked about that student who had, I think, 12 teachers over the course of... Yeah, I think even just in the first semester. In the first semester he had 12 different teachers. There is this thing of rampant turnover and the schools were kind of struggling to find teachers to replace people who quit, like those three who literally just walked off the job. Without notice and that sort of thing. And to actually understand that, you go to the district and we ask them like, hey, how often, how long did teachers stay here? How long are teachers actually staying teaching school? Because a lot of experts were telling us like a solid teaching core was going to be something that really gave a school a lot of stability. So what we kind of did was we then, again, went to the state because we wanted to know whether this was a unique problem to Penels, went to the state and found a way to basically get where every teacher teaching for a public school in the state of Florida, where they taught. And we got that each year over the course of a decade. And so, yeah, so we got the whole haystack. It was like, gosh, like three million records, all in all, just of every teacher and where they were in each of the schools. So what we ended up doing is we had to spend weeks kind of sticking. Each one of those years was kind of a disparate year because this wasn't the kind of thing. The district doesn't publish like, here's our turnover numbers, here's, because it doesn't reflect on them particularly well. State doesn't do it because they don't have any horse in that game. So what we did is we looked where every teacher came from who taught at the school. So this is what it looks like for Shore Acres Elementary School. And so each one of those little rows, this was a web app that we built to kind of explore the data. Each one of those little blue cells is kind of a year that each of those teachers, which is each row, spent at Shore Acres. So Shore Acres was, Shore Acres is a Title I school, right? Lisa, do you remember? I don't. So this isn't one of the schools that we looked at. This was not one of the wealthiest schools in the district, but it... It's a predominantly white school. Yeah. So it's a predominantly white school. And this kind of shows how stable the teaching core is. So you have some new teachers, some people who taught at private schools at other places in the district for a little while. And you kind of see like, you'll see in a moment what this actually means. And this is an average school in Pinellas County. This is Campbell Park, where for every teacher, just in 2013 or 2014, most, the vast majority, this was their first year teaching, for a lot of these, if you go further down, I don't have it on hand right now, but basically very few of these people stay for more than a year or two. And you can kind of see every teacher who's going there. So that was one of the ways that we kind of took stuff that we were hearing from the students, from the families, and finding ways to really measure the full extent of those effects. But every data set needs to be treated like another source. You've got to vet it, and you've got to see if what you see here actually matches up with what's going on on the ground. And with that, I'll turn that over to Lisa, and I'll be right back. Thanks for doing this. Hello. I know we're doing terrible on time, and I apologize. So I will be fast. Am I just flipping through like this? Oh, fantastic. Human reporting. Be cool if we had like alien reporting or something, but we don't today for you. I apologize. So that's me, and those are children. Don't miss the face of the kid on the right. But so as Nat was saying, it was important for this story, and in all stories, but especially here to talk to quote-unquote real people. Like Nat says, it validates the data. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of polls that then reflect a different outcome. Nothing comes to mind for me, but it is important to make sure that the conclusions you're drawing from the data are actually reflected out in the people that are living this reality on the ground. Just because we're sitting at our computer seeing results, we want to make sure it resonates with the community that we're covering. To do that, you actually have to go out into it and talk to people. And something that our editor, Chris Davis, said yesterday is that stories have impact when they make you feel something. And the human storytelling we did for failure factories went a long way, I think, in turning that data and these policy decisions into realities that played out for real people, you know, struggling to get their kids, you know, just not even an amazing education but an adequate education. So, it also was important because it led us on different reporting paths. Like Michael said earlier, we hadn't envisioned our story on behavior problems in the schools until we talked to kids and their parents and we're hearing this over and over again that this was a huge barrier to learning. So that's something that had we just relied on the data we would not have gotten in our stories. So, when we first started trying to find real people, we called churches, we talked to community leaders, we have a group called COQEBS, Concerned Organizations for the Quality Education of Black Students. We talked to the Urban League and everyone had anecdotes, oh yeah, I know a ton of families like this but it wasn't really panning out and I think the reason is we just needed to get on the ground and do that. We had to cold call teachers when we wanted teachers for day one and that was maddening for anyone sitting near me for those few days because I had this little script where I was leaving voicemails. I went through like hundreds of school board agendas every meeting for the last few years and I scrolled through looking for any teachers that had resigned or retired from these five schools in the past three years. We didn't want anyone who had been fired just in case it was an axe to grind type situation. And I would call them and I would say, hi, I'm Lisa Gartner from the Tampa Bay Times and I know this is so out of the blue and I apologize but I was wondering if I could ask you about, I did this just like a hundred times in a row for like 10 days. And not everyone wanted to talk but what I think made it successful in the cases that it was was just thinking about the motivations of why people want to talk to you and tell their story. This was, as Michael touched on, an open secret in the community. Nobody who was sending their kids to these schools thought everything was fine and I think there was a frustration and a breaking point really where people wanted this story out there to get it to be told. So we talked to teachers who had recently left the schools and some of them who were still there. And we talked on background with teachers who were scared about getting fired over it. But we also wanted to talk to a lot of kids and their parents. I remember I was out of town for one of our weekly meetings and when I came back, Kara was like, oh yeah, we're gonna get a hundred kids. I was like, oh, great. Cool. So I'll talk about the process a little bit by looking at some of these kids. So this is Tyree Parker. He was in kindergarten at Maximo Elementary. I met Tyree by going to one of the many rec centers that are in South St. Pete and standing outside for three hours trying to catch parents as they came to pick up their kids from aftercare. I think this one was Sandrolyn. I also went to Campbell Park and Child's Park and said, hi, you know, the same kind of script, but can I give you a call to talk about your child's education and follow up the next day, talk on the phone if they had a good story and many of them did and had the same story. I mean, I talked to a ton of people and I don't think I ever heard anyone say, everything's going great. Good, we could talk. So that's how I connected with his grandmother, Linnies Washington. They moved down from Georgia. As we had mentioned earlier, they do have metrics to measure how you're doing in kindergarten and we were able to get copies of even his pre-K report cards that showed he had mastered simple skills that his kindergarten teacher was now saying he was hopelessly deficient in. He was getting kicked and hit and threatened and bullied. He got pushed into a bathroom with his pants torn. Someone destroyed his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle hat that his mom had given him. I mean, we spent time with these people and it was heartbreaking at times. I believe that this family who were desperate to get into another school but can, you know, meetings with the superintendent, anything you've heard about uninvolved parents, please throw that out the window here. They ended up moving into like a tiny apartment in Largo just to get into an average school for him and he's doing much better. So, that's Tyree again looking a little happier. So this is Katen Bowden. He featured in Day 1 of our story. I found Katen by hanging out at Little Lake Practices at Lake Vista Park in South St. Pete. Parents sitting on the bleachers while their kids played. I ended up talking to a woman who ran a preschool for a few years and she remembered Katen who had been, you know, full of potential doing really well, super bright. And by the second or third grade at Fairmount Park Elementary he was failing every class but PE and art. So she got me in touch with his family. It took a few calls for us to connect. I think sometimes as journalists we think, well, if someone doesn't pick up they don't want to talk but a lot of times these are busy people and you're just interloping in their lives. So we stuck with it and I was able to talk to her. She lives with her sons every day before school for their safety and for their success. They live a block or two, I think just a block from Jamerson Elementary, an A-rated magnet school that she's applied to multiple times to try to get her son into. But she can't. She keeps losing the lottery. So instead Katen has to walk to Fairmount Park Elementary one of the worst schools in the state where he was having a miserable time and about to fail his first year of standardized tests. He faced being held back, being transferred to an alternative school and he was still on a wait list at the time the story ran and he never got off it. He may have since in this new school year but I know for this year he didn't. And we spent time with these families. We walked to school with them. We got ready with them. We saw what the routines were like. That's me super tired. We probably do 7 a.m. I don't know about you guys but walking to Fairmount Park Elementary with Katen and his mother Luanda. So this is Naomi Gaines. We talked about how the second day story, the behavior story came out of talking to people and ended up being an unexpected story that we did. There are also story avenues we followed that never came to light of day. We looked at the graduation rates. The most horrendous graduation rates for black students in the country, really. But we couldn't really put together something that fit in with the rest of the package. That is how our photographer and Kara met Naomi. She was in a credit recovery class at Gibbs High School because she wasn't going to graduate on time otherwise. So while we were doing the discipline story day four they crunched the data and they found that the most discriminatory school in the county was Gibbs. Black and white students who were reprimanded who got referrals for doing the same things and black students were punished more harshly and in ways that removed them from the classroom as compared to their white classmates. So we were looking into talking to people from Gibbs and we thought, well we had Naomi's name from that so I gave her a call and the reason she was in credit recovery was because she had headphones on her desk unplugged and she got a referral for electronic device. No one really believed her that she wasn't using them or listening to anything. She was punished with an alternative bell schedule which is when you go to school at different hours like in the evening and she had no way to get there so she missed it and when she was begging for a bus pass or another way to get there and she ended up trying to and trying to meet their punishment missing like almost two weeks of school and falling really behind and just crying every night really stressed about that. The last thing I'll say about that is Chris Davis is a tyrant he's a really good editor but he pushes you to do things and get people and anecdotes that you wouldn't otherwise even think to try to get so I walked into his office and immediately regretted it. I think I just like wanted to say hi or see how you were doing. He was like, yeah, that's section. What if we got some white kids from Gibbs saying that they get away with things all the time that black kids don't? I was like, what? How am I going to get that? I went back to my desk and was like furiously texting Cara who was out in assignment like Chris has lost his damn mind but within actually an hour or two we had that quote before I even went out to Gibbs I sent some Facebook messages to some kids who had graduated the year before and were at college and was just like hey is this something you would talk to me about and I got this girl on the phone and she's like yeah, I would walk by administrators to leave cut school early all the time and they never stopped me but they would stop black kids. It's like alright, so if you don't have someone pushing you like that you might think to not even try to get that but it was really helpful in reporting the series and really took it to the next level. I'm going to stop talking now. Good afternoon everyone. I just want to say that I am honored and privileged to have been invited to participate on this panel. I am not one of the award-winning journalists but I think that the issues that they touched upon and that they beautifully illustrated and executed in this series please read the whole series if you haven't illuminate things that in my research and action worlds as a faculty member and someone who works with schools using this using research that it's a lovely case study in illustrating the multiple forces that affect black youth outcomes and that ones that are often studied in isolation in my field. We have individuals who are so we have individuals who study educational policy and decision making of leaders. Can you hear me now? Thank you. There are those who study teacher educators there are those who like me study youth and sometimes youth and families and how they experience schooling there are others who study structural and poverty factors that impact directly and indirectly schooling but you can see from this portrayal the confluence of factors that come together that work interactively to affect these black children's outcomes and they executed the piece in such a complex and multifaceted way that it was impossible to place blame or culpability on one actor or set of actors which is often the tendency the teachers the bad parents their bad cultures the students but at the same time they really provided clear points for cause for intervention that either didn't happen should have happened has started to happen still needs to happen in a way that was really quite accessible and it also made me geek out as a researcher because I was able to both address questions the who's to blame was a very I felt very clear about like what kind of things were to blame but it also raised on questions that were not answered which is what you know cool research does right I guess that my role is kind of a discussion here is to kind of point to a few themes that are both connected to other research in this area but also that might be connected to the localized context here in Michigan as well as national kind of trends that are happening that mirror what was found in the in the Tampa peace why not this this piece illustrated that once again our country's attempt to do the experiment of separate but equal just doesn't work because separate always is accompanied with unequal conditions with regard to resources with regard to constructions of children themselves and your view of their deserving this their view at your view of their humanity even when race is not on the table it's on the table because it's hard to imagine and I literally can't imagine these set of conditions persisting over time happening with other populations of children and being tolerated this long and so or happening at all and then being tolerated I as a both a researcher and someone who wants to use and does try to use research to work with schools and with children and families is that this piece also complicated the notion of poverty and what poverty means if you read the piece but also heard the kind of introduction that it wasn't that this school you know had children who were poor than other schools who were performing better so the indicators of the children's background but one of the things that the series did highlight was something about the history of the neighborhoods like once they went from the strategic busing to the neighborhood schools the authors provided an interesting context around the concentrated segregation in that neighborhood that had and isolated segregation that had resulted from historical housing discrimination and job discrimination and policy and so the idea of you know poverty meaning kind of one size fits all is really challenged in this piece there are poor neighborhoods that have organization and stability and access to other resources but there can also be poor neighborhoods that have been disenfranchised in such ways that they are higher concentrations of stressors that also impact those children families and then those concentrations come to the setting so it really made me think about the way we study poverty and apply poverty and policy and I mentioned that in the context of this art in this series because when pressed at the school district level and when pressed when various policymakers were pressed around providing additional resources to support the school one response was well there are other schools with poor children too so we have to kind of distribute those equally when in fact the conditions of poverty in the neighborhood and even in the school were not equal and so really thinking about how to apply policy around poverty and resources in an equitable way not just being equal the other thing that I want to highlight about the piece which relates to the work that I do in my scholarship related to how students experience schools the climate and culture of schools and implications for their longer term trajectories and I will say I usually study people at the later end adolescents and high schoolers and in Michigan right now the graduation rates for black students are about 67% up and compared to 83% for white students 90% for Asian students about 72% for Latino students and so you can see how the processes that were put in place in early in students lives may also play out to affect these longer term outcomes but one of the things that I think is really striking about what they were able to uncover is the impact of this desegregation or this desegregation decision on the school climate and context itself one of the things that we are known for long periods of time is that the relational context of schooling actually predicts a lot about what children end up doing how they behave, how they engage in interest and curiosity and so this change actually is a change that relates to an unequal academic experience so for instance the students who feel more connected to schooling to make connected to their subject matter or more likely to engage and persist if we move to a school structure where there is an over reliance on management and behavior and compliance where we have schools where teachers change every few minutes that the relational context is inhibited school bonding itself with teachers and with peers in schools actually predict lots of things about school persistence and drop out and you can't imagine that lots of bonding and connectedness can happen when you have teacher turn over and when you have teachers who are focusing on management and not creating communities where students are connecting with each other either the implications are not just for the students the implications are actually a part of the process that you saw unfold because the literature would also suggest and these are contextualized small studies and even nationally representative studies that students bonding to actors in the school to teachers and with each other actually relates to school violence or a decrease in school violence and so how can we explain why a school that didn't have these issues came to have these issues at such a start rate in such a short period is that the actual relational context of the school is being affected in ways that then become a self-fulfilling prophecy and bonding out in ways that relate to the ways that they've been structured and not allowed to engage with each other or adults and as was mentioned here individuals who come into the school because there was a lot of turnover get a history that it's always been like that and so it's always been like that leads to the attribution that it's the parents that it's the children or that it's the culture of these families that is happening instead of the actual despite the parents values for education despite their efforts to engage their children in a high quality educational space that they're actually the children themselves are being shaped and formed and influenced by the school structure and the school climate. So it's not just something that's affecting those individual students but it's also setting a culture in place for the children and students in subsequent cohorts to come and it's actually creating a school culture that wasn't there to begin with. One of the things that I wanted to ask the the authors and so are about this really strategic use of data so one of the things that I also thought was really innovative and smart about this piece is that they seem to think about and also the implementation and the rollout and the presentation of data in ways that seem to anticipate different questions that would come up like oh it's just these kids are differently poor than these other kids no we actually collected data to show that these kids demographically did not look different from these other kids even in poor neighborhood spaces and so it's something that's going on in the school. Oh it's something to do with the parents and the like too and so really providing kind of real faces and lived experiences to counter that prevalent perspective that parents don't value education or that are not as engaged so you mentioned that a little bit and so I will take advantage of my position here to place that as a question as we go to Q&A to ask you about your strategy around the data the types of data and then as you discover things going on like the disciplinary issues and the violence how you chose to collect data and present those data strategically to your different audiences and finally I will say because we're over and I need to let us go to Q&A is that I hope to engage with this audience or this audience will engage with this group and really thinking about how the current approaches to educational reform and maybe the upcoming approaches to educational reform bode well or not well for addressing the types of issues that were highlighted in the piece in the series what are the prospects for not continuing to create failure factories or not recreating failure factories in the forms of other public school options in the context of the new potential educational leadership so you know but you have to like they can't talk about politics but I can't I will stop there again to express my gratitude in being able to participate and learn from this panel and these sets of authors and to really learn something about a setting and a set of topics that I had not known before thank you we're getting some questions collated any thoughts on the question that Tabby laid out yeah absolutely it's a great question and I will tell you that the idea the notion of shooting down the arguments pinning the blame for this phenomenon that we were seeing on societal reasons or some type of parental non-engagement annihilating arguments like that became important to us pretty early on in this process because we had not only because we could anticipate them we went back through past coverage of this issue and read the letters to the editor and read the op-eds that had followed and each of them sort of echoed these themes of well you know if they read to their kids we wouldn't be in this mess et cetera so we knew pretty early on that we needed to go and completely annihilate that argument we were pretty methodical in how we went about it we I think pretty early on knew that we wanted to compare our community to other similarly situated communities so we got on the phone with a sociologist at the Florida State University and he helped us design sort of some measures that you would look at if you were going to try to predict how kids would do in school and so we did that and found after we pulled this information together from the Census Bureau and the American Community Survey that our county was dead in the middle of the pack when it came to these different measures but really the nail in the coffin came when Lisa and Nat collaborated to come up with this kindergarten readiness testing and just to recap what Nat said basically what we did was we analyzed these test scores of tests given to kids as they come into school to see how ready they were to start school and what we found was that black kids in our county came into school no less prepared than kids in scores of other underprivileged schools across Florida and it was only after two years in the school system that they started tanking in comparison so that seemed like a pretty clear indicator that it had more to do with the school and the setting that they were in with the kids themselves Of course this didn't stop us from getting lots of racist voicemails and emails and other things people will sometimes just believe what they want which is frustrating but we did sort of everything we could to inoculate against that Okay, why don't we start with some questions from the audience Okay, so I'm going to combine these two questions because they're kind of similar Did you experience resistance from school officials who feared that the series would reflect poorly upon them and also kind of coming with that were the school board members and other administrators honest or did they avoid me and forthright? So, yeah they weren't happy with the way that they were depicted in the series I don't think, you know what, we never heard that we were being unfair to them interestingly but we weren't unfair to them, we actually been over backwards to be fair One of the things that we do in the course of an investigative project is we reach out to the subjects of our stories early in good faith before we've drawn any sort of firm conclusions and we ask them to explain sort of their take on the world and as they see it and their explanation of the phenomenon that we're looking into and that's something that we did for the board members we went up to them and said well hey, before we even breathed word one about hey, this seems like a pretty serious problem you guys seem to be kind of remiss in how you've conducted yourselves over the past decade we ask them, well hey, you know tell us what you think about this problem is there an issue down in South St. Pete that we could be doing more to address have you guys done enough what is your general take on resegregation, desegregation that type of thing and we got honest answers from them so at the end of the day though we presented them with all of our findings before we published it and gave them another opportunity to respond so they were very restrictive of access though they really didn't let us in the schools at all we had to work around that we requested multiple times to observe class to see for ourselves, to walk the hallway we were transparent about why we were looking at these schools because they were so low performing but they would tell us that we would be a distraction to learning which always made us laugh when they were holding like, you know, Columbus Day events and stuff there that was, you know, taking up the whole day but, yeah did you explore the role or lack of the teachers union in Pinellas County in policy development if so, what conclusions did you draw that's a great question so we did so did we explore the role of the teachers union and any potential culpability in the turnover at these schools and the climate in fact we did look at that and there was some blame to be spread around to the teachers union we determined that there was a policy that they had helped hold in place that allowed teachers to be transferred out of these schools in the middle of the year and there were other policies that I'm not remembering right off the top of my head right now that they had a hand in sort of keeping in place that led to making it easier for these teachers to turn over the involuntary transfer the involuntary transfer policy was one of them as well yeah jump in with the question I mean Florida was known historically it's having a very strong and kind of complex state accountability system and this was all occurring around the time that the accountability system was in place and then no child left behind I wanted to speak about the state's role or lack of role in intervening in Pinellas I think that's particularly relevant now that policy is being pushed back to the states more and more so that's an interesting question as well for a couple of reasons so there are based on the results of standardized test scores triggers in place in Florida where the state will come in and potentially take over a school after a certain point interestingly the superintendent of our school district in Pinellas County formerly was the chancellor of education at the department Florida Department of Education and he was responsible for creating a sort of fail-safe measure against total state intervention and it was called a hybrid model where there would be a little more state involvement I'll mess it up if I describe the specifics right now but it was a hybrid model that was one step short of having the state fully take over a struggling school and at least one and possibly two of the schools are now in that hybrid model and so the state has been sort of hanging over the entire situation like the sort of Damocles but it hasn't fallen yet because there has been so many opportunities built into the model and this question might also be more directed at Tabby but I'm sure if you all have something to add please do if this is an isolated incident that happened in Florida only or has this type of boundary reorganization happened in other states in essence is this a trend short answer is no it's not isolated and as I think about the state of Michigan Michigan is one of the most segregated states in the country and so has been a natural experiment in some ways coupled with economic stressors in some spaces there are examples of the creation of spaces again not all poor or impoverished context you know will have these outcomes but there are examples of redistricting efforts and zoning and I think a couple of people that I've seen in here today are actually quite expert on the history of kind of demography in neighborhoods in Michigan that include discriminatory policies and practices that have concentrated poverty and mobility in spaces that in ways that have affected schools and so we have school spaces not only in the Detroit space but even in other areas that have student outcomes and change in student outcomes that mirror some of the trends described in Tampa I would also say some of the national trends around the impacts of moving toward of trying to address impoverished schools by taking on strong management and over emphasis on management and discipline have also been linked to some of these same outcomes compared to schools that are impoverished spaces that have moved toward participatory student respects kind of democratic oriented management approaches which require expertise which require experience which again is one of the issues that happens in the schools too that the teachers are less likely to have that training or to leave before they're actually able to be in a space long enough to implement it effectively so it's not isolated unfortunately another question and this is I think for the team but you might have some way in here as well Tabby Michigan has pre-K programs for high risk students like Head Start or Great Start Readiness programs does Pinellas have these and how effective are they? The fair test Professor we talked about? Not an expert in a lot of this but we were finding we actually when we were coming up with the idea let's compare how prepared kids are when they are coming into kindergarten we actually went to the person who created the program in the first place and she was telling us yeah we have ways to actually improve these scores for kids coming to the poorer schools and we went to Pinellas because we knew the same things that you are noticing and we wanted to kind of bring in a bit of a pilot program yeah so we had Head Start and do you know why the district kind of just passed? No so we spoke to this researcher and she said that she's got this pilot program that has been proven to boost kids reading ability in underperforming schools what she let slip in an interview with us and this is breaking news because we haven't reported it yet I'm sorry is that Pinellas County had an opportunity to use these programs in these five schools and actually did not allow the program into it they wanted to they tried to even direct the program toward B rated schools in some of the predominantly white neighborhoods the reasons for it were not entirely clear though she felt the researcher I think indicated that it might have had something to do with the board wanting to look like they are distributing resources equally across the district and what not so anyway we might get to the bottom of that in subsequent stories okay well staying along the same lines a proposal being discussed in Michigan is to close the worst performing schools 25 out of 38 are in Detroit is that what would has been or would be recommended for Pinellas County the closure of schools I was actually thinking the same thing let me add on one corollary to that question there's kind of a common somewhat I don't know ironic or puzzling to some people like phenomenon where kind of parents very impoverished, very low performing schools and a lot of standard measures are resistant to the closure of the school or even kind of wholesale reform and so I'm curious if there had been discussions of closure and if so how have some of the families responded so so I have not heard any sort of serious discussion about closing the schools in Pinellas County at this point I mean we have seen other school districts who have gone about quote unquote closing the schools and then reopening them as sort of a more in a more gendered segregated academy for example trying different techniques out but basically though when it comes down to it these schools have still been sort of carved out as predominantly black places with a lot of kids who have low income and needs that are not present across the board and what they're trying to do right now is something that I don't think has ever been done before which is to sort of buy their way out of a problem that has been created over time when another option would be to draw the attendance boundary in such a way that distributes these kids to other schools so you know the closure is not on the horizon as far as I know but they've got a big task ahead of them I think we have made time for one more question we picked the best one I know I'm like well what reforms have resulted from the series excellent there have been a lot of things that have come out of the series and I will name a bunch but I'll probably forget even more so feel free to back me up here at the district level there were a lot of policy changes and hires they hired a turnaround leader with an eight person team to oversee these five schools everyone re-interviewed for their jobs teachers at these schools got $25,000 bonuses if they qualified for them a reform that the district previously laughed at putting into place even though districts like D.C. and Duval over in Jacksonville have done that successfully they they hired a minority achievement officer someone who focuses on issues specific to the kids in these schools which is something that also was happening in other districts that they scoped at they changed their discipline policies to limit the number of days that kids could be suspended from school they're also exploring and may have already decided to open centers where suspended students go and can receive tutoring and counseling instead of just going home to like play video games and eat snacks they what else at the district level they removed the principals at the schools they removed all five of the principals which I have mixed feelings about principal turnover was part of what was contributing to school not having consistent leadership but at least one of those principals have been in place for a long time and the school wasn't getting better at the district and federal level was it the department of education that opened the civil rights investigation into the school system Arnie Duncan the secretary of education and his successor John King came down to Campbell Park Elementary and they spoke there and put a lot of pressure on the superintendent they called what had been done in their education malpractice and a man made disaster if you watch sports you probably like have a crush on LeBron James me and Kara the other education reporter were like oh my god Arnie Duncan but so it was an exciting day and the state also was doing a review looking into the funding model and whether the schools got the extra money they were supposed to or whether Pinellas supplanted you know took away their own funding and used the federal dollars to fill in the hole what did I miss okay that was a lot of it okay I'd like to thank all of our panelists people can join us for a conversation we always want to take these events and use them to spark conversation that goes on beyond the event so we invite you to stay and talk to our panelists and to the other journalists in the room and to one another about the ideas that this sparked and thank you for coming thank you