Emmanuel Felton is a staff writer at The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit newsroom focused on inequality and innovation in education. He has covered the national education beat for Hechinger since 2014, writing about how the federal government has neglected its responsibility to enforce school desegregation lawsuits as well as the push for more social-emotional learning, among other topics. In 2016, he was awarded two fellowships, a USC Annenberg Health Journalism National Fellowship and an Ida B. Wells Fellowship from The Investigative Fund. He used both opportunities to supplement his coverage of the intersection of race and education for the Hechinger Report.
Previously, Felton covered education, juvenile justice and child services for the New York World, a project of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before that, he worked in advocacy, including stints at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP of Mississippi.
Felton used his Spencer fellowship year to examine METCO, one of the oldest, continuously operating school desegregation programs in the country. His book proposal is currently being considered for publication.