2017-2018

Audrey Watters is a writer and independent scholar who focuses on education technology — its products, its politics, its pedagogical implications. Her Spencer Fellowship-supported project on the shape and power of the technology network was published in the 2018 fall education of The Baffler. It’s called The Fables of School Reform. 

In addition, Watters developed a book proposal during her Spencer year on the history of education technology in the 20th century and the development of early teaching machines by education psychologists. Her book Teaching Machines, is set to be published by MIT Press.

She is continuing to develop her data base which will eventually allow the public to trace the historical, political and financial connections between education companies and the vast network of education technology venture capitalists.

Watters has worked in the education field for almost twenty years: as a graduate student, college instructor, and program manager for an ed-tech non-profit. Although she was two chapters into her Comparative Literature dissertation, she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test: freelance writer.  She has written for The Atlantic, Edutopia, Inside Higher Ed, The School Library Journal, and elsewhere across the Web, but she is best known for her work on her own website Hack Education (http://hackeducation.com)

Watters has given keynotes and presentations on education technology around the world and is the author of several books, including The Monsters of Education Technology, The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology, The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology, Claim Your Domain, and Teaching Machines.

 

Antonio Gois has been an education reporter in Brazil since 1996. He writes a weekly column about education for O Globo newspaper, one of Brazil’s largest, and is also a consultant and education columnist at the cable channel “Futura.” He appears on CBN-Rio radio station weekly as a commentator on education issues.

His Spencer supported book on school leadership in North and South America, Líderes na escola, was published in 2020 by Fundaçao Santillana/Moderna.

Gois has twice won Brazil’s highest journalism honor, the Esso Journalism Prize, for stories about education. One of these stories was about schools in poor areas with excellent results and involved a deep investigation on school data in order to find those schools and identify common practices. The second prize was for a series of articles about schools in violent areas in Brazil and how this affected students’ outcomes and school climate.

Gois is founder and the first president of Jeduca, the Brazilian Association of Education Journalists at www.jeduca.com.br. Launched in June of 2016, the project was inspired by the Education Writers Association in the U.S. In 2010-2011, Gois was a fellow at the Knight-Wallace program at University of Michigan, where he studied school evaluation.

A story of a principal who led a successful school turnaround

“Our Children,” a TEDx talk about inequality in education, comparing Brazil and U.S.

“Brazil explores U.S.-style education policies,” published in The Atlantic and the EWA website

“Lessons of excellence in poor areas,” a story of schools with excellent results attending poor children 

“To educate in Conflict Zones”, a story of how violence impact Brazilian schools, and possible solutions 

Cara Fitzpatrick is a visiting journalist at the Russell Sage Foundation, freelance reporter based in New York City, and former education reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. She was recently awarded a book contract for her Spencer-supported proposal on the six-decade history of school vouchers in America.

In 2016, she and Tampa Bay Times reporters Lisa Gartner and Michael LaForgia won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for Failure Factories, a five-part investigation that traced the rapid decline of five elementary schools after the Pinellas County School Board abandoned integration efforts. The series also was honored with the George Polk Award for Education Reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Medal, and the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting, among others. Fitzpatrick has been a reporter for about 14 years, with most of that time focused on education.

Fitzpatrick grew up in Washington State and graduated from the University of Washington and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is married to Michael LaForgia, now an investigative reporter at the New York Times, and they have three children.

Nick Chiles has distinguished himself as both a bestselling author and an award-winning journalist, over the course of three decades as a writer. As a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, the Star-Ledger of New Jersey and New York Newsday, Chiles spent most of his newspaper career covering education, but also did stints as a political reporter and a health reporter.

Chiles has won over a dozen major journalism awards, including a 1992 Pulitzer Prize as part of a New York Newsday team covering a fatal subway crash. He also won 1989 and 1993 National Education Reporting Awards presented by the Education Writers Association. More recently, he won the 2016 Green Eyeshade Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best public affairs reporting, for a piece he did for The Hechinger Report on testing third-graders in Mississippi. He also won two National Association of Black Journalists awards for magazine writing in 2014 for stories in Ebony magazine, including a series on Saving Black Boys.

Chiles is the author or co-author of 14 books, including three New York Times bestsellers. As a celebrity memoirist, he has co-written books with Bobby Brown, Rev. Al Sharpton, Kirk Franklin and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, among others. His 2014 book Justice While Black: Helping African-American Families Navigate and Survive the Criminal Justice System, written with attorney Robbin Shipp, was an NAACP Image Awards finalist.

From 2003 to 2009, Chiles was Editor-in-Chief of Odyssey Couleur, a national travel magazine geared toward African Americans. He also served as Editor-in-Chief of the website AtlantaBlackStar.com, a news site focused on the global African diaspora. A graduate of Yale University, Chiles currently resides in Atlanta with his wife, Denene Millner, and two teenage daughters.

Chiles spent his year as a Spencer Fellow working on a book about the impact of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative and how academicians and educators have made tremendous strides in understanding how to successfully educate and raise black boys, but their work is failing to break through to the communities and families who most need it. He is currently teaching Journalism at Princeton University, and serves on Atlanta, Georgia’s school board.

 

Mississippi’s new third-grade reading gate test (Green Eyeshade Award winner)

Assessing My Brother’s Keeper

Chronicling the work of an amazing principal in New Orleans

The Miseducation of Black Boys (NABJ Award winner)

Black students struggle at University of Georgia