2018-2019

Alexandra Fuenmayor Starr has reported on immigration, poverty, and education for more than two decades. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, Slate, The New Republic, and The American Scholar. Her piece for Harper’s about African teenagers who were trafficked to play basketball in the U.S. South was included in the 2016 edition of Best American Sports Writing and sparked a Department of Homeland Security investigation.

Starr has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and the Brian Lehrer show. She authored a special report on Latino immigrant entrepreneurship for the Council on Foreign Relations in 2012 and frequently moderates discussions about migration and social policy for the organization.

Starr has served as an immigration correspondent for National Public Radio and reported on the Puerto Rican diaspora for WNYC. As the Capitol Hill reporter for  Business Week she wrote about then-President George W. Bush’s education reforms. She has been a visiting journalist at the Russell Sage Foundation, an Emerson fellow at the New American Foundation, a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University Law School, a Milena Jesenska fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge in Vienna, a Casey Journalism fellow in Child and Family Policy, and a Japan Society fellow. Her work has also been supported by a Ford Foundation Travel Fellowship.

In addition to her work as a journalist, Starr has taught graduate and undergraduate students at the City University of New York and New York University.

As a Spencer fellow, Starr reported on the educational experiences of teenage Latino immigrants in New York City and on Long Island, with an eye towards highlighting promising approaches to educating older English language learners. This is a subject with deep personal resonance: Starr is Venezuelan and lived in Latin America for several years. She attended public schools in Northern Virginia, where many of her classmates were recently arrived immigrants from Central America.

Her first Spencer supported pieces on the impact of mandatory retention on English Language Learners aired on NPR in June, 2019:

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/11/04/360187176/from-nycs-international-schools-lessons-for-teaching-unaccompanied-minors

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/07/412304594/beyond-college-ready-top-charter-schools-support-graduates-in-college

Kyle Spencer is an award-winning education journalist and frequent New York Times contributor who focuses much of her attention on the ways in which race and class are impacting life inside American classrooms. She writes often for The Hechinger Report and has written for New York magazine, Slate, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, The Baltimore Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The International Herald Tribune, and many other publications. A veteran journalist with 20-plus years of experience, Spencer has written about charter proliferation, the controversy over the Common Core, Harlem parents in the age of school reform, million dollar PTA’s, stress in high-achieving school districts and the prison-to-college pipeline, among many other things.

In 2012, Spencer wrote a series of stories for The New York Times about hyper-aggressive fundraising efforts at New York City’s well-to-do public schools, which launched a citywide debate about public school inequity. The series was part of a crowdsourcing project she helped coordinate between WNYC Radio, The New York Times, and the education website SchoolBook.

In 2014, she co-produced a Frontline episode about a school district re-segregation effort in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that won the EWA Broadcast Award. The film was credited with shedding light on the issue and led to public pushback against the effort. It eventually failed. Spencer has been a scholar with The Nantucket Project and last summer, was one of the journalists chosen for the Social Science Summer Institute for Journalists with The Russell Sage Foundation. Spencer  has appeared on New York 1, The Brian Lehrer Show, and The Talk of The Nation. She speaks and moderates panels for schools, education-related conferences, workshops and non-profit events.

As a Spencer Fellow, Spencer followed the Far Right’s efforts to mobilize a conservative youth movement on the nation’s campuses. Her book proposal is tentatively called Raising Them Right, and is currently being considered for publication.

Here are some samples of her work:
Life Beyond Bars: One Man’s Journey From Prison to College

It Takes A Suburb: One Town’s Journey To Alleviate Student Stress

The Million Dollar PTA

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.

Kalyn Belsha is a national reporter based in Chicago for Chalkbeat.org. Previously she covered education for The Chicago Reporter, a nonprofit online magazine that investigates issues of race and poverty. There she chronicled how Chicago’s historic school closures in 2013 impacted the city’s African-American communities. Belsha partnered with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting to tell the story of one Chicagoan who made it her life’s mission to stop future school closings after her grandchildren and community lost their neighborhood school.

Prior to The Chicago Reporter, Belsha covered education for the magazine’s sister publication, Catalyst Chicago. There, she wrote about the growth of the Noble Network of Charter Schools, holes in the early educator pipeline and inadequacies in bilingual education. Belsha also covered education in Chicago’s west suburbs for The Aurora Beacon-News, a publication of the Chicago Tribune.

Belsha used her Spencer Fellowship year to investigate the growing exodus of black families from Chicago to other cities in the South and the Midwest, and the impact of this major demographic shift on education. Her work will roll out in 2019-2020 school year, including narrative, audio and data visualization components.

Examples of Belsha’s work:

Thousands of black students leave Chicago for other segregated districts

My town, Chi-Town

English learners often go without required help at Chicago schools

Behind sale of closed schools, a legacy of segregation

Inside Noble