NICAR 2016

Deep dive:
#FailureFactories

Follow @tbtprojx

An outlier

Horrible stories

A theory develops

Problem #1:

Conventional wisdom

Inevitable

Poverty

Parents

First ingredient:

Buy in

Our big, awesome Failure Factories team:

Michael LaForgia, Cara Fitzpatrick, Lisa Gartner, Nat Lash, Connie Humburg, Chris Davis

Unusual approach...

(Not a few big questions)

Testing that wisdom and building a case

• Demographics
• Median Household Income
• Povery rate
• Percent of black kids on free/reduced lunch
• Percent of men/women who didn't graduate high school
• Percent of single-parent homes
• Percent unemployment
• Readiness data

• Survey of other districts
• Catalogued school board’s promises:
  • Funding, attention, etc.
• Database of kids’ stories

Bodies

• Nowhere else 5 of bottom 15
• Far poorer places doing better

Over and over...

...till we were convinced

Problem #2:

Convincing

anyone else

Strong feelings

Hard harm to understand

Data as ‘body cams’

Thousands of stories

Mental zooming

Power of the web

31 kids

A series of charts

@tbtprojx