Michael LaForgia, Lisa Gartner, and Cara Fitzpatrick of the Tampa Bay Tribune investigated five of the lowest-performing schools in Florida and got to the bottom of their failure. Their story, “Failure Factories,” described five schools in one of the state’s most affluent district that had been “average” (when judged by test scores) in the recent past and are now among the “worst” in the state.

They write:

In just eight years, Pinellas County School Board members turned five schools in the county’s black neighborhoods into some of the worst in Florida.

First they abandoned integration, leaving the schools overwhelmingly poor and black.

Then they broke promises of more money and resources.

Then — as black children started failing at outrageous rates, as overstressed teachers walked off the job, as middle class families fled en masse — the board stood by and did nothing.

Today thousands of children are paying the price, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

They are trapped at Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo and Melrose — five neighborhood elementary schools that the board has transformed into failure factories.

Every year, they turn out a staggering number of children who don’t know the basics.

Eight in 10 fail reading, according to state standardized test scores. Nine in 10 fail math.

Ranked by the state Department of Education, Melrose is the worst elementary school in Florida. Fairmount Park is No. 2. Maximo is No. 10. Lakewood is No. 12. Campbell Park is No. 15.

All of the schools operate within six square miles in one of Florida’s most affluent counties.

NPR interviewed Michael LaForgia and Cara Fitzpatrick about their investigation.

MICHAEL LAFORGIA: We spent a year examining what was going on with five elementary schools in our predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Pinellas County. What we found was that 95 percent of black children who were tested at these schools failed reading or math. Teacher turnover in the schools is a chronic problem. Last year, more than half of the teaching staff at these five schools requested transfers out. We found that all of this is a recent phenomenon. By December of 2007, when our school board voted on a plan that effectively re-segregated the district, none of the schools in question was ranked lower than a C. Today, all of them are Fs in the state ranking system.

VIGELAND: Wow. Well, Cara, how would you describe the county where these five schools are located – Pinellas County – because I think that is one of the surprises here.

CARA FITZPATRICK: Well, Pinellas County is one of the most affluent counties in Florida, so that’s part of the surprise, I think, here. And one of the things that’s interesting about this, too, is that these five elementary schools are all in a relatively small area of South St. Petersburg.

VIGELAND: Michael, as you noted, these schools were doing a lot better about a decade ago, and they had a very different demographic at the time because of integration and busing. So what changed?

LAFORGIA: So a decade ago, there still was in effect federal oversight that was mandated by a civil rights lawsuit that dated to the 1960s. The district got out from under that lawsuit in 2007. Rather than stick with the integration efforts that had been working up till that time, the school board opted to go to a neighborhood schools model which effectively re-segregated the school district.

VIGELAND: What did it mean in terms of the student population?

LAFORGIA: Well, it meant that schools that previously had been 60, 50, 40 percent black were now suddenly 80 and 90 percent black. And they were drawing from a high-poverty area. The children who previously had been spread among other more-affluent schools who had had access to 15 or 20 schools’ worth of guidance counselors or behavior specialists suddenly only had access to five schools’ worth.