3755 Richmond Ave.
SPEAKER: LISA FALKENBERG, INTRODUCTION BY DUNCAN KLUSSMANN
More than two years into the state takeover of H.I.S.D., Supt. Mike Miles continues to draw national attention-and intense local scrutiny-for his aggressive, top-down reforms, including sweeping campus changes and his widespread New Education System. Our speaker, Lisa Falkenberg, is a sixth generation Texan from a small town, Seguin, a top reporter from the Houston Chronicle, rare triple Pulitzer Prize Winner, one of the state’s most influential journalistic voices, who will separate promises from performance and whether these changes are producing meaningful improvements or merely dismantling the district’s foundations.
Introducing our speaker, will be Dr. Duncan Klussmann, former Superintendent, Spring Branch School District, currently Assistant/Associate Professor, Dept. of Educational Leadership & Public Policy Studies, Univ. of Houston.
Please attend and invite your friends to hear this important program. A successful H.I.S.D. is important to Houston’s future.
Joe Colangelo
Program Committee
Lisa Falkenberg is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the Houston Chronicle’s senior columnist.
Falkenberg formerly led the Chronicle’s editorial board as vice president and editor of opinion. In May, Falkenberg shared a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing for a series on the dangers of stopped trains in Houston. In 2022, she led the editorial board to their first Pulitzer Prize for a series debunking the “Big Lie” of voter fraud and examining Texas’ long history of voter suppression.
Falkenberg wrote a metro column at the Chronicle for more than a decade and in 2015 was awarded the Pulitzer for commentary, as well as the American Society of News Editors’ Mike Royko Award for Commentary/Column Writing for a series that exposed a wrongful conviction in a death penalty case and led Texas lawmakers to reform a grand jury system ripe for abuse. She was a Pulitzer finalist in 2014 and 2023.
Raised in Seguin, Texas, Falkenberg is the daughter of a truck driver and a homemaker, and the first in her family to go to college. She earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. She started her career at The Associated Press, first as a college student in Austin, helping cover the Legislature, and later in Dallas, covering everything from politics to capital murder trials. She joined the Chronicle’s Austin bureau in 2007 as a roving state correspondent.
Falkenberg lives in Houston and is the mother of two teen daughters and a 5-year-old son.
