Dale Mezzacappa is a journalist who has spent most of her career with The Philadelphia Inquirer. Since 1986, her primary area of coverage has been education, and her work has won many local and national awards. Among those cited were stories in a series spanning 13 years that followed the travails of 112 inner-city sixth-graders promised a free college education by a wealthy philanthropist, and a package commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education that detailed continued racial separation and the vast inequality of educational opportunity in the Philadelphia area.
Prior to taking over the education beat, she worked in Trenton and Washington covering politics and government for The Inquirer and The Record of Hackensack, N.J. She was also formerly the contributing editor at The Philadelphia Public School Notebook, a bi-monthly independent and nonprofit publication with a mission to draw attention to injustices facing students in urban schools.
A graduate of Vassar and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she teaches a journalism course at Swarthmore College and is a past president of the board of the National Education Writers Association. Contact her at dalem@thenotebook.org or @dalemezz.
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