Amazing Disgrace by Jonathan Kozol

All you back-to-schoolers who missed Jonathon Kozol's fast, which began last summer as Congress geared up to reauthorize NCLB, can still dip into the controversy with Why I am Fasting: A Note to My Friends. And why not follow-up with a first hand account this Thursday, March 26, 2008 at Pace? He'll catch us up on his latest book, Letters to a Young Teacher, which is all about you—that is, if you're actively cultivating your irreverance for NCLB too.

Kozol, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar, moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood in Boston during the civil rights campaigns of the mid-60s and became a fourth grade teacher. Well-known for Amazing Grace, an expose on South Bronx schools, and then later for The Shame of the Nation, Kozol has a history of writing about the injustice in U.S. school systems. He also puts his mouth where his pen is, spending a lot of time in D.C. attempting to convince the Senate leadership to radically revise the punitive aspects of NCLB.

Pace University School of Education's sixth annual free lecture series, "The Current Status of Urban School Reform: What is Real?" is located at Pace's Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts from 6-8 p.m.

Also, don't miss the last speaker of the series, Deborah Meier, educational reformer, writer and activist, on “What’s the Big Fuss All About? What’s at Stake in the Latest Round of Educational Reform? A View from the Bottom” on April 16.

If you can't make Kozol or Meier, you can download the talks, along with all of the other speaker's lectures.