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| News and Views from The Forum for Education and Democracy |
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Election Day 2006 Forum Director George Wood It’s Election Day, 2006, and like many of you I am going to get to my email after I work at our local polling place. I try to spend every Election Day at the polls for one reason – it’s such a delight to see my current and former students come in to vote, especially those voting for the first time. Watching them take on this responsibility reminds me of something I think about every graduation day in the spring. As I clasp each graduate’s sweaty palm and hold them there on the stage long enough for pictures and a few words I think – “welcome to your most important role, that of citizen.” To read more, click here. Guest Commentary Grand Visions and Possible Lives by Mike Rose We can all agree,” wrote a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard not long ago, “that American public schools are a joke.” This way of thinking and talking about our public schools has been with us for some time. It was what led me, in the early and mid-1990s, on a cross-country journey to observe a wide variety of public schools that had been judged by their teachers, students, and parents to be good and decent places of learning. This journey was both geographical—recording actual classrooms and communities across the United States—and philosophical, trying to gain a lived, felt sense of what public education means in a democracy. The result was a book called Possible Lives. Now, a decade after its publication, the same kind of reflective journey is more needed than ever. Read on... New Resources Democratic School Accountability "This is just the book we need to start the discussion we've not been engaged in: accountable for what? In this modest—but critically important—book we have the chance to explore this from the bottom up and the top down. What a relief, and how thought-provoking. Each chapter builds upon the last, culminating in a different but eminently practical way of opening up new possibilities."—Deborah Meier, author of In Schools We Trust, founder of NYC's Central Park East public schools in East Harlem and Boston's Mission Hill school; and senior scholar and adjunct professor, NYU, and Forum Convener. Read on... |
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