Letters to a Young Teacher

JONATHAN KOZOL is a Rhodes Scholar, former fourth grade teacher, and a passionate advocate for child-centered learning. Kozol is one of the most widely read and highly honored education writers in the nation. His first book, Death at an Early Age (1967), a description of his first year as a teacher in a Black community of Boston, received the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Among his other major works are Rachel and Her Children , a study of homeless mothers and their children, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and Savage Inequalities , which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. His 1995 best-seller, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation , received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Ten years later, in The Shame of the Nation , a description of conditions that he found in nearly 60 public schools, Kozol wrote that inner-city children were more isolated racially than at any time since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The Shame of the Nation appeared on The New York Times bestseller list the week that it was published. RANDI WEINGARTEN is president of the American Federation of Teachers and a lifelong champion for children and teachers in public schools. She is the author of Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy. THEODORE M. SHAW is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and the Director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights. He attended Columbia University Law School and then practiced as a Trial Attorney in the Honors Program of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C. In 1982 Shaw joined the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) where he worked for over 26 years. Shaw has taught at the University of Michigan Law School, Columbia University School of Law, CUNY School of Law at Queens College and Temple Law School. He is currently a faculty member of the Practicing Law Institute.