Thursday, March 16, 2006

Best-selling Author Jonathan Kozol to Give Free Speech

Noted author and education activist, Jonathan Kozol will be in Rochester to give a speech entitled, "The Shame of the Nation: Educational Apartheid, High-Stakes Testing, and No Child Left Behind". The speech takes place Monday, March 27th at the East High School Auditorium, 1801 East Main Street and is free and open to the public. Sign language interpreting will be provided. Anyone concerned with Rochester schools and the state of public education in general should attend this important event.

"Jonathan Kozol profoundly addresses inequality in the educational settings of our schools," says Bill Cala, Superintendent of the Fairport Central School District and Steering Committee member of the Coalition for Common Sense in Education. "If you have ever heard him speak, you know the moving and persuasive argument he makes."

Kozol is the author of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, his most recent best-seller. In it, Kozol contends that America’s public schools show no sign of the desegregation ordered in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. He has numerous works on children and the state of American public education to his credit including Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools and Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.

Dan Drmacich, Principal at School Without Walls in Rochester and Steering Committee member of CCSE says about Jonathan Kozol, "Kozol, relentlessly describes the negative impact that segregation and the use of high-stakes standardized testing has on poor, Rochester children, and the moral responsibilities each of us has to respond."

Hosted by the Coalition for Common Sense in Education, the event is co-sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Education, the School Without Walls Community Board, Nazareth College, SUNY Brockport, SUNY Geneseo, and the Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester.

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