Teach-In: Education

As the 2017–’18 school year begins, Politics and Prose is happy to present a teach-in on the present-day and future reality of our K–12 public education system. What does public education mean, and how can we best equip our children for the 21st-century? How can schools and school systems protect children from discrimination and support those living in poverty? How should we as parents, students, and citizens respond to various political agendas, and is the concept of public education itself under attack?

Jane Dimyan Ehrenfeld is the Executive Director of Center for Inspired Teaching. She is an educator and attorney with a decade of teaching experience in public elementary schools in Prince George’s County, Maryland and Boston, where her classroom was the focus of Jonathan Kozol’s 2007 book, Letters to a Young Teacher. David Osborne is the author of numerous books including the bestselling Reinventing Government and the forthcoming Reinventing America’s Schools and is senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, directing the Reinventing America’s Schools Project. Dawn Williams is the Interim Dean at Howard University School of Education, and has been a member of the faculty since 2003 in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies where she most recently served as Department Chair. During her teaching career, she taught elementary and high school students. Panel moderator Valerie Strauss is an education writer at The Washington Post, where she has worked for 30 years. At the Post, she has covered a variety of education beats and now authors The Answer Sheet blog, which focuses on education and everything connected to it.

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Produced by Tom Warren