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Position: Secretary - Education

The U.S. Department of Education establishes policy for, administers, and coordinates most federal assistance to education. It assists the president in executing his or her education policies for the nation and in implementing laws enacted by Congress. The department's mission is to serve U.S. students, to ensure that all have equal access to education, and to promote excellence in the nation's public schools. It is the job of the secretary to see that these missions are carried out effectively. The secretary is responsible for ensuring that this happens.

Type of Appointment/Position: Presidential with Senate confirmation    

Jonathan Kozol Rate this Nominee   Current Rating: click to rate
Nominee's Background:
Jonathan Kozol was born in Boston in 1936 into a traditional middle-class Jewish family. Kozol's father worked as a neurologist and psychiatrist, and his mother was a social worker. Kozol attended Harvard and later Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and then lived in Paris in poor neighborhoods for several years while he worked on a novel.

A defining moment in Kozol's life occurred in 1964 when, shortly after returning to Boston to pursue an academic career, he heard about three young civil rights workers who had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. He had never been political or had any involvement in race issues, but he was greatly affected by the news. Soon after hearing of this event he began working as a teacher in a freedom school that had been set up in a black church in a low-income, predominantly black area in Roxbury, just south of Boston.

Kozol has made a practice of leaving comfortable surroundings for more challenging, impoverished areas. He enjoyed teaching young children, and eventually got a job in the public school system in Roxbury teaching fourth grade. The segregated public school in Roxbury was very different from the school Kozol had attended as a child growing up in the wealthy Boston suburb of Newton. Shortly after he began teaching in the public school system, Kozol was fired for reading from a book of poetry by Langston Hughes that was not on the approved curriculum list. Soon after, he wrote his first work of nonfiction, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools, based on his teaching experiences in Roxbury. The book won the National Book Award in 1968.

Nominating Speech:
Click here for excellent info on his work and ideas.

To research this nominee, please look for them on the Wikipedia website or at Google.
Progressive Criteria:
The Education Department will

Support true academic standards and reject punitive standardized testing that deprives schools of funding solely because of low test scores;

Support not penalize school districts that need extra help because they have many poor, minority or immigrant students;

Work to restore public education as an effective vehicle for social mobility, as it has been for so much of our country's history;

Open up many routes to higher education;

Improve teacher pay, dignity and respect;

Reject voucher systems and other privatization schemes;

Protect our students from commercial influences and marketing in their schools;

Understand that in addition to training for good jobs, the public education system must educate responsible, engaged citizens.

Comments so far:
October 15, 2005 Sharron Ozaki - After reading much about Mr Kozol, reading his books, and in particular, his own personal time invested in his beliefs of change through real opportunity for children in education and social change, I would work my heart out to have Mr. Kozol in a position of authority of our education system. He is a person who has experienced the tragedy of our education and social system as an educator, as an involved activist, and as a person who has made in depth study, both in general, and in specific, with the children and the parents. Finally, Mr. Kozol has the ideas and the commitment to make positive changes for our youth that is vital to us as a society. There is no one better informed nor better committed to overseeing the education of our youth.

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