What to Expect When You’re Expecting Bilingual Children

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On May 13, 2013, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill released a report on dual language learners, Dual Language Learners: Research Informing Policy. The university has a special project, Center for Early Care and Education Research- Dual Language Learners (CECER-DLL), funded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation which is a part of the United States Office of Administration for Children and Families. It focuses on dual language learners age birth to 5, their families, learning environments in early care and education center-based programs, home-based child care providers, and Head Start and Early Head Start Programs.

Even before the release of the report, some states, like Massachusetts, have dedicated policies towards young dual language learners. However, many school districts across the United States still utilize standardized questions that are geared for monolingual children when addressing dual language learning needs. Educators, concerned with the possibility that a dual language learner child might need federal IDEA educational supports, use questions that date to the 1970s to find out if a child requires special services. One form provided by a public school district asks parents to check Yes or No to “Speech is not clear enough to be understood”. According to the report, for dual language learners under the age of 5, that is very likely the case, because the sounds of two or more language systems influence speech.

With regard to phonological abilities, as infants DLLs’ are behind monolinguals, but then make significant progress during the preschool years, and eventually, reach the same skill level as their monolingual English speaking peers during the early grades.

Another question the form asks is “What language is generally spoken at home?” While the spoken language may be one thing, the child’s exposure to media may show a completely different picture. The popular website, pbskids.com, has video games like Pinata Party featuring Curious George and The Man with the Yellow Hat. Apparently, El Hombre del Sombrero Amarillo is now bilingual. Because of resource issues, financial and available personnel, some public schools will assess dual language learners in English only. This is where things break down dramatically for preschoolers, because, according to the report, their English vocabulary cannot be comparable to that of monolingual English speakers.

Also, while DLLs’ vocabularies in their individual languages are smaller than monolinguals’ when conceptual vocabularies in both languages are combined, DLLs’ vocabularies are often equal to that of monolinguals.

CECER-DLL released a report in June 2012 that explains in more detail how to properly assess a dual language leaner, Examining the use of Language and Literacy Assessments with Young Dual Language Learners. They recommended assessments in both languages spoken at home, and they test on whether or not a child can understand what is said to them (receptive vocabulary). Expressive vocabulary (what a child says) is also assessed, but it is very likely that a young dual language learner is in what is termed the Silent Period, a duration when there is no talking.

…dual-language approach in which DLLs were assessed in both languages for at least one area of language or literacy development, irrespective of language proficiency or dominance. The most frequent area of development assessed in both the home language and in English was receptive vocabulary.

They also utilized input from parents to allow the assessors to get a better understanding of which language to focus on.

Studies used parent and teacher/caregiver report of children’s language in various ways, including as background information on language exposure, as an initial step, or as sole criterion in determining language of assessment.

They endorsed the use of language neutral or language independent assessments. Language neutral assessments come in a few forms. One type, the assessors present flashcards with different pictures and use a specific word in either of the two language to ask a child to identify a picture from the group of pictures. Some other language neutral tests introduce new vocabulary in either language while presenting a picture that depicts the new word. Then the assessor asks the child to either repeat it or be able to identify the new word amongst a set of flashcards.

Educators who do not believe that dual language learners develop language skills differently from monolingual children will find the most recent release from University of North Carolina to be an eye opener.

Dr. Alejandro Brice, 2012-2014 Chair, ASHA Multicultural Issues Board, Dr. Mahchid Namazi, Assistant Professor at Kean University and Patricia Murray, M.A., LDT/C, Advocate and Educational Consultant Educational Resources for Success, LLC , share their knowledge of how children become bilingual.

New Jersey’s Standardized Tests, NJASK

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It’s that time of year again in New Jersey, no, not Christmas. It’s time for standardized testing of third, fourth and fifth graders, the NJASK. The test covers just 2 subjects for third graders, math and English Language Arts. Fourth and fifth graders have to take a third subject, science. For the past few weeks teachers have been preparing their students for the NJASK by practicing writing prompts, critiquing previous essays, and reviewing math facts. Last week in Princeton, New Jersey, fifth graders took the tests, and younger children had to keep a quiet environment so the fifth graders could concentrate. Gym class did away with highly active sports, and younger children learned yoga for a week. While some loved the less competitive and more stretchy activity, others complained that gym was boring for 5 days. To celebrate the one year anniversary of Education Roundtable, this piece focuses on standardized testing, because the first show was entitled “Assessments”.

The New Jersey Department of Education has no rules about whether or not a student can or cannot opt out of the NJASK. However, not all school districts consider opting out of the NJASK an excused absence.

A spokesman for the state Department of Education said there is no statewide protocol for sitting out the tests. “Although the testing is required of schools, it is a local decision whether a student receives an excused or unexcused absence,” said Justin Barra, the department’s communications director.

In 2013, some New Jersey parents opted out. In a national organization called United Opt Out National, parents in New Jersey sought advice on how to go about opting out. A parent in New Jersey, Joe Schwartz wrote in with his thoughts.

We are opting our daughter out (gr 7).  We were told we would have to keep her home for nine mornings (4 of the test administration and 5 make-ups).  We appealed to the county superintendent and then the state director of assessment, who kicked it back to the district.  We are hoping that the school will make a very token effort to give her the test on the make-up mornings so we can send her to school without the pressure and embarrassment of being pulled out of class and sitting for the test. We are also investigating a legal challenge; this may help encourage the district to settle this with as little contentiousness possible.

Other parents help their children prepare for the test, because they know doing well on them will help their children in their academic career. Last year, some parents spoke up about how they prepare their children for the tests.

Jacquelyn Darby, a Union mom, said her basement is set up like a classroom and her fifth-grade son, and twin eighth-grade daughters, do practice test problems there. Doing well in school is not optional, she said. “It’s a requirement and, even when you go to college, it’s all about your language arts and math skills. It’s gotta be their meat and potatoes,” Darby said. “It’s one of those things we have to do. And if we have to do it, I’m for anything to help my child excel.”

Other New Jersey parents opted out their children from the NJASK by submitting a request to their district’s superintendent. Parents like former Assistant Superintendent Maryann Reilly of Morris School District, which serves Morristown and Morris Township, kept her son at home during the week of testing in 2012.  A main reason for opting out, parents feel the standardized tests do not serve the purpose they were designed to serve.

“He has taken it since third grade, and we just decided this year, it was enough,” Reilly said. “We don’t value the measure, and we don’t get anything useful from it. We’re hoping people will wake up and see it is just not appropriate anymore,” she said.

In order to get a more complete picture of the original purpose of standardized tests, parents need to take a look into the distant past. Standardized tests originated in China some time in the 6th century CE. The imperial families used standardized testing as a means to implement social reform, shaping  social structure based upon merit. The imperial examinations used a merit based system to look for candidates to fill civil service positions at the local level in rural districts to higher positions in metropolitan areas. The first Chinese tests covered music, archery, equestrian abilities, arithmetic, writing, and rituals and ceremonies. Later standardized tests included military strategies, civil law, revenue and taxation, agriculture and geography.

In the 19th century, the British Empire colonized parts of China, and learned of the imperial examinations as a means to level the playing field. British administrator, Thomas Taylor Meadows, wrote to the British government explaining the success of standardized imperial examination.

The long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the operation of a principle, which the policy of every successive dynasty has practically maintained in a greater or less degree, viz. that good government consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only, to the rank and power conferred by the offical posts.

He also warned that if the British government did not employ the same system to seek local leadership in British government posts, then the British Empire would collapse. “England will certainly lose every colony she possesses unless she adopts some system of impartial elevation of colonists to the posts and honours at the disposal of the crown…”

Great Britain adopted standardized testing in the 19th century, and from there it spread to the United States. Much like the original usage in imperial China, standardized tests in the military, Army Alpha and Beta tests, searched for officers in a manner that removed bias between people from different socio-economic backgrounds. One of the psychologists that worked on the military test was Carl Brigham, a faculty member of Princeton University who eventually chaired the College Board commission in the 1920s to create the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). From then on, standardized testing became more prevalent.

Facing problems that stem from a highly de-centralized public education system and deeply concerned with educational inequity faced by the poor in the United States, President Lyndon B. Johnson looked to standardized testing for solutions. He created the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that required standardized testing in public schools. In the 1980’s, the United States, heavily competing with Japan for economic dominance, was losing. As the United States wondered why the nation was losing its economic competitive edge to the Japanese, attention turned to education for an explanation. In April 1983, Nation At Risk published a report written by the National Commission on Excellence in Education , and it addressed the dominance of Japanese automobiles by promoting standardized testing. “Standardized tests of achievement (not to be confused with aptitude tests) should be administered at major transition points from one level of schooling to another and particularly from high school to college or work.“

In the 1990s, No Child Left Behind under President George W. Bush further extended the weight of standardized tests, and most recently, officials discovered the high stakes of standardized testing has led to not only teaching to the test but outright cheating. In April 2013, The New York Times found Atlanta, Georgia, doing such.

The widespread cheating and test score manipulation problem,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, “is one more example of the ways politicians’ fixation on high-stakes testing is damaging education quality and equity.

What started off as well intentioned approach to social reform has lost its luster in the course of time. In addition to the unexpected ethical dilemma posed by standardized tests, test questions have become biased. According to the Parent, Student and Teacher Information Guide issued for the Spring 2013 NJASK, The New Jersey Department of Education states

All test questions are carefully reviewed by trained professionals and educators to ensure that the questions are fair and are not offensive to any group of people. After the test, all questions undergo statistical analysis for any racial, ethnic or gender bias. If a test question has poor statistical results from these analyses, it is eliminated from future tests.

There remains a much greater issue, at least on the literacy section. In the 1960s, prominent educators and researchers like Luise Rosenblat discovered that everyone reads everything a little differently. A sample English Language Arts poem in the 2013 NJASK reads “If my grandma didn’t have me, I don’t know what she would do – She’d have to eat millions of cookies and go by herself to the zoo.” Would a child who has never had the opportunity to be with any grandparent be able to connect with the writing and actually understand it? Not every child has the same family circumstances.

The first Education Roundtable show, which focused on assessments and how they might change, introduced Dr. Samuel Stewart, Mercer and Middlesex County Executive Superintendent, and Princeton Public Schools’ Assistant Superintendent Bonnie Lehat. New assessments created by Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) will come out in the 2014-2015 academic year.

Most Recent U.S. News and World Report Rankings

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This past week has been an exciting one for the world of education. On Thursday, May 2, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Noam Chomsky and Bruno della Chiesa participated in a conversation moderated by Howard Gardner. (For the education world, this is like having Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Louie Armstrong jam together.) They discussed the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who in his 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, referred to white people as oppressors. In 2012, Arizona officials pulled it from the K-12 curriculum.

Chomsky commented that Freire’s book was “an instrument for consciousness-raising, which will lead to change in institutions…so by U.S. standards, Freire is a radical revolutionary.”

While Chomsky, della Chiesa and Gardner discussed the state of education in this country, parents across the nation rifled through freshly printed U.S. News and World Report 2013 high school rankings. New names appear at the top. Of note, Monmouth County’s High Technology High and Biotechnology High sit on the top with #12 and #8 respectively. While there are many who may not find rankings of any sort interesting or truly indicative of what a school is capable of, some find the last two years rankings particularly interesting.

With the departure from No Child Left Behind, there has been concerted effort to find the high schools who have successfully bridged the achievement gap. Rich and poor students do equally well. For the past two years, U.S. News and World Report w0uld only rank a high school that shows above average performance of economically disadvantaged students. There is a two step process to allow a high school to be ranked.

• Step 1: The first step determined whether each school’s students were performing better than statistically expected for the average student in the state. We started by looking at reading and math results for all students on each state’s high school proficiency tests.

We then factored in the percentage of economically disadvantaged students (who tend to score lower) enrolled at the school to identify the schools that were performing better than statistical expectations.

• Step 2: For those schools that made it past this first step, the second step determined whether the school’s least-advantaged students (black, Hispanic and low-income) were performing better than average for similar students in the state.

We compared each school’s math and reading proficiency rates for disadvantaged students with the statewide results for these student groups and then selected schools that were performing better than this state average.

High Tech High accepts students from all socio-economic backgrounds, so does Biotechnology High. Opponents of county based districts’ STEM schools say that career academies cherry pick only the best student in every town, so they are selecting only the best students in the county. However, the fact that students from all economic backgrounds achieve goals comparable to college standards indicate that these schools figured out something worthwhile.

Has the United States finally stepped up to plate in bridging the achievement gap?

How do you educate the next Steve Jobs?

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How do you educate someone to be the next Steve Jobs? It is an interesting question, because Jobs was such a complicated individual. Educators have been looking at Bloom’s Taxonomy, a graphical representation of the levels of thinking increasing with complexity. In the late 1990s, Lorin Anderson reviewed educational requirements for the 21st Century, and placed “Remembering” as the lowest level of thinking and “Creating” as the highest. The new term, Creating means the ability to produce something that solves a problem or meets a need, like Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone. She changed all the nouns used in the original Bloom’s Taxonomy into verbs to stress the importance of producing, writing or making something.

Herein lies an interesting problem. Only Thomas Edison or Walt Whitman types are capable of Creating (upper case c)? Some would argue that while not everyone will revolutionize a field or domain, we can all create (lower case c).

Because there are educators who believe that everyone is capable of achieving the highest level in Bloom’s Taxonomy, some want to turn the pyramid upside down, and start with teaching children Creating first. Many believe inquiry based learning is the way to go about doing just that, and it seems to fit in well with the Common Core. However, from psychologists’ views, Creating requires creativity, and that in itself takes time to develop. Howard Gardner stated that “…one cannot be creative unless one has mastered a domain—that process can take up to ten years.”

Creativity yields other questions, because creativity in writing differs from creativity in physics. In addition, there are different levels of creativity. Written with a lower case c, creativity helps parents figure out how to schedule a day, while Creativity yields Fielding or Pulitzer prizes.

Little-c creativity, which is often used as an indicator of mental health, includes everyday problem-solving and the ability to adapt to change. Big-C creativity, on the other hand, is far more rare. It occurs when a person solves a problem or creates an object that has a major impact on how other people think, feel and live their lives.

Are you confused with all the upper and lower case ‘c’ words? No worries, there’s a good possibility that none of this matters. Whether the student is capable of creativity, Creativity, creating or Creating, a certain type of mindset needs to be taught. Some call it Not Fearing Failure, others call it emotional resilience. How many times did Edison fail before he created a successful prototype of the light bulb? Did Jobs curl up into a ball and quit, when the computer LISA was a market flop?

If we conjecture that all of us are capable of Creating, whether as an act of creativity or Creativity, then how do we approach education? What role does emotional resilience play? Dr. Linda Eno, principal of Biotechnology High School, Pankti Kothari and William Wang share with us their school’s approach.

Why the stereotype of Chinese American children being good at math?

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It’s easy for any one of us to stereotype. One of the most prevalent generalizations is that Chinese children are good at math. I have many American friends of Chinese heritage who express apathy towards the logical mathematical subjects. (They refer to themselves as ABCs, American Born Chinese, or Bananas, but I don’t use either term to categorize myself or my highly culturally mixed children).  When my mathematically disinterested friends tested on any standardized math test, they still performed well. When interest plays such a pivotal role in a child’s success in a subject, why does the anecdotal evidence suggests that there is some sort of connection between cultural heritage and math ability?

I have met folks from mainland China who believe using the Chinese language to teach math yields better outcomes. I thought that was an interesting statement, but after some thought I wonder if perhaps an observable occurrence has been mistakenly identified as an underlying reason. Is it more likely that the Chinese culture plays a large role in teaching math?

One of the first items that seem to indicate the correlation of culture and math is the usage of twelve animals for the Chinese zodiac. When a grownup asks as child how old he is, often the grownup would ask, what sign he was born under. Then, the grownup would calculate aloud the age of the child basing it on the child’s sign and the sign of the current year. In essence, the grown models using base 12. In school, the academic approach to math is base 10. So the child is exposed to 2 different math bases from an early age.

On further thought, it does not seem a language itself can contribute to better understanding of math, but the process of learning Chinese may be laying mathematical foundations. Chinese is a heavily context driven language, because it has an unusually high number of homonyms. As an example, the sound “ba” pronounced with the first tone, could mean the number 8, scar, plantain, break open, scratch, etc.  The listener would need to reference other words around it and the context of the conversation to know how the character is used. Chinese requires a child still in the process of acquiring the language to process all the possible meanings on-the-fly. Does this not sound like teaching a child to build truth tables (defined as mathematical table used in logic—specifically in connection with Boolean algebra, boolean functions, and propositional calculus—to compute the functional values of logical expressions on each of their functional arguments, that is, on each combination of values taken by their logical variables)?

It would be an interesting study for a psychology student.

Educators Getting Involved with Social Reform

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Glen Galindo, Founder of Migrant Students Foundation, initiated the Cesar E. Chavez Blood Drive as a way to foster real life experience for many different college students across the nation. As a result of brainstorming, Migrant Students Foundation thought of a long term need to promote students to enter the health industry. Also, blood drives helped first generation college students from a migrant background to engage the college community. Unexpectedly, health education occurred as student donors discovered issues with their own health, like diabetes. Daria Wells, a Junior at The College of New Jersey, is the founder of the Cesar Chavez Blood Drive initiative at TCNJ. Other participating colleges include Rutgers University, Rider University, Princeton University, Seton Hall University, and Mercer County Community College.

What’s the Number 1 High School in New Jersey? It might be a career academy

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During the administration of George W. Bush, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was reborn as No Child Left Behind, which authorized and provided grants to Smaller Learning Communities (SLC).  SLCs across the nation could use funds to

(1) study the feasibility of creating smaller learning communities;

(2) research, develop, and implement strategies for creating smaller learning communities;

(3) provide professional development for school staff in the teaching methods that would be used in the smaller learning community;

(4) develop and implement strategies to include parents, business representatives, community-based organizations, and other community members in the activities of the smaller learning communities.

As a result, career academies, small high schools between 100 and 300 students, qualified to receive federal SLC grant money. Because of the increasing number of career academies which have proven to be successfully educating students, more parents encourage their children to apply.

One of the most successful career academies in the United States is located in Monmouth County, New Jersey, High Technology High School. This career academy accepts  the top candidate from each town in Monmouth County. Kevin Bals, principal of High Tech High, shares with us his knowledge and thoughts.

A Long Story

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One of my sisters-in-law gave my children an interactive globe that tells them something about each country on the planet. Today, the globe informed my older child that while Australia’s average life expectancy is 82, Swaziland’s average is only 32. She asked me why.

“Should I talk about AIDS?” I thought. The World Health Organization reported that over a third of Swaziland’s population between ages 15 and 49 has AIDS. I know nothing about the virus except the recent news that a Mississippi baby who is now a toddler was cured of it. Perhaps there is hope for Swaziland. However, I shouldn’t talk about AIDS. Uncle Luis, my children’s Godfather, should talk about that one, because he is a gastroenterologist who did his residency studying the effects HIV drugs had on the liver. Dr. Jennifer, a retired Army Colonel whose specialty is infectious diseases, can teach it.

I sighed, not because I knew a long conversation would ensue, but because I would need to work out a complicated subject for not just a young child but myself.

“There are more doctors, nurses and medicine in Australia than Swaziland,” I replied in the most general terms that an elementary school child could understand.

“Why?” came another question.

“Sit down,” I started. I was not sure how this conversation would go. We sat at the kitchen table, where so many of these contemplations happen. “There are not enough doctors in Africa because there isn’t enough money.”

“Why?” She dropped another bomb on me.

“In order for a country to have doctors, the country has to have money,” I explained. “So there are lots of people who are trying to come up with ideas how to make sure all countries have money. Ways to spread the money around.”

“If we spread all our money around, then WE wouldn’t have any.”

I did not expect this. “Yes,” I thought to myself. “Averaging doesn’t work. Enabling others does work. Should I talk about the shortcomings of communism? Should I talk about people’s views of Bolshevism? Or maybe about a kibbutz.” I decided to steer clear of politics.

“How does anybody make money?” I asked.

“You get a job,” she said with a smile that indicated she knew she had the right answer. I was glad to see that smile. How wonderful it must be knowing that you can have a right answer.

“That’s right,” I confirmed. “There aren’t that many jobs in Swaziland.”

Truth is, peasants in Swaziland grow marijuana to sell to South Africans.

“So how do you get them jobs?” she asked.

We had a conversation about micro-loans, and how $200 in the hands of woman or man with a good idea could generate money. However, she seemed to struggle with the idea, so I gave her an example.

“If someone gave you $500 so that you can make anything you want, what would you want to make?” I asked.

“TVs,” she answered.

“Let’s say you can make 5 TVs by yourself, but then you got an order for 100 TVs. What would you do?”

“I would hire people.”

“Right. Then let’s say you and the people who work for you do such a good job, that you get another order for 5000 TVs. Then what would you do?”

“I’d hire more people and start a big company.”

“What do people do with the money they make?”

“Go out and buy stuff.”

How true, I thought. That is how money works. Instead, I chose to say, “Yes, and they get an education. So that their children can become doctors, nurses and scientists who make medicine to cure disease.”

The conversation continued, until we reached a moral conclusion, an agreement in the Golden Rule. Also, we came to general commitment to the concept that money can be enabler when used to help, and a disabler when it becomes the only motivating factor in life. This long discussion has quite honestly given me a bit a of headache. I think I will try to shake it off by taking her to a bike ride to a local shop where you can buy stuff. Except that all the stuff allows artisans to pay for food, housing, doctors, medicine, and education for their children.

Polarity in Education

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Howard Gardner of Harvard University states that human beings have 9 different kinds of intelligences that make us see the world from a unique perspective. Every individual has a profile, a blend of the intelligences. Much like fingerprints, no two people have identical profiles, no two persons will interact with the world in the same way. According to Gardner, if a person has an inclination towards engineering or math (Logical-Mathematical Intelligence), the same person can also be self-aware (Intrapersonal Intelligence) and understand others (Interpersonal Intelligence). With a growing emphasis of interdisciplinary studies, teaching and learning, education pundits see more value into harnessing the different intelligences a single person can have.

Yet, there are countless individuals who see intelligences as mutually exclusive, with ample evidence from policy setters who emphasize S.T.E.M over arts, and administrators who use more money for science resources than art. Teachers and aspiring teachers believe that if a student possesses Logical-Mathematical intelligence, then automatically the same student is incapable of possessing Intra-Personal, Existential, Musical or any other intelligence. Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci should have dissuaded these individuals, but because of the persistence of this viewpoint art and science have become polar opposites. This is a dilemma for the United States, a nation that needs to leverage the multiple intelligences within a single person to solve 21st Century global problems, because the “…arts and sciences do not demonstrate our ironic composition of polarities. In their definitions the two are not opposites. The two are not a true dichotomy at all. For example, science often delves into many the behavioral aspects of humanity that until recently were considered liberal arts in nature. The arts also make plenty of use of scientific methods and technological tools.”

The United States is not alone in this problematic view of art and science. Singapore’s Ministry of Education, concerned with readiness for the 21st Century, stated the emphasis of “hard skills”, math and science, will not prepare children for the future. It plans on giving “soft skills”, aka art, more weight. The protests in Singapore sound similar to those found in the United States. “The hard-soft dichotomy is false. That is, one cannot account for the lack of the other. They are certainly not mutually exclusive.”

We should give ourselves more credit than this. Human beings are multi-faceted and our education should be, too.

Robert Morrison, Founder of Quadrant Art Education Research, shares his point of view.

Educators Becoming Social Activists

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The United States of America faces inequity in education. After No Child Left Behind showed educators the stark realities of disparity in education known as the achievement gap, education pundits debate how to address it. Famous institutions like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation encourage increasing teacher efficacy and the number of effective teachers, while concentrating them into much needed areas. The Gates Foundation also calls for the need to measure student growth. Others, like Charles Payne at University of Chicago suggest culture change that involves engaging parents, encouraging teachers to stay after school and challenging students. While schools try different means to close the achievement gap, reporters find that reform movements may actually be worsening inequity between the haves and the have-nots in education. The Washington Post explains that even though Brown v. the Board of Education in 1954 ended segregation, there has been a rise in what they term de-facto segregation. Compounding the problem, all education reform remains entrenched in testing, and test driven accountability does not raise student outcomes.

It appears that since the call of desegregation, the nation has come upon a place where social reform and education reform intersect and has not left it yet. Acting quietly, some local educators have now become involved in social reform. Others, not so quietly, have engaged aspiring teachers across the nation to be involved in social reform. There will be a series dedicated to bringing to light some of the efforts of educators and education activists who have turned to social activism.