EMBOLDENING CITIZENS AND LEADERS TO STAND UP FOR OUR FUTURE September 6, 2010 
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Position: Secretary

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    

To research this nominee, please look for them on at the Progressive Government Institute website and Google.

Jonathan Kozol   Current Rating: click to rate
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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:
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