Jonathan Kozol received a summa cum laude degree in English literature from Harvard in 1958, after which he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University. In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, Jonathan Kozol moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston and became a fourth grade teacher in the Boston public schools. Kozol has devoted the subsequent four decades to the issues of education and social justice in America.

His earlier books, including The Shame of the Nation, Amazing Grace, Savage Inequalities, and Death at an Early Age are required reading at most universities and are part of the curriculum for future teachers and for professional development in dozens of our major urban systems.

Jonathan has been called by The Chicago Sun-Times “today’s most eloquent spokesman for America’s disenfranchised.” But Kozol believes that teachers and their students speak most eloquently for themselves; and in his newest book, Letters to a Young Teacher (Crown Publishers, August 2007), so full of the vitality of youth, we hear their testimony.

In Letters, Jonathan draws upon four decades of experience to guide the newest generation of our nation’s teachers into the ethically complicated challenges but, also, “the sheer joy and passionate rewards” of what he calls “a beautiful profession. If there is a single message I wish I could pass on to young teachers and to people thinking about teaching, that would be the one. It’s not political at all, not on the face of it; but fighting to defend that right to celebrate each perishable day and hour in a child’s life may, in the current climate of opinion, be one of the greatest challenges we have.”

The book concludes with a challenge to teachers to speak out boldly in opposition to the growing corporate attempts to privatize our public schools and announces the creation of a national network Jonathan has launched to support and advocate for talented but, at times, intimidated teachers who resist the drill-and-kill mentality that the federal law No Child Left Behind has forced upon too many of our urban schools.

When Jonathan Kozol is not with teachers in their classrooms, or at universities and colleges speaking to our future teachers, Jonathan is likely to be found in Washington, where he devotes considerable time to what he calls “my lifelong efforts at remediation of the members of the U.S. House and Senate.” Jonathan Kozol has spent much of the present year attempting to convince his friends within the Senate leadership to radically revise the punitive aspects of No Child Left Behind.