April 4, 2016
(Photo above, (L to R) Inspired Teaching’s Jane Ehrenfeld presenting award to Jonathan Kozol)
On Thursday, April 21, at the 2016 Chocolate Inspiration gala, Inspired Teaching will honor award winning author, educator, and activist Jonathan Kozol as the inaugural recipient of the Inspired Teaching Changemaker Award.
“The most important thing for me,” said Mr. Kozol upon receiving the award, “is empowering teachers to go into the classroom and uphold their own high spirits, their sense of creativity, originality, and their personality above all else.”
For the past fifty years, Mr. Kozol has worked to overcome the challenge of providing equal opportunity to every child in our nation’s public schools. As his website describes,
“Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year as a teacher, received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Among his other major works is Savage Inequalities, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. His 1995 best-seller, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King. Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison wrote that Amazing Grace was ‘good in the old-fashioned sense: beautiful and morally worthy.’ Elie Wiesel said, ‘Jonathan’s struggle is noble. His outcry must shake our nation out of its guilty indifference.’
Ten years later, in The Shame of the Nation, a description of conditions that he found in nearly 60 public schools, Jonathan wrote that inner-city children were more isolated racially than at any time since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The Shame of the Nation appeared on The New York Times bestseller list the week that it was published.
Jonathan’s most recent book on childhood and education is Fire in the Ashes, a sweeping narrative that follows a group of children in a destitute community out of their infancy and elementary grades, through their secondary years, into their late teens, and beyond.”
This year’s special Chocolate Inspiration, celebrating Inspired Teaching’s 20th Anniversary, will be held at the Embassy of Italy and will feature the finest DC-area chefs and their most inspired chocolate creations.
More information about the event and purchasing tickets is available here.