Education

Initially known for his role on the short-lived but critically acclaimed TV series Freaks and Geeks, the actor stars alongside Sean Penn in Gus Van Sant's newest film.

Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, and New York Times journalist Paul Tough discuss the project, an audacious integrated poverty-eradication effort in New York City.

Frank Burd and Ed Klein are Philadelphia public school teachers who were attacked on the job. Both Burd, a math teacher, and Klein, a music teacher, talk about the difficulties of teaching in inner city schools.

Michael Farris is the co-founder of Home School Legal Defense Association and the president of Patrick Henry College, the first university in America for Christian home-schooled children. The school, located in Purcellville, Va., grooms its students for leadership.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, it also disrupted the education of thousands of students. While many schools remain closed, Benjamin Franklin High School is one of the few operating charter schools in New Orleans. We talk with two teachers.

In 1949, when he was 24, Greenberg joined the Inc. Fund, which would later be called the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He worked on some of the most important civil rights cases, including representing Martin Luther King, Jr. He also led the Fund's campaigns to help integrate the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi. With others, he tried the Delaware and Topeka cases of Brown v. Board of Education. His memoir and history of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is called Crusaders in the Courts: Legal Battles of the Civil Rights Movement.

Patterson's book Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy looks at the historic Supreme Court case and its aftermath. Patterson also wrote Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974.

His new book is Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Among the commercial activities at many universities and colleges these days are: drug companies giving money to medical schools, industry buying the rights to scientific discoveries and industry-endowed faculty chairs. Bok is critical of such ventures.

Ravitch is the author of the new book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. In her book she chronicles the efforts of school boards and bias and sensitivity committees to edit and shape the textbooks that end up in classrooms. Some examples of this include: omitting the mention of Jews in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story about prewar Poland, changing the expression "My God!" to "You don't mean it," and recommending that children not be shown as disobedient or in conflict with adults.

Mel Levine, M.D. The founder of the All Kinds of Minds Institute and the Director of the Center for Development and Learning has just written a book called A Mind at a Time: America's Top Learning Expert Shows How Every Child Can Succeed. Levine is a professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School.