Back to School for Clergy

Today, as part of her outreach in her first month in office, the new Chancellor of NYC’s Department of Education, Catherine Black, met with a diverse group of faith leaders: Christian, Muslim & Jewish leaders were represented at today’s meeting (this is one of several) and just to give you an idea of the breadth of opinion in the room, besides the OU, on the Jewish side of it, were the National Council of Jewish Women and the AJC.

While the meeting itself was off the record, I can report I had the opportunity to discuss my feelings on two recent education related events. One was the documentary Waiting for Superman, which I watched just yesterday at a screening by Governor Chris Christie in Trenton. The other was my visit to three schools in West Philadelphia, which I have already written on publicly. Superman is a gut wrenching film for anyone involved in education, and as my colleague over at E3, Derrell Bradford noted afterward, it speaks to the fierce “urgency of now” – with now the operative word and as my colleague Rafi Katz put it in his testimony today before the NJ Senate’s Budget Committee on the Opportunity Scholarship Act – at its most basic, it’s about helping kids in failing schools.

Posted by: Howie Beigelman