June 15, 2010: My guest will be educator and poet Len Solo. Len is the author of the new book:
"Making An Extraordinary School: The Work of Ordinary People"
Forewords by Jonathan Kozol & Roland S. Barth
"One of the country's outstanding schools"
-Redbook Magazine
"The Disney's Spotlight School of the Year, 2000"
"What a gift! Making an Extraordinary School offers an enlightened and enlightening alternative to what so many today must experience and endure in schools. It offers a powerful example of a better way."
-Roland S. Barth
"Len Solo's beautiful and tremendously useful story of the Graham & Parks School is one of those rare works on education that is a genuine joy to read"
-Jonathan Kozol
Len Solo has been an educator for most of his professional work life. He has been a public high school teacher of English, math, and social studies; founder of a small, private alternative school in Atlantic City (Atlantic County New School); founder and department chairperson of the Teacher Drop-Out Center at Stockton State College, Pomona, New Jersey; principal for twenty-seven years at Graham & Parks Alternative Public School in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and is currently an education consultant. He is also a painter, writer, and poet.
Len’s books include: Landscape of the Misty Eye, with Steve Weitzman; Rooted in Place; Making an Extraordinary School: The Work of Ordinary People; The Magic of Light; and has most recently contributed an essay in the anthology, Turning Points: 35 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories.