For Immediate Release
Edutopia Announces the 2007 Daring Dozen
Prestigious List Honors Leading Lights in the World of Education
San Rafael, CA (May 23, 2007) -- Edutopia, the magazine of The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF), has announced its 2007 Daring Dozen, a collection of twelve remarkable individuals making a powerful difference in the world of education. Profiles of this year's group, chosen by Edutopia staff from a broad range of candidates from around the country, will appear in the June 2007 issue of Edutopia. In addition, Edutopia.org will host a Daring Dozen interactive map highlighting personal comments, photos, videos, and online resources from the honorees beginning Wednesday, May 23.
"Every thriving culture has its exceptional citizens, and in the world of education, where it takes exceptional skills simply to survive, these folks manage to stand out," says Jennifer Sweeney, executive editor of Edutopia. "This group is incredibly diverse, but they do have in common a passion for making the highest-quality education available to every child, including those sidelined by hardship, inequity, or the courageous sacrifices of their families."
The 2007 Daring Dozen
1. Richard G. Baraniuk (Houston) is the Rice University electrical and computer engineering professor who founded Connexions, the online center for free texts, most of which are written by faculty members at universities in the United States and abroad.
2. Edward Burns (Baltimore) is the Baltimore detective turned teacher who now produces HBO's critically acclaimed series The Wire. He has provided a voice of authenticity for the series' fourth season, which has brought national attention to issues facing urban public schools.
3. NÃnive Clements Calegari (San Francisco) is the founding executive director and a board member of 826 Valencia, a free drop-in writing lab for youth ages 6-18. It has spawned 826 National, a collection of six nonprofit organizations, with additional chapters in Ann Arbor, Michigan; New York City; Chicago; Los Angeles; and Seattle.
4. Mary Keller (Harker Heights, Texas) is the cofounder and executive director of the Military Child Education Coalition. Keller built this nonprofit organization to ensure smoother transitions to new schools and unfamiliar communities for the roughly 850,000 K-12 students in military families who must relocate every two to three years.
5. Mark Leon (Moffett Field, California) is the director of the Robotics Alliance Project at NASA's Ames Research Center. Guided by Leon's commitment and enthusiasm, the project has reached out to more than 100,000 middle school and high school students in the United States and abroad, promoting science, technology, engineering, and math through competitions.
6. Claudette Morton (Helena, Montana) is the executive director of the Montana Small School Alliance, an organization that links the state's 145,000 K-12 students, many of whom are in truly rural settings. By creating teacher training and forging alliances between state agencies and local technology corporations, Morton has set an example that helps to connect remote locations and improve learning opportunities for teachers and kids in rural schools around the country.
7. Luma Mufleh (Atlanta) coaches the Fugees, a group of soccer teams of young refugees ages 9-17. Mufleh has offered much-needed support and cohesion, as well as educational opportunities, to children from war-torn areas of Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia and other troubled countries who have settled in the suburbs of Atlanta.
8. John W. Rogers Jr. (Chicago) is the founder of Ariel Community Academy, the high-performing K-8 public school located in Chicago's low-income South Side neighborhood that meshes financial literacy and investment with core curriculum.
9. Arthur Rolnick (Minneapolis), director of research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has used his influence to advocate for early-childhood education. Traveling the country making presentations, conducting research, and publishing reports, Rolnick advocates early education as an economic-development issue, spreading the message that spending on high-quality education for three- and four-year-olds yields a higher return than any other public investment.
10. Derrell Simpson (Washington, DC) is an eighteen-year-old senior-class president who just completed a three-year term as a District of Columbia commissioner of volunteer and service-related programs. The commission's youngest member, Simpson co-chaired the subcommittee on education and worked to introduce youth-service education into the district's school curriculum.
11. David Sobel (Keene, New Hampshire), an Antioch New England University education professor, is on the forefront of an educational-reform movement that emphasizes the use of the local environment as a laboratory to teach science, ecology, and social studies. He trains legions of future teachers and others to put kids in contact-literally-with their environments, making ecology concrete and immediate.
12. Laurie M. Tisch (New York), chairwoman of New York City's nonprofit Center for Arts Education, has played a pivotal role in restoring arts education in the city's public schools. Since 1996, the center has exposed more than 450,000 children to education about and careers in theater, dance, music, fashion, art, and architecture.
The June issue of Edutopia also includes the Global Six, a collection of remarkable individuals from beyond our national borders whose bold projects offer inspiration for educators everywhere. The issue also checks in on past Daring Dozen honorees and reveals their current aspirations.
About Edutopia:
Edutopia is published by The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF), founded in 1991 by filmmaker George Lucas as a nonprofit organization that chronicles and advocates innovative practices in education. In addition to publishing Edutopia magazine and the Edutopia.org Web site, it produces documentaries and publishes books and DVDs. To find out more about Edutopia magazine and GLEF's resources, go to www.Edutopia.org.
