OSTI AWARDS HALL OF FAME

2011 OSTI AWARD RECIPIENTS

OSTI Lifetime Achievement Award- 2011

The purpose of this award is to honor a person that has made a significant and lasting contribution to the field of education.

Jonathan Kozol

Jonathan Kozol was born in Boston in 1936 into a traditional middle-class Jewish family. Kozol's father worked as a neurologist and psychiatrist, and his mother was a social worker. Kozol attended Harvard and later Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and then lived in Paris in poor neighborhoods for several years while he worked on a novel.

A defining moment in Kozol's life occurred in 1964 when, shortly after returning to Boston to pursue an academic career, he heard about three young civil-rights workers who had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. He had never been political or had any involvement in race issues, but he was greatly affected by the news. Soon after hearing of this event he began working as a teacher in a freedom school that had been set up in a black church in a low-income, predominantly black area in Roxbury, just south of Boston.

Kozol has made a practice of leaving comfortable surroundings for more challenging, impoverished areas. He enjoyed teaching young children, and eventually got a job in the public school system in Roxbury teaching fourth grade. The segregated public school in Roxbury was very different from the school Kozol had attended as a child growing up in the wealthy Boston suburb of Newton. Shortly after he began teaching in the public school system, Kozol was fired for reading from a book of poetry by Langston Hughes that was not on the approved curriculum list. Soon after, he wrote his first work of nonfiction, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools, based on his teaching experiences in Roxbury. The book won the National Book Award in 1968.

Kozol's books often involve first-hand accounts of his experiences. His books serve to bear witness to social problems such as segregated and unequal schools, illiteracy, and homelessness. Often Kozol succeeds in humanizing abstract social issues by involving the reader intimately with particular individuals who are directly affected by these issues.

In his most recent book, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, Kozol addresses the issues of race and poverty by exploring the lives of inner-city residents in the South Bronx. In a review for the Washington Post Book World, Marie Arana-Ward writes that it is "a powerful book that lays bare what is surely the ugliest truth about us: that there are pockets of hell in our inner cities, and that even as an entire sector of America is condemned to burn in them, we insist on looking the other way."

Kozol has said, "Of all my books, Amazing Grace means the most to me. It took the most out of me and was hardest to write, because it was the hardest to live through those experiences. I felt it would initially be seen as discouraging but, ultimately, sensitive readers would see the resilient and transcendent qualities of children and some mothers in the book-that it would be seen as a book about the elegant theology of children. That's what happened finally. The most moving comments about it also pointed to its moral and religious texture."

Kozol currently lives with his dog Sweetie Pie in a 200 year-old farmhouse in Byfield, Massachusetts.

Jonathan Kozol has received the following awards:

Rhodes Scholar, 1958-59; Olympia Award, 1962; Sexton fellowship in creative writing from Harper & Row, 1962; National Book Award, 1968, for Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools; Guggenheim fellow, 1970 and 1984; Field Foundation fellow, 1972; Ford Foundation fellow, 1974; Rockefeller fellow, 1978 and 1983; Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 1988; Conscience in Media Award, American Society of Journalists and Authors, 1988; Christopher Award, 1988, for Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America; New England Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, both 1992, both for Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools.

OSTI Pioneer Award- 2011

The purpose of this award is to honor a person that has shown leadership and development in the out-of-school time field.

Andria Fletcher

Dr. Andria J. Fletcher is Chief Afterschool Consultant for the Center for Collaborative Solutions.  She is a nationally recognized expert in afterschool program and policy development.  As the founding Director of Sacramento START, Andi initiated the program in 1995 with 20 sites, 120 staff, 2,000 students and $850,000 in funding.  Under her leadership, within three years, student attendance increased to 4,000 and funding exceeded $3.4 million.  In 1997, she and Carla Sanger of LA’s BEST afterschool program worked with Assembly Member Deborah Ortiz to launch California’s first afterschool legislation, which led to $550 million in state funding.

Andi has been a keynote speaker and workshop presenter at over 150 national, state and regional conferences including the California Department of Health Services’ Obesity Conference, National School Boards Association Conferences, California Department of Education-sponsored afterschool conferences, Council of Chief State School Officers 21^st Century Community Learning Centers sessions, Harvard University’s Symposium of Evaluation, the National League of Cities, the Disney Institute, the National Association of Elementary and Secondary School Principals, the National Summit on Afterschool and several U.S. Department of Education Regional conferences.  She is the author of numerous publications, many of which are among the most widely read in the field.  She is the co-author, together with Sam Piha and Reba Rose of the Community Network for Youth Development, of A Guide to Developing Exemplary Practices in Afterschool Programs.  Most recently, she authored Changing Lives, Saving Lives–A Step-by-Step Guide to Developing Exemplary Practices in Healthy Eating, Physical Activity and Food Security in Afterschool Programs (2010).  She also wrote Expand and Excel, A Step-by-Step Guide for Managing Growth and Strengthening Quality in Afterschool Programs (2006), Lessons in Leadership (2007), and the Developing Exemplary Practices in Nutrition, Physical Activity and Food Security in Afterschool guide (2008). Andi earned her doctorate in Political Science at UCLA.

Andi has done a wide variety of consulting and site-based mentoring and coaching for afterschool programs over the last thirteen years as Chief Afterschool Consultant for CCS.  She led the original Healthy Behaviors Initiative Learning Community and provided coaching to the Learning Community afterschool programs and certifying them as Healthy Behaviors Learning Centers. She is now leading an LA Healthy Behaviors Learning Community for LACOE.