If
you were to search Google for the shows below,
the most efficient way would be to add (audio)
after the name; for example: Dr. Seuss (audio)
or Michael Morpurgo (BBC). But it should be noted
that Google does not index most of public radio
or the BBC. Unfortunate for many.
For non-functioning
links, please contact the
webmaster;
or go to Link
Rot to find the missing pages.
In the
midst of the culture wars of the late '60s and '70s,
a great textbook war broke out in West Virginia when
the local conservatives of Kanawha County declared war
on the local progressives over their new textbooks, a
war that included boycotts, bullets, and bomb threats.
Trey Kay won a 2010 Peabody Award for
his radio documentary on that 1974 battle. Many parallels
can be drawn between the fears of those West Virginia
parents and the fears of today’s Texas state textbook
committee. It’s
worth noting that in the intervening quarter century,
the grand fears of the West Virginia families and churches
never materialized and the state’s
education still ranks in the bottom 15 in the nation.
One of the most telling moments and quotes comes from
a West Virginia parent who declares during the broadcast, “If
I have been successful as a parent, nothing my children
can read in school will hurt them.” That
in itself is worth hours of debate. Listen to The
Great Textbook Warat: http://mediasearch.wnyc.org/m/30507901/the-great-textbook-war.htm (58
mins.)
A full transcript also is available at the site page
for free.
For
more than a decade, the testing crowd pointed to Dr. Diane Ravitch as
a loyal supporter. Having worked for both Presidents
George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, she made no bones
about being pro-accountability. In the early 1990s she
was assistant secretary of education in the first Bush
administration. A widely respected education historian,
she slowly began to have second thoughts about
the testing mania of NCLB as early as 2003 and in 2010
published The
Death and Life of the Great American School District, a
book that thoroughly
repudiated the testing community and itemized
the damage done by narrowing curriculum in
the name of higher scores — which
never rose anyway. Listen as she explores the book’s issues with
Diane Rehm, March 11, 2010, 52 mins. http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-03-11/diane-ravitch-death-and-life-great-american-school-system.
Amanda
Ripley added
long-term research to her own decades of observation
in the American classroom to write “What
Makes a Great Teacher?” in
the January/February 2010 issue of The Atlantic.
Listen to a fascinating 30-minute
interview with Ripley, covering what the great ones do, what
the bad ones fail to do, and who’s most at fault in classroom
after classroom, especially in the inner-city. Much
to think about here.
Three
distinguished history professors host a monthly online
podcast ("BackStory
with the History Guys") that looks
at a current issue through the
eyes of their respective centuries of expertise
(18th, 19th, 20th centuries). Every show is both
insightful and entertaining, far from stuffy. In this
episode, they look back at public
education in America and wonder
if we've set ourselves up for failure by expecting
too much from a place where children spend only 900
hours a year. The archives of this series should be required
listening for anyone teaching history.
With the cell phone as ubiquitous to the classroom
as ballpoint pens, what are the ramifications? Is it
benign, distracting, or damaging? The answer can be
found in a new study from three Stanford University
professors ("Cognitive
control in media multitaskers”) in the science journal PNAS
(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
The study offers strong evidence that the biggest users/abusers
of multitasking are also the biggest losers when it
comes to intellectual performance. Just as worrisome
is the finding that heavy users faired poorly in their
performances even when distractors (laptop, ipod, iphone,
etc.) were turned off, suggesting there’s
a lasting negative impact from distracted-living, at
least for brain-work.
One of the Stanford author-professors, Clifford
Nass, brought his findings to KQED’s public radio “Forum” and
took calls from listeners in the San Francisco
Bay area for a program called "Multitasking:
Does It Work?"
(Aug. 28, 2009 (55 min.). To download the program as
MP3 audio, click DOWNLOAD.
or listen via the panel below.
In the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s
assassination in 1968, a third-grade teacher in an
all-white class in Iowa took an extraordinary step: She
divided her classroom by eye-color, telling her students
that blue-eyed
students were smarter and better than brown-eyed students.
Furthermore, she put identifying collars on the brown-eyed children,
decreeing that blue-eyes could not play on the playground with brown-eyes.
The reaction was immediate. PBS' Frontline filmed one of
her classes three years later and again when that class
returned for a reunion 17 years later. The entire program
is available online and remains one of the most extraordinary
lessons on the lasting impact of racism and discrimination.
The first eight minutes of the program are entirely appropriate
for grades 3 and up. The rest of the "A
Class Divided" is geared toward middle-
and senior high students, as well as adults. If there's
a better example on film of how to teach, I'm unaware of it. Class
Divided at: www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/
When Jim Sadwith was a student
at a N.E. prep school (Hotchkiss School) back in the
1960s, he felt lonely, scorned, and disenfranchised until
he read Catcher in the
Rye by J.D. Salinger. That inspired him to write
a play based on the book, after which he felt compelled
to gain the reclusive Salinger’s permission to stage the
play at his school. It took him more than a year to find
and meet the author and the results were predictable:
cursory rejection—except
for a challenge Salinger threw at the boy. The results,
short and long-term, make for a fascinating coming of
age tale. http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_812_Meeting_Salinger.mp3/view.
“On
the Media,” NPR’s weekly show devoted
to all things media, took a hard look ("The
Net Effect,"April
3, 2009) at how the Web
is affecting the print world (books, newspapers,
magazines) and what it could be doing to our
brains—for better or for worse. It’s
a refreshing and thought-provoking show.
Dick
Gordon explores one of education’s
most pressing and continuous problems: the school
dropout. In this interview
he pores over the issues with a recent 20-year-old dropout
and a former dropout that recharged himself, went to
college, and now is a Houston ISD dropout prevention
officer. The lessons in their personal stories should
be heard by every student (junior high through senior high), educator,
and parent. ("The
Story," 50 mins., Dec. 10, 2008, http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_663_Lessons_From_A_Dropout.mp3 To
hear the interview here, click right:
One of the more controversial
figures in American education today is Michelle
Rhee, chancellor of schools for the District of
Columbia, who is bringing a whole
new paradigm to urban education, including the elimination
of tenure. She's already closed down dozens of schools
in what is the lowest achieving district in the nation.
Nonetheless the question remains: Can fixing the school
fix the child if the home is so badly broken? Listen
as Diane
Rehm interviews Rhee on December 26, 2008, along with taking calls
from listeners: http://www.wamu.org/programs/dr/08/12/16.php#24146
One in every 150 children
is now diagnosed to be somewhere on the spectrum
of autism and much has been written and speculated
on the causes and effects. The public radio program, “Speaking
of Faith,” often addresses issues apart from the traditional parameters
of faith and in this 60-minute program it interviews
families of autistic children—"Being
autistic and being human." It is riveting,
inspiring, and very enlightening. For example, one family’s child
is fascinated by the logos of film companies the precede
the movie and it turns out there is a vast number of
people engaged in the same obsession. How does an autistic
person who is bound by the concrete relate to the abstract
concept of God or religion, right and wrong, and even
empathy? (Oct.
16, 2008, “Speaking of Faith,” 60-min.
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2008/beingautistic/)
Jeremy Miller worked for 9
years as a Kaplan coach/tutor, including 2007 in New
York City schools, using boilerplate-scripted lesson plans to help at-risk
students achieve passing grades on state tests. His salary per day was
$295 per day, with an overall cost of $1000 per student. The year after
his NYC experience, he put his experiences on paper in a lengthy expose
for Harper's Magazine (September 2008) entitled, "Tyranny of the Test." An
integral part of the No Child Left Behind Act's solution to low scores, privatized
supplemental instruction (like Kaplan, Princeton Review, etc.) takes a serious
hit in this dispatch right from the trenches of education and will give pause
for second- and third-thoughts about what we're doing in the name of higher scores.
Miller gave a 30-minute interview to public radio's Leonard Lopate on WNYC in
September 2008 at: www.wnyc.org/flashplayer/mp3player.swf?config=http://www.wnyc.org/
flashplayer/config_share.xml&file=http://www.wnyc.org/stream/xspf/107583
Connie Heerman is
a veteran 27-year English teacher working in an
inner-city high school (Perry Meridian High School,
Indianapolis) when she decides to use the book Freedom
Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used
Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around
Them (also the subject of the popular
film a few years ago). Because the student-authors
of the book occasionally use raw language, Heerman
petitioned approval from the school board. When her
queries went unanswered, she distributed the book
to her students. And that's when the storm arrived,
first with a demand that she retrieve the books, and
then her suspension as a teacher. Listen
as she tells this heart-breaking story to "The
Story" and Dick
Gordon. Ironically worth noting is the mission statement
for Perry Meridian High School English Department: "We are committed
to language literacy in all its forms as a critical
tool for lifelong learning." To
hear the interview here, click right:
Is
the "short story" an endangered art form"?
Remember when nearly every periodical published at
least one short story every month? Not so any longer.
Meanwhile the publishing world focuses almost
exclusively on
the novel. KQED's "Forum" hosts a panel of
publishing experts to discuss the issues.
To hear the show, click right:
The
repetitive drudgery of schoolwork — without immediate
rewards — often drives students into dropping
out, opting for paying jobs with instant gratification.
Some of these young people might have second thoughts
after listening to the testimony of two women who totaled
28 years in a Perdue chicken factory, working
the line,
and then helped run a Duke University study on the
physical and emotional damage done by that kind of
work. No wonder some prefer the risk of military
life over "line work." (APM's "The
Story," 50 mins., May
14, 2008)
To listen to the show, click on the right:
In the wake of reports
that 1 in 10 high schools are "dropout factories," graduating
less than 40 percent of their students, NPR's Diane
Rehm talks with 5 experts on the issues involved, www.wamu.org/programs/dr/07/11/07.php#18269(55
mins., Nov. 7, 2007).
Blake
Taylor (and his mother) discuss what
life has been like for a child diagnosed as ADHD
at age five and medicated ever since. Far from
a depressing journey, Taylor's tale is enlightening
and inspiring. Today at age 19, he's a premed student
at UC-Berkeley. (April
23, 2008, "The Story" with Dick Gordon, 20
mins). http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_500_ADHD_and_Me.mp3/view) To
hear the interview, click right:
Everyone sooner or later meets
a disappointment that wounds deep enough to seem
mortal. A story like that of Floyd
Scholz can help ease such
wounds. At age 13 Floyd had been told by his football
coach that he lacked any redeeming athletic qualities
and thus was wasting his time practicing with the
football squad. Devastating. Within a few years,
the coach was proved mightily wrong—Scholz
became a national decathlon champion and seemed headed
for an Olympic team berth in the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
And then came disappointment again: President Carter
cancelled the U.S. team's participation. Everything
he had worked toward for five years had suddenly
evaporated. Today Floyd Scholz is another kind of
world-class champion—this time carving expensive
birds out of blocks of wood. (April
21, 2008, "The
Story" with Dick Gordon, 20 mins.)http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_498_Boycotts_and_Birds.mp3/view)
Click to listen here:
On The Diane Rehm Show, we get a glimpse of what
it's like to teach in the American classroom under
No Child Left Behind: veteran educator Jonathon
Kozol discusses his book, Letters
to a Young Teacher,
and Dan Brown talks about his
book, The
Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New
Blackboard Jungle.
Dr.
Ben Carson, the preeminent children's
neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins, was raised by a welfare
mother with a third-grade education who was married
at the age of 13. Watch and listen as he describes
his rise from both poverty and the bottom of his school
classes to the heights of personal and medical success.
(Dr. Carson's
personal story has been an integral part
of The Read-Aloud Handbook for decades.) This
interview comes by way of the Academy
of Achievement, a Web site that symbolizes
the unparalleled opportunity of the Web and, at the
same time, the vast array of knowledge lost
to those who cannot or refuse to use it. With each
of the hundreds of world-famous individuals interviewed,
their words come to us via text, audio, and video.
The roster includes people from the arts, business,
public service, science and exploration, and sports—all
commercial-free. The subjects range from Dr.
Carson and Maya
Angelou to George Lucas and Desmond
Tutu,
Amazon's Jeff Bezos to the NFL's Peyton
Manning, with
each highlighting pivotal decisions in their childhoods
and careers. In addition, classroom materials for teachers
also are available from the foundation.
There is also an excellent
55-min. interview by Diane Rehm with Dr. Carson from
Dec. 23, 1999; it can be heard at: http://wamu.org/programs/dr/99/12/23.php
For
the umpteenth time, the question has arisen: Is Reading
on life-support or already dead? As technology takes
away more hours, young people gravitate to online games
and chat-lines, and newspaper readership at a 20-year
low, what does this portend for the future? WNYC (NPR-New
York) devoted one show to the subject. First in was
historian David
McCullough, who is sincerely
worried. Listen at: www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2007/12/21
The "online literacy
debate" continued
with an interview with Elizabeth
Birr Moje, professor of Literacy, Language,
and Culture in Educational Studies at the University
of Michigan, and Sunil Iyengar,
director of Research and Analysis at the National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA) (20 mins., Aug. 12,
2008, "The
Great Literacy Debate," WNYC-Brian Lehrer
Show). Listen at: www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2008/08/12
For a look at one of the earliest predictions of Reading's
imminent demise, read about the Scribner's essay from
1894 "The
End of Books." What caused the
furor way back then? Thomas Edison's invention
that began the technology revolution.
Speaking
of inventions, Amazon is now marketing a device that
may revolutionize the publishing industry: the
Kindle.
With a screen that is unparalleled in its clarity (Amazon
prefers to call it electronic-paper), it operates
independent of a computer and is lighter than a paperback
book (10.3 ounces). Buy a book and it's delivered wirelessly
in less than one minute and stores 200 volumes. How
much of a choice? More than 100,000 books available,
including more than 90 of 112 current New York Times
bestsellers at $10 each, along with newspapers like
The New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, and Washington
Post. Kindle's cost: $400. Too much? What if the
price drops, as it did for the iPhone and the iPods
and HD TV? Listen as Tom
Ashbrook of
NPR's "On Point" surveys experts and callers
on how this gadget will or will not affect the reading
culture of America at E-READING. (Nov.
20, 2007, 45-mins) at: http://archives.onpointradio.org/shows/2007/11/20071120_b_main.asp.
See also ONLINE READING here.
What
makes for a bestselling children's book? Leonard
Lopate (of WNYC-NY) polls three experts in the field — Jean
Feiwel (former head of Scholastic), Diane
Roback (senior
editor of the children's section of Publisher’s
Weekly), and Micha Hershman (a manager
of Borders Group children's department) — to
gather opinions. An excellent overview of the field
today, with good and bad news. A full transcript also
can be copied from the web site (Mar.
3, 2008, 25 mins.) at: http://mediasearch.wnyc.org/m/19252945/what_makes_a_best_selling_children.htm
Child
development experts have been sounding alarms for more
than a decade about the disappearance
of play from the
landscape of childhood. A recent alert comes from Elena
Bodrova of the National Institute for Early Education
Research, who tells NPR's "Morning Edition" that
the lack of play time is showing up in children's self
regulation and executive function. What does that mean?
Listen as she explains in this enlightening 7-minute
piece "Old-Fashioned
Play Builds Serious Skills." (Feb.
21, 2008, 7 min.) at: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19212514
On Feb. 1, 1960, four
black college students in Greensboro, NC, handsomely
dressed in jackets and ties, sat down for lunch at
a Woolworth store (the equivalent of Wal-Mart today).
At a time when segregation ruled the south, such
an action was more than daring — in some
places it bordered on suicidal. Denied
service, they returned the next day with 15 friends
who, in succeeding days, were joined by 300, and then
1000. A revolution had been started by four young people.
Listen as one of those men, Franklin
McCain, eloquently
looks back to those events and the role it played in
his own life and American history. (NPR's "All
Things Considered," Feb.
1, 2008, 7 mins.) at: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18615556.
Related children's picture book: Freedom
on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins by
Carole Boston (Dial, 2003) looks
at the lunch counter revolution through the eyes of
an eight-year-old girl.
One of the little-known chapters in the
Civil Rights movement is the tale of a 24-year-old
Presbyterian seminary student (Gurdon Brewster) who
apprenticed during the summer of 1961 at Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta and lived with "Daddy" King,
Martin's father. The young man became an integral
part of the King family that summer and in sharing
his tale with Dick Gordon on American Public Radio's "The
Story," he
paints a vivid portrait of both the King family, the
role of religion in the movement, and the dangerous
times they lived in; (Jan.
21, 2008, 52 mins.) at http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_432_Summer_With_The_King_Family.mp3/view
In light of new research showing a distinct IQ
advantage for first-borns (6/22/07,
New York Times, page 1 www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/science/22sibling.html),
a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology
explore the ramifications on "Forum" at
KQED in San Francisco (June
29, 2007, 52 mins.) at
www.kqed.org/epArchive/R706291000
There's an alarming
and growing academic
achievement divide
between our male and female students,
with the boys showing up on the short end of the comparison
in almost everything academic. Is it a boy problem
or a man problem — or both? Two public radio
shows have addressed the issues: In June 2006, Leonard
Lopate of WNYC (June
16, 2006, 33 mins.) talked
with college professor (and
parent) Tom Chiarella (author of "The
Problem With Boys,"Esquire July
2006), along with Dr. Leonard Sax, author
of Why
Gender Matters; You can listen to the entire interview
either by clicking on the menu immediately below or using
your browser to reach www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2006/06/16.
Chiarella's entire article can be found online at http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0706SOTAMBOYS_94
Out
in San Francisco at KQED, Michel
Krasny confers with a panel of experts for
opinions about what's causing the student gender divide.
(July 11, 2006, 52 mins.) at www.kqed.org/epArchive/R607110900
In "Put
to the Test," American
RadioWorks looks back on the first four years
of No Child Left Behind, tracking its effects on one
high school in Greensboro,
NC; listen as various points of view are shared by
principal, faculty, students and parents. The tale
is sobering and the reporting is first-rate. Both audio
and the show's transcript are available for free directly
at the site. (Sept.
24, 2007, 52 mins.) http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/testing/
Alfie
Kohn, one of America's freshest,
most respected education writers and the author
of The Homework Myth, argues that little
of what we call "homework" does any
good and, in fact, may do considerable harm.
Listen as he explains to NPR's Diane
Rehm, and then takes calls from across
the U.S., some of which contain fiercely cogent
responses. (Diane
Rehm Show, Sept. 5, 2006, 55 mins.) www.wamu.org/programs/dr/06/09/05.php#1144
Far
and away, the best public speech I've ever heard
was the one given by New York Times foreign
affairs columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas
Friedman in May 2005. Explaining to
a St. Paul, Minnesota, audience how he came to write
his million-copy bestseller, The World Is Flat,
Friedman does everything we ask of a public speaker:
he's dynamic, informative, entertaining, suspenseful,
involves the audience, and poses a provocative scenario
that lingers long after his spoken words have ended.
One need look no further for a masterful example
for a public speaking class. American
Public Radio, 45 mins. at: http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/thinkglobal/local-thinkglobal-470738.mp3
Click to listen to audio here:
Friedman also is available online for viewing (free)
on the Charlie
Rose show, speaking about The
World Is Flat.
In
the midst of prime television viewing hours one night
in 1974, a young black woman leaned into a microphone
at the Watergate hearings and declared in a husky voice
that had been honed on debating teams at an all-black
high school and an all-black college, uttered words
that resonated across Washington and into the White
House, while riveting the nation: “My faith in
the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total,
and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator
to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction
of the Constitution.” Those words by Rep.
Barbara Jordan of Texas were, among other
things, the single loudest clarion in what became a
full-throated chorus for the resignation of President
Richard M. Nixon. No black woman in American
history had ever been heard by so many Americans in
one day, and with such historical effect. Her life
story is heard in a special one-hour audio from KUT
radio in Houston. The entire script for the show is
available at http://kut.org/items/show/5525.
The audio button for the broadcast can be found at
the bottom of the page at: http://kut.org/items/show/5524.
More Jordan material, including Bill Moyers' stirring
eulogy at her memorial service, can be found through
the University of Texas site at: http://txtell.lib.utexas.edu/stories/media/j0001-video.html.
The
most listened to radio drama in American history, "On
a Note of Triumph," was broadcast simultaneously
by all three networks, May 8, 1945, to mark the end
of World War II in Europe (VE Day). Sixty million Americans
tuned in to listen. The script was written by the man
many believe to be the only true genius the radio networks
ever produced, Norman
Corwin. Carl Sandburg called the show"
one of the all-time great American poems" and
people could quote whole passages many years later.
On its 60 anniversary, NPR rebroadcast both the show
and a one-hour profile of Corwin (still alive and still
brilliant at 95), narrated by Charles Kurault. Links
to both shows can be found at: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4668028.
Listening
to the broadcast again while the war in Iraq was still
being waged was a sobering experience. In 2006, a short
documentary on this show won an Academy Award.
If
you're teaching a unit on the Civil War, don't miss
this short segment from "Morning
Edition" on the 140th anniversary of Lincoln's
assassination. It features a recording from 1947
in which a 101-year-old
Confederate veteran recalls being
a teenage prisoner of war and one morning seeing
the camp's flag at half-mast. "Who died," he
asked. (3.5 mins., April 15, 2005)
Beginning in 1974, the L.A.
Theater Works began recording
live theater for an audio archive that now
ranks as the best in the world, with more than
320 major American productions. Via LATW's
Web site, a complete play can be heard each
week, along with 15-minute openings from dozens
of others. In addition, its archive of plays
is available for purchase on CD or audiocassette.
Author Ernest
J. Gaines was raised by his crippled
aunt who had never walked a day in her
life, who crawled everywhere she went. In this
NPR interview, he explains the role she and
her friends played in his book and movie, The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. (NPR,
Feb. 5, 2005, 8 mins.)
At any given time you can find
as many as three sports biographies on The New
York Times top-10 bestseller list. Sold as the
athlete's own view, invariably the books are written
by "ghostwriters" who often can't get the
athlete to even read the book, never mind think it
through. Listen as three top writers tell what it's
like to write
the life of a professional but non-reading athlete.
(Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC, Dec. 2004, 30 mins.)
Dr.
Jack Shonkoff, pediatrician and
dean of the Heller Graduate School at Brandeis
University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and chairman
of the Committee on Integrating the Science of
Early Childhood Development, waves a red flag
about some of the learning mandates imposed today
by federal education authorities. He declares,
"Any attempt to use research on brain development
for assessing children in education settings at the
present time is completely unwarranted." Here
he addresses the Minnesota School Readiness Business
Advisory Council, a group of local business leaders
working on issues of early childhood development. (2004,
Minn. Public Radio)
Academy
Award-winning actor Sidney
Poitier tells Terry Gross how he went
about losing the heavy Caribbean accent he brought
to the U.S. as a semi-literate teenager, an accent
that prevented him from gaining roles at New York
auditions: He listened to American radio announcers
between rounds of hotel dishwashing, mimicking the
announcer's words, sentence after sentence. ("Fresh
Air," 2001, 17 mins.)
On the 190th anniversary of
the famous battle at Fort McHenry, historian Anthony
Pitch, author of The Burning of Washington,
explains how
the Star-Spangled banner came to be written and
why it is so important. (NPR, 14-minutes,
9/12/04)
Listen as a panel
of librarians, booksellers, publishers, and educators discuss
the findings of the NEA that shows a record 10%
decline in serious reading over the last
decade. According to them, it's not all "doom
and gloom." (KQED's "Forum,"
8-6-04, 52 mins.)
Geoffrey
Canada is spearheading what might
be the most hopeful urban school project ever: "The
24-Block Solution,"
covering 60 blocks and 6,500 families in Harlem. The
goal — educating
parent and child, before birth and after, before school
and after school, in-school and out of school. Listen
to his approach, now funded in the tens of millions
by New York's elite for the city's poorest. The rest
of urban America is watching this one with bated breath. ("Leonard
Lopate Show,"WNYC
July 21, 2004, 32 mins.) For more on Canada's
Harlem Project, his 60-minute 2008 interview with
TV's Charlie Rose can be viewed online
at: www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/01/02/2/a-conversation-with-geoffery-canada.
In August 2009, National Public Radio’s “This
American Life” featured a segment on Geoffrey
Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, the most
successful urban poverty education program existing
today. To hear the show, use the link here (www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1311),
and listen to the Prologue and Act One (the rest of
the show is devoted to other issues). Canada's first
big splash came in a New York Times Siunday Magazine
cover story in 2004, which can be found online at:
www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/magazine/the-harlem-project.html.
The
issue of "black underclass culture" reared
its head in 2004 from an unlikely source: Bill
Cosby. Cosby explains his controversial
remarks to "Talk
of the Nation" and takes teachers' phone
calls (July 7, 2004,
48 mins.), as well as guesting
on "Tavis
Smiley Show" (30
mins.). Also: Listen to
a recording of Cosby's actual speech, and then a
discussion by black writers and callers on "The
Brian Lehrer Show" (WNYC,
July 16, 2004, 32 mins.). "The
Tavis Smiley Radio Show" took on the subject
again with 5-minute commentaries by University of
Pennsylvania professor Michael
Eric Dyson (May
27, 2004) and Princeton
professor Cornel
West (May
26, 2004). The Atlantic Monthly went even
deeper when it published the most in-depth profile
of Cosby and his personal crusade ("This is how we
lost to the white man") in May 2008, found at: www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/cosby.
Harry Potter audio
narrator Jim
Dale tells how
he manages the 200 different voices that make the Potter
audios all-time bestsellers ("All
Things Considered,"recorded 2000, 8 minutes).
Terry Gross interviews education
professor Diane
Ravitch on outrageous "sensitivity
censorship"
in textbooks and exams ("Fresh
Air," 40 minutes).
Radio commentator/storyteller Jean
Shepherd recalls (the night after)
what it was like to participate in the 1963 Civil
Rights March on Washington (NPR,
15 mins.)
Harvard is
the most difficult college to gain entrance to in America.
To attain that distinction even via the privileged
suburbs is a major achievement but to reach it from
a Thailand refugee camp by way of a New York city hardware
store is almost inconceivable. Listen to 24-year-old Van
Tran tell his story ("Weekend
Edition,"
June 5, 2004, 7 mins.)
An
executive with The Princeton Review examines the
new S.A.T. essay criteria and conjures how the works
of four famous writers (Hemingway, Stein, Shakespeare,
and "The Unabomber")
would stand up under the S.A.T.
essay grading code. (NPR, Feb,
2004, 5 minutes)
The oldest forum for community
affairs in America is California's Commonwealth
Club.More
than 3,000 major figures have addressed this audience
in the last 100 years and its archive of recordings
is being digitally preserved. Click Commonwealth to
see a list of persons whose speeches can be heard via
the Web, including: Dwight D. Eisenhower; Edward
Teller; Ronald Reagan; Robert F. Kennedy; Benjamin
Spock; Shirley Chisholm; Cesar
Chavez; Desmond Tutu; and Bill
Gates.
One
of America's great contemporary immigrant success
stories —from
Iranian poverty to Ivy League college president to
president of the Carnegie Foundation —Dr.
Vartan Gregorian. ("The Connection," 2003,
50 minutes)
For working class America,
the public library has always been a major thru-way
to achievement. Listen as Washington
Post Book Week Editor Michael
Dirda describes
his journey from being a child his teachers thought
was mildly retarded to winning a Pulitzer Prize ("Diane
Rehm Show," 2003, 50 mins.).
When Vernon
Jordan began
college, he was the only black in his class and his
reading scores were lower than those of his classmates.
How did he catch up, graduate, and become one of the
nation's leading civil rights leaders and Washington
power broker? Listen as
he tells his and his parents' story.
("Diane Rehm Show," 2001,
50 mins.)
Little
known audio files on black history
American RadioWorks' "Remembering
Jim Crow" looks at
segregation through the eyes of those
who lived it:
To hear blacks recall Jim
Crow, click audio right:
To hear whites recall Jim
Crow, click right:
On
the 40th
anniversary (Aug. 28, 2003)
of the famous March on Washington, MPR devoted
two hours to the event, including a rebroadcast
of the entire 16-minute "I Have
a Dream Speech" (which was
supposed to be only 4 minutes long); and
Pulitzer-winning historian Roger
Wilkins' powerful recollections
of MLK Jr. the man — not the
icon (second hour of program). It is nothing
short of outstanding.
"Say
It Plain," an anthology
of African-American oratory including
speeches by:
Searching for and then
saving to disc public radio interviews can be cheap
and easy if you
know how. Click here for a guided tour of Where
and How-to.
AND
. . . the funniest 31
minutes you may ever hear on NPR and not
the least bit educational — in fact,
some of the most politically incorrect but
falling-down funny
minutes ever aired on NPR:
"Dame Edna" with Scott Simon.
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