David Berliner And Bruce Biddle
Who: Chief defenders of public education.
Influence: The pair's 1995 book, The Manufactured Crisis, charged conservatives with "organized malevolence," claiming right-wingers were trafficking in lies about public education in order to destroy it. The treatise became a dog-eared bible for those who reject the premise that schools are failing. Critics call their research shoddy and claim it will lull America into a dangerous sense of complacency about schools. Opening Salvo: Manufactured Crisis begins: "This book was written in outrage."
Tammie Overstreet
Who: Gender bender.
Influence: In 1993, the 17-year-old senior and seven other girls joined the ultimate boys' club: Texas high school football. After the state lifted a nearly 50-year-old ban against girls on the gridiron, the 220-pound, five-foot-six-inch Overstreet played offensive line for her high school in the east Texas town of Pittsburg. She had played football recreationally, and though a backup on the team, she was thought to have the most potential of the pioneering girls.
ESPN Soundbite: "I love to hit people," Overstreet said.
Walter Annenberg
Who: Public education's Daddy Warbucks.
Influence: In 1993, the former ambassador and publishing tycoon pledged $500 million for education reform-the largest gift ever bestowed on American public education. Stymied by school bureaucracy, the foundation that divvies up Annenberg's money has scaled back its initial dreams of sparking radical change. Still, some Annenberg schools have boosted test scores and community involvement.
Beginnings: As a graduating senior, Annenberg gave his prep school a $17,000 track.
Shawntel Smith
Who: Education's secret PR weapon.
Influence: During her 1995 reign as Miss America, Smith championed "school to work" issues, bringing glamour to education's most unsexy topic. Republicans charged that beauty queens have no business taking political stands-Smith touted a Clinton plan-but she countered that this work would "enhance the image of Miss America as a woman of the '90s."
Defining Moment: A press conference where Smith stood with Secretary of Education Richard Riley and then-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, two bureaucrats whose looks made Smith seem even more stunning.
Anthony Alvarado
Who: Renowned school reformer.
Influence: After allegations of corruption led to his 1984 ouster as New York City's schools chancellor, the 57-year-old former junior high school teacher went to one of the city's community districts and engineered a turnaround with reforms that stressed reading, professional development, and high standards for kids. Resigned in 1998 for a job as a top-ranking San Diego official, leaving behind a district whose test scores were among the best in the city.
Secret To Success: Make improved instruction the cornerstone of reform.
Chris Whittle
Who: Education entrepreneur extraordinaire.
Influence: No one has done more to promote the idea that doing good in the schools is good business. Whittle founded Channel One, the commercial classroom television program in 1989 and the Edison Project school-management firm in 1991. Though neither venture is spinning gold for Whittle-he sold Channel One in 1994 and scaled back his initial vision of Edison as a coast-to-coast chain of for-profit schools-Whittle claims to be riding the wave of the future.
Badge Of Honor: Channel One recently caught the wrath of strange bedfellows Phyllis Schlafly and Ralph Nader; Nader called the show "the most brazen marketing ploy in the history of the United States."
Bob Chase
Who: Union boss.
Influence: Elected as head of the National Education Association in 1996, Chase set out to reinvent the 2.4 million-member group and make education reform-not collective bargaining-its top priority. His controversial initiatives have so far fallen short, but he's widely seen as a catalyst who will bring change to the nation's largest teachers' union.
Little-Known Fact: Chase once trained to be a Roman Catholic priest.
Christa McAuliffe
Who: Teacher hero.
Influence: Children closely followed McAuliffe's 1986 star-turn as the first Teacher in Space and then watched on televisions in their classrooms as her triumph turned to tragedy in the Challenger space shuttle disaster. As this generation of kids moved through high school and college, interest in teaching as a career soared.
Legacy: The Challenger Space Center for Science Education, founded in 1996 by the families of the space shuttle crew, promotes the study of space through more than 30 learning centers nationwide.
R.L. Stine
Who:
Stephen King of children's literature. Influence: Stine's gore-filled Goosebumps and Fear Street books are wildly popular with kids; USA Today ranked 15 Stine books among 1995's top overall bestsellers. Critics call his work intellectual junk food, while others hail it for sparking kids' interest in reading.
Past Life: Before the gruesome books brought him fame, the author wrote humorous books such as Miami Mice and was known as "Jovial Bob Stine."
Robert Ballard
Who: Distance learning pioneer.
Influence: A world-class oceanographer, Ballard received thousands of letters from students after he discovered the Titanic wreckage in 1985. Four years later, he founded the Jason Project, which takes teachers and students on research expeditions that are broadcast simultaneously through the Internet to thousands of classrooms.
Globe-Trotting: Expeditions have explored Amazon rainforests, Hawaiian volcanoes, and 19th century warships wrecked in the Great Lakes.
Wendy Kopp
Who: Founder of the Peace Corps for public schools.
Influence: Kopp's Teach for America has triggered a national debate on alternative certification for teachers. Since 1989, the group has placed more than 5,500 newly minted-but uncredentialed-college grads in impoverished urban and rural schools. Many praise TFA teachers' diversity, energy, and fresh perspective; others dismiss TFA as a feel-good program that undercuts teacher quality.
Big Dreams: Kopp conceived TFA as part of her Princeton senior thesis. The program, which is a public/private venture, received its first grant the day after she graduated.
David Hornbeck
Who: School reform guru.
Influence: As a consultant, Hornbeck helped build Kentucky's 1990 groundbreaking education reform plan, which pioneered the idea that states reward school success and punish failures. Later, as Maryland's superintendent, he became the first state chief to propose a statewide mandate to make community-service work a requirement for graduation.
Learning On The Job: The 58-year-old Hornbeck, now superintendent of the Philadelphia schools, has degrees in history, theology, and law-not education.
Michael Milken
Who: Educational philanthropist and entrepreneur.
Influence: The fallen junk-bond king and his brother, Lowell, have awarded 1,330 outstanding teachers more than $33 million-no strings attached-since 1987. Milken also has invested heavily in education and technology ventures. His Knowledge Universe company-with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion-sells everything from continuing education for teachers to toys and books.
Teaching Background: Milken tutored inner-city kids in the 1980s and, after pleading guilty to six felony counts of breaking securities laws in 1990, tutored fellow inmates and their children while serving two years in prison.
E.D. Hirsch
Who: Cultural literacy maven.
Influence: Hirsch's K-8 "Core Knowledge" curriculum evolved from his 1987 book, Cultural Literacy, which advocates teaching kids nearly 5,000 dates, names, and facts to give Americans a common knowledge base. Roughly 800 schools now use Core Knowledge, and many lawmakers have enlisted Hirsch's help to craft state academic standards.
Rehabilitated?: Educators blasted Cultural Literacy and continue to argue that its theories promote only rote learning, but the scholar has won more than a few converts. "I think the world is coming closer to E.D. Hirsch," one education expert said in 1997.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Who: First Advocate.
Influence: Clinton used the bully pulpit of the White House to raise the profile of children's issues, though billion-dollar child-care and children's health-care legislation stalled. In her 1996 best-selling It Takes a Village To Raise a Child, she cautions against premarital sex and divorce, urges parents to buy flat and firm baby mattresses, and warns of an "assault" against children.
Little-Known Fact: In the 1980s, it was Hillary who reportedly persuaded then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton to push for testing of teachers.
Jonathan Kozol
Who: Education's conscience.
Influence: A 62-year-old writer-activist, Kozol spent three years documenting the lives of children in America's worst neighborhoods for his 1991 book Savage Inequalities. The book fingers the property tax as the source of huge gaps in student achievement; kids living in property-poor districts attend schools that are literally crumbling and don't get the essentials they need to learn, he argues.
Secret To Success: Kozol's books-which include a National Book Award winner-put a human face on troubling, uncomfortable questions about how society handles illiteracy, homelessness, and poverty.
Robert Slavin
Who: The brains behind Success for All.
Influence: The 48-year-old Johns Hopkins University professor and education researcher created one of the decade's most popular reform packages, Success for All, which focuses elementary schools on making sure students can read by the end of 3rd grade.
Achilles' Heel: Critics say much of the research touting the program's success is authored by Slavin himself. Teachers say the curriculum is too restrictive.
Eric Harris And Dylan Klebold
Who: Mass murderers.
Influence: The country fixated on fear and loathing in the American high school after this pair killed 13 in their Colorado suburban high school and then turned their guns on themselves. The event capped a decade of school shootings and unraveled the nation's psyche. To blame? Violent computer games, the modern family, high school cliques, Hollywood, the National Rifle Association, and other oddities of everyday life.
High-Level Response: Within weeks of Columbine, a team of Secret Service agents was assigned to study more than a dozen school shootings for patterns in the violence.
John Stanford
Who: A legend in the making.
Influence: Stanford led the Seattle school district for only three years-he died of leukemia in 1998 at 60-but his energy and no-nonsense management style revived the beleaguered system. A retired U.S. Army general, he was one of a number of noneducators named to run city school systems in the '90s.
Coming Soon: Hollywood filmmakers are eager to produce a movie based on Stanford's life story, saying it could be a bigger hit than Stand and Deliver, the Jaime Escalante movie.
Lou Gerstner
Who: Business booster.
Influence: IBM's 57-year-old CEO leads corporate America's campaign for school reform. Co-author of the 1994 book, Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America's Public Schools, Gerstner assembled the nation's governors for a 1996 summit, where he proclaimed failing schools a national emergency and urged states to adopt tough academic standards.
School-To-Work?: Some educators have questioned Gerstner's motives: Does he truly want better schools, or is he trying to reinvent education so that it cranks out graduates ready-made for business?
Reverend Floyd Flake
Who: Strange bedfellow.
Influence: As a leading Democrat and African American in Congress, Flake made waves in 1997 when he joined with conservatives to back school voucher legislation. The 54-year-old minister left office soon after and founded a small school affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal church that he heads in Queens, New York.
Mission: Flake, who campaigns for vouchers, is one of a number of black leaders who say their support of choice stems from the failings of public schools. "I support public education," he said in 1997, "but I believe we have to challenge it."
Bill Nye
Who: Carl Sagan for kids.
Influence: The former Boeing Co. engineer and standup comedian hosts the nationally syndicated television show, Bill Nye the Science Guy. With snappy graphics and MTV-like pacing, the program aims to make science cool for a generation that's turned off to careers in the laboratory.
Uncle Sam Wants You: Nye's message behind the glitz: The nation needs more scientists to solve the challenges of the future.
Deborah Meier
Who: Small schools advocate.
Influence: A well-known teacher and reformer (Central Park East Secondary School, which Meier founded in the '70s, is one of America's most successful education experiments), she threw herself into the small-schools movement in the 1990s.
Quotable: In her 1995 book, The Power of Their Ideas, Meier writes, "Small school size is not only a good idea but an absolute prerequisite for qualitative change in deep-seated habits."
Seymour Papert
Who: Rethinker of school in the computer age.
Influence: If the marriage of education and technology works, the 69-year-old MIT professor gets a big share of the credit. The creator of the first computer programming language designed as a learning tool for children, he contends that computers can erase the evils of the institution that he calls "School," with its daily lesson plans, fixed curriculum, and standardized tests.
Quirk: Papert has dubbed parents, teachers, and others fed up with the status quo "Yearners."
Reid Lyon
Who: Reading wars arbiter.
Influence: A top scientist at the National Institutes of Health, Lyon leads a team of researchers whose brain studies suggest that kids with reading disabilities benefit from early-age phonics instruction. Though he advocates a mix of reading instruction, back-to-basics advocates trumpet his findings as proof that whole language is a failure.
Whose War Is This?: Lyon calls the reading wars "stupid" and says his group "doesn't give a damn about phonics or whole language. It gives a damn about getting kids to learn to read."
Rafael Oberti
Who: Reluctant hero of disabled students.
Influence: In the early 1990s, the 8-year-old Rafael and his parents sued their New Jersey school district after officials refused to place the boy-who is severely disabled with Down syndrome-in a regular classroom. The courts eventually sided with the Obertis; one judge issued a landmark ruling, saying, "Inclusion is a right, not a privilege for a select few."
What's Right For Rafael: Afterward, the Obertis claimed they were simply fighting for their child. "We're not heroes," said Rafael's mother.
Albert Shanker
Who: Iconoclast.
Influence: Once a militant unionist who led a 1968 teachers' strike that brought New York City to its knees, Shanker reinvented himself in the 1990s as a visionary thinker and fierce critic of the public schools. Among his pet issues as president of the American Federation of Teachers: rigorous core curricula and standards, tough tests, and safe schools.
Statesman: Shanker died in 1997 at the age of 67, though his long battle with cancer had slowed him little. Shortly before his death, scholar Diane Ravitch said, "Right now, he's probably the most influential person in American education."
John Chubb And Terry Moe
Who: School choice champions.
Influence: Their 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools provided the philosophical underpinning of the decade's choice movement. "Government has not solved the education problem because government is the problem," wrote Chubb, a political scientist, and Moe, an economist.
Solution: Deregulate and allow schools to operate freely while giving parents tax money toward tuition at the school of their choice.
Putting Ideas Into Practice: Chubb is now a top official of the Edison Project, Chris Whittle's for-profit school-management firm.
Jamie Nabozny
Who: Civil rights pioneer.
Influence: A gay teenager, Nabozny sued his Wisconsin school district, claiming officials looked the other way when students verbally and physically abused him. A U.S. district court sided with him in 1996, marking the first time a federal jury ruled that gays were entitled to some protection from harassment by their classmates. The district eventually agreed to pay Nabozny nearly $1 million as part of a settlement.
Indictment: Nabozny said classmates beat him and urinated on him.
The Student
Who: The raison d'être.
Influence: The number of students in America's schools has broken all-time highs each of the last three years, crowding classrooms and prompting teacher shortages. Total number of students attending public and private K-12 schools in 1998: 52.7 million. States where the baby boom "echo" is the loudest: California, Texas, and Florida.
Teachers Wanted: The trend continues; schools will have to hire an estimated 2.2 million new teachers in the next 10 years.
--Greg Malling And Meghan Mullan, Teacher Magazine
