With Boston's first poet laureate, Sam Cornish, and other educational advisors, I worked in the poorest neighborhoods of Greater Boston and in newly desegregated schools of rural North Carolina and Delaware. There, with teachers, administrators, and policymakers we created learner-centered curriculum development initiatives as part of the federally-supported "Great Society" broad agenda to eliminate poverty and racial injustice. Decades later, as I reflect on that era and the work I did then and since, this "war" was the single most meaningful, most useful, most important I fought (and keep fighting).
