Once again, I wrote and/or edited almost all of the copy contained in the latest issue of the Temple University College of Education’s Educator magazine. The 24-page issue features two lengthy profiles of alumni:  Irving Scott, who leads the Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation’s $335 million Empowering Effective Teaching program; and Christopher McGinley, who this semester returned to co-lead the college’s principal certification program after serving for many years as a principal and administrator in the Philadelphia schools and then as superintendent in two suburban school districts.

Both stories focus on the educators’ efforts to address the achievement gap between white and minority students. For profiles, I like to focus on “Aha!” moments that prove to be seminal events in people’s lives and careers. For Scott, there were two: first, when he considered himself solely as an athlete, his 9^th grade English teacher forced him to recite before his classmates two poems—one by Robert Frost, the other an original one she required Scott to write. His other key moment occurred while earning his master’s degree and principal’s certification at Temple, when he came upon the following quote by John Dewey that goes to the heart of the achievement gap issue: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.”

McGinley’s hinge moment came when, as a new assistant superintendent in the suburban Cheltenham School District, he discovered that African American students there were suffering from the same tyranny of low expectations that also plagued Philadelphia’s minority students.

To report the stories, I interviewed Scott in both Philadelphia and his Gates Foundation offices in Washington, District of Columbia; I interviewed McGinley in his Philadelphia townhome and attended an evening class he taught at Temple’s Ft. Washington, Pennsylvania, campus.

Click here to see a full PDF of the Fall 2014 issue of the Educator.