I have been involved in issues of equity and public education for over 35 years, working as a teacher and administrator is St. Paul, Minnesota and Boston, Massachusetts.

Between 1975 and 1981 I was the court appointed administrator at South Boston High School. The school was in federal receivership as a result of a civil rights case in which it was found that the Boston Public Schools had been deliberately segregated. South Boston High was virtually 100% white and had the lowest achievement test scores in the city. We succeeded in raising achievement level, but integration was a failure. The student population is now overwhelmingly minority.

The St. Paul Logo Project was one of the many staff development programs I initiated between 1981 and 1996 while I was director of Staff Development for the St. Paul Public Schools. The superintendent had asked me to survey the used of the emerging computer technologies in the St. Paul schools. What I found was that computers were used mostly for drill and practice, and that any other uses, notably programming, were restricted to high achieving high school students. Logo, we learned, was accessible to all children and it became the cornerstone of the St. Paul Logo project.

Since 1986 I have been a volunteer with the Cambodian Children’s Education Fund, and since 1995 I have been working with students and teachers at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in programs that look at art history from a global perspective.