Of course our fallen soldiers deserve the recognition they receive this special day (deserve much more than that, for sure), but this Memorial Day Weekend brought some recognition for a few living heroes, too.
I'm referring to this shout-out for SEED from uber-columnist Tom Friedman in the Sunday New York Times. (By the way, nice title.)
Every once in a while as a journalist you see a scene that grips you and will not let go, a scene that is at once so uplifting and so cruel it's difficult to even convey in words. I saw such a scene last weekend at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland in Baltimore. It was actually a lottery, but no ordinary lottery. The winners didn't win cash, but a ticket to a better life. The losers left with their hopes and lottery tickets crumpled.The event was a lottery to choose the first 80 students who will attend a new public boarding school - the SEED School of Maryland - based in Baltimore. I went along because my wife is on the SEED Foundation board. The foundation opened its first school 10 years ago in Washington, D.C., as the nation's first college-prep, public, urban boarding school. Baltimore is its second campus. The vast majority of students are African-American, drawn from the most disadvantaged and violent school districts.
Some reformers are upset that he didn't use the term "charter" to describe the school, though to be fair, SEED Maryland isn't a charter school, to my knowledge, though its cousin in D.C. is. And furthermore, expecting Friedman to embrace any form of public school choice in education only leads to disappointment; his most famous tome came right to the edge of calling for a major overhaul of our education system and blinked. Anyway, this is a day to express gratitude, so let us not be greedy.
