I’m delighted to announce that Sylvia Peters has agreed to join MRSH’s Board of Directors. Ms. Peters is a native Chicago educator who gained national recognition for the success of the children who attended Alexander Dumas School, a K-8 school in a highly impoverished section of Chicago. Under Sylvia Peters’ leadership, Dumas School was recognized by the U.S. Department of Education for educational excellence and featured on NBC television for its drug-free environment and character education program.

Most people would be content to serve one city with such accomplishments, but not Sylvia Peters. She was a founding member of the Edison Project. After working briefly with Edison, she went to work reinvigorating the three schools in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood, one of Baltimore’s federally designated Empowerment Zone neighborhoods—some of the poorest neighborhoods in the nation. Within a few years, those schools were producing high-achieving, highly engaged students. Many of you met Sylvia at this point—for we shared her conviction that Core Knowledge had the potential to improve the accomplishments of students from a variety of life stories. Sylvia appreciated the richness of the curriculum for all cultures and encouraged students, parents, and community members to work collaboratively to address the challenging work and to take ownership by making decisions at local levels about material selections. In an earlier interview for Horizon Magazine, Ms. Peters urged the adoption of a challenging curriculum and rigorous learning in every school as a direct means to impact educational outcomes in our nation. Later, when asking a woman from Baltimore about the status of that area’s schools, she was told, “You’re the one who started us on our intellectual journey.”

Several years ago, the Enterprise Foundation persuaded Ms. Peters to move south to Atlanta, Georgia, to work in one of its poorest communities. Ms. Peters did not merely work there; she chose to live there—across the street from one of the oldest public housing projects. This exemplifies her immersion into the issues and lives that absorb her attention.

She’s not just an educator, though. I’d have to say she’s also a community organizer in the best Chicago tradition—spending as much time with moms and dads as she does with children. The very nature of the work in Atlanta reflects this as efforts focus on implementing school reform in combination with neighborhood revitalization activities in such areas as housing, community safety, and employment.

Sylvia and her husband, Jan, have their permanent home in Knoxville, Tennessee—having found Southern living to their liking. If you have the opportunity to visit her home, you’ll find a stunning collection of African-American art—a collection that has been years in the making. In fact, during a recent telephone conversation, Sylvia shared that she is no longer with the Atlanta program. She is home in Knoxville for a hiatus - trying to get this collection in shape to go on tour. An art curator from a Chicago museum is organizing her rarely seen collection of paintings by African Americans from the Midwest into a traveling exhibit.

And after the hiatus? Sylvia has a plan, of course. Anyone who knows her will attest to her unflagging efforts to improve education for children in America. Our phone conversation began at 7:30 AM, at which time she mentioned she had been up since around 5:00 and could use a nice break. I noted that she must be a morning person, and she laughed. She said her husband tells her she is a “morning and night person - a truly driven senior citizen.”

After living in Knoxville for a time, she now feels ready to become involved in education in Tennessee. She says, “I see myself as a catalyst for change. I now want to turn my attention to working with teachers and principals. We have to take all pieces of educational structure and change all facets systematically and simultaneously.”

Sylvia feels there is a good marriage between MRSH and the educational initiatives she has been involved in. The moving force behind her life work has been to “substantially improve the learning diet of our children in public schools.” For too long the curriculum has been woefully lacking in substance, and “our children are being intellectually undernourished.” She sees MRSH as an institute that has stayed steadfast to its commitment to good teaching practices and continues to promote what is good for children. “I believe in the integrity of MRSH,” says Ms. Peters. The feeling is certainly mutual.

October 2003