ATLANTA — Walter C. Farrell, Jr., National Education Policy Center Fellow at the University of Colorado-Boulder, will deliver the 30th annual Benjamin E. Mays Lecture on Feb. 20 at 6:30 p.m. in Georgia State University’s Student Center East Ballroom (55 Gilmer St. S.E., Atlanta).
Farrell will give a presentation entitled “Emerging Apartheid in Public Education and the Lives of America’s Ethnic Minorities.”
This event, hosted by the Alonzo A. Crim Center for Urban Educational Excellence, is free and open to the public.
Farrell previously served as chair of the Department of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has tracked the progress of public school privatization legislation since the 1990s and has traced the origins and bipartisan development of No Child Left Behind in 2001 and Race to the Top in 2009. He has published widely in academic journals on a host of urban and social policy issues and serves as an expert legal consultant on K-12 education issues.
“Given the enormous challenges facing urban education today and the role of policy in addressing or exacerbating these challenges, I believe Dr. Walter Farrell is an ideal choice for this year’s Mays Lecture,” said Brian Williams, Crim Center director. “His work in education lies at the intersection of some key issues in the field: school privatization, equity and inclusion, and immigration.”
Benjamin E. Mays was a minister, educator, sociologist, social activist and president of Morehouse College in Atlanta from 1940 to 1967. He also was president of the Atlanta Public Schools Board of Education and supervised the desegregation of Atlanta’s public schools. The annual Mays Lecture encourages the discussion of issues facing urban educational leaders, honors the memory of Mays and promotes his philosophy of excellence in the education of those typically least well served by the larger society.
For more information about the lecture, e-mail [email protected] or call 404-413-8070.