I’ve been tracking former principals and administrators in the School District of Philadelphia, individuals who worked impossibly hard to carve out opportunities for children in the 1940s and 1950s. But it’s striking and sad how little is left of their work: google reveals little more than the school named for them. Even more tragic is the way their names emerge in articles about how messed up urban schools are, the same schools they worked to re-shape so very long ago.

Jonathan Kozol (among others) makes this point about MLK or Thurgood Marshall: look for the school named for them and it will invariably be in a tough neighborhood. But what about folks like principal/district superintendent Dr. Tanner Duckrey? A school may have been named for him but his steadfast work to carve out equal educational opportunity remains solely the domain of historians…