Michael FullanProfessor Emeritus, University of TorontoAuthor, Coherence and NuanceToronto, ON, Canada
Monica George-FieldsPresident and Chief Executive OfficerREACHNew York, NY
Avis GlazeFounder and Chief Executive OfficerEdu-Quest International Inc.
Amy GriffinSuperintendentCumberland County Public SchoolsCumberland, VA
Zaretta HammondAuthor, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students
Maria Alcon HerauxKIPP Foundation
William HiteSuperintendentThe School District of PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia, PA
Matt HurtDirectorComprehensive Instructional Program, Virginia
Scott JeffriesSuperintendentWythe County Public SchoolsWytheville, VA
Dena KeelingChief Equity OfficerOrange County Schools, North Carolina
John MalloyToronto District School BoardToronto, ON, Canada
Jay McTigheJay McTighe and Associates
Eric MooreSenior Accountability Research and Equity OfficerMinneapolis Public SchoolsMinneapolis, MN
Pedro NogueraDeanUniversity of Southern CaliforniaRossier School of EducationLos Angeles, CA
David OsherVice President and Institute FellowAmerican Institutes for ResearchWashington, DC
Katrise PereraSuperintendentGresham-Barlow School DistrictGresham, OR
Paul RevilleFrancis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and AdministrationHarvard UniversityGraduate School of EducationCambridge, MA
James SchwartzLead Leadership CoachNetwork for College SuccessThe University of ChicagoSchool of Social Service AdministrationChicago, IL
Nancy ShinExecutive Director (retired)HOPE Foundation
Dennis ShirleyProfessor of EducationLynch School of EducationBoston CollegeBoston, MA
Aaron SpenceSuperintendentVirginia Beach City Public SchoolsVirginia Beach, VA
Susan SzachowiczSenior Fellow for the Successful Practices Network and Retired Principal of BrocktonHigh School
Benny VásquezChief Equity OfficerKIPP
Sharon WolderChief OfficerStudent Support ServicesBrockton Public SchoolsBrockton, MA
About the Authors
Award-winning author and educational leader Alan M. Blankstein served for twenty-five years as president of the HOPE Foundation, which he founded and whose honorary chair is Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. A former “high-risk” youth, Alan began his career in education as a music teacher. He worked for Phi Delta Kappa, March of Dimes, and Solution Tree, which he founded in 1987 and directed for twelve years while launching Professional Learning Communities beginning in the late 1980s. He is the author of the best-selling book Failure Is Not an Option®: Six Principles That Guide Student Achievement in High-Performing Schools, which received the Book of the Year award from Learning Forward. Alan is senior editor, lead contributor, and/or author of eighteen books, including Excellence Through Equity with Pedro Noguera. He also authored some twenty articles in leading education print including Education Week, Educational Leadership, The Principal, and Executive Educator. Alan has provided keynote presentations and workshops for virtually every major educational organization in the United States, and throughout the United Kingdom, Africa, and the Middle East. Alan has served on the Harvard Principals’ Center advisory board, and the board of the Jewish Child Care Association, where he once was a youth in residence.
Marcus J. Newsome is the director of the Virginia Superintendents Leadership Academy. Previously he served for sixteen years as an award-winning school superintendent in Newport News, Chesterfield County, and Petersburg City (Virginia). In 2015, his work was recognized by the United States Office of Educational Technology during a White House ceremony as a leader in transforming schools from a print to a digital learning environment. He has served as a consultant to governors, members of Congress, and both national and international business leaders on solutions for closing achievement gaps, narrowing the digital divide, assessment design, professional development, and twenty-first-century teaching and learning. Newsome has earned doctorate degrees in educational leadership and religious education. He began his career as an art and mathematics teacher in the District of Columbia, and later served as a curriculum writer, principal, and district administrator. He has also served as an associate professor for several universities, including Harvard University and Virginia Commonwealth University. An ordained minister, and dedicated husband and father, he has dedicated his career to the service of children.
Chapter 1 Out of the Crisis
The virus began in China, moved across Asia, and hit Europe hard. Not long after arriving in the United States, the virus was properly given status as a pandemic; the stock market plummeted, bringing on a recession; students were shut out of schools, which had closed; and the death toll began to mount.
According to the Seattle Times:
Scattered through the news stories and the mimeographed weekly CDC reports . . . were accounts of tragedy: A 2-year-old toddler dying in his mother’s arms on the way to the hospital in Tangipahoa Parish. A 12-year-old camper who died on a hike in San Diego. A 16-year-old exchange student dying of “fulminant hemorrhagic pneumonia” days after arriving in New York.” (Brown, 2009)
This didn’t begin in 2019–2020; this wasn’t coronavirus, or COVID-19. This was a different pandemic.
On April 17, 1957, Maurice Hilleman realized a pandemic was on its way to the United States. That day The New York Times reported on a large influenza outbreak in Hong Kong. One detail in particular caught the doctor’s eye: in the long waiting lines for clinics, the paper said “women carried glassy-eyed children tied to their backs.” He quickly got to work, putting out the word that there was a pandemic coming and pushing to develop a vaccine by the time school started again in the fall. (Little, 2020)
By the time Dr. Hilleman read the New York Times article, some 250,000 Hong Kong residents had already contracted the virus. He reached out to the United States Army medical general in Japan to further investigate and in return received the saliva of a serviceman who’d become infected. Hilleman realized that this strain of influenza was one for which we had no cure.
As the chief of respiratory diseases at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, DC, Hilleman had access to other flu serum and the scientific data needed to begin round-the-clock efforts to work on a vaccine in time for his predictive date of the virus’s arrival in the United States: September 1957.
While working tirelessly to develop a vaccine, Hilleman also enlisted the initially grudging support of major corporations in preparing for mass development and distribution of the serum yet to be created.
Hilleman’s work was intertwined in his own upbringing. He was born in Miles City, Montana, to parents who had survived the Spanish flu pandemic, and he credited much of his success to his rural childhood experience of raising chickens. His vaccines since then had often been derived from fertilized chicken eggs, so he foresaw the need to inform company CEOs whose help he’d enlisted to remind farmers not to kill their roosters at the end of hatching season.
The virus arrived as he’d anticipated in September 1957, as did the first