The Educational Contract

Dr. Sharon Washington is an education anthropologist and the founder of Anthropologi Educational Research and Development, an international firm created to bring "education" back to schools. She is also the creator and host of Education Made Visible, an education news talk show designed to bring the public back into public schools, and to take the conversation of education beyond the bureaucracy of schools. For the past eighteen years, Dr. Washington's work has taken place on the frontlines of urban education in some of the most dilapidated communities in the United States. In these communities, she has designed and implemented several programs that have helped to create more purposeful learning environments for K-12 students. This book, her first, is the result of that work. Dr. Washington has also worked in education research, policy analysis, program design, and teacher preparation in various parts of the world. That work includes school design, teacher certification, and leadership development in the United States; policy work in South Africa; research on the role of autonomous schools in the technology of a revolution in Chiapas, Mexico; the politics of education in Cuba; and the definition of school and its role in economic development in Malawi. Sharon has lectured at New School University and the University of Houston; and taught students in grades 6-12. She has worked as a journalist for six years. Her writings have appeared in the Dallas Times Herald, the Akron Beacon Journal, and New York Newsday. Dr. Washington has a PhD and a Master's degree in anthropology from The New School for Social Research in New York City. She received her undergraduate degree from Columbia University in New York City, where she graduated with a major in cinema and media theory. She studied the role of cinema and media images on "Third World" imaginations. Sharon lives in Houston, TX with her son, Dennis and his wife Tristan.