Lisa Kalem's Publications

• Exciting News on the Charter School, Lisa Kalem December, 2010 by Lisa Kalem Front I am pleased that the work undertaken by charter schools continues to be recognized by education and business leaders throughout the country. I am excited today about the $1 million gift given by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to Achievement First, an organization that runs 19 charter schools throughout Brooklyn and Connecticut. This gift will allow Achievement First to open up its amazing charter school operations to an additional 6,500 students. The new charter schools will be available to students in Rhode Island as well as Connecticut and New York. What is even more gratifying is the fact that this gift from The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation follows a donation of $250,000 from Walton Family Foundation, Inc. for each new charter school opened by Achievement First. In addition, Achievement First won a $1.7 million, two-year grant from the United States Department of Education to create new high-quality charter schools. This means that even more children in the region will have the chance to receive these excellent educational opportunities. Like the area served by my charter school family, New City Public Schools, the areas in which Achievement First schools are located were in desperate need of alternatives to the more traditional public school models. Charter schools, which are publicly funded, offer specialized curriculums and academic settings that resonate positively with many students. Children tend to thrive in the charter school world, which is often smaller and more flexible, and it is delightful to know that another charter school organization is earning such recognition from the business community.

• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole , Lisa Kalem January, 2011 Considered a classic of Southern literature, A Confederacy of Dunces was published 11 years after the death of its author, John Kennedy Toole, who committed suicide at the age of 31. The manuscript for the novel was found by Toole’s mother, Thelma Toole, who recognized the immense value of her son’s writing and worked tirelessly to see it published. Rejected by a number of publishers, the work was finally given meaningful support from author and professor Walter Percy, who responded to the persistent requests by Mrs. Toole to read her son’s book. Written in 1969, published in 1980, the work received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. Set in New Orleans of the 1960s, A Confederacy of Dunces is a novel renowned for its triumphant feat of sustaining high hilarity while recounting the trials and misadventures of its odd, tragic, and diverse set of characters. Its title is taken from an epigraph by Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” The main protagonist of the book is a 30-year-old man, Ignatius J. Reilly. At the book’s opening Reilly still lives with his mother but is forced to set about to find gainful employment. Describing his skills and interests, Ignatius states, “I dust a bit…in addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.” His quest takes him on an iconic, quixotic journey that leads him to meet and reflect on an array of eccentric, colorful people. Slothful in appearance, profoundly sensitive, deeply disdainful of popular culture, and proudly, stubbornly, committed to his view of himself as an outsider, Ignatius J. Reilly takes his place as one of the great anti-hero’s of modern literature. by Lisa Kalem

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