Keeping The Faith

Five young leaders make the progressive tradition their own.

Keeping The Faith

In this age of standards and accountability and testing and cultural literacy, Jessie Singer is an unabashed progressive. The Portland, Oregon, high school teacher promotes multiculturalism. She eschews (as much as possible) the "canon" of dead white male authors. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to literature. She prefers to teach books that raise questions of justice, fairness, and equality. She opposes tracking and standardized testing. She believes classrooms should be more democratic. And she doesn't lecture.

But as Singer, 27, discovered early in her career, it isn't easy to go against the grain. After receiving her master's degree from Lewis and Clark College, which has a well-regarded teaching program steeped in progressivism, she spent a year at a Eugene high school where her youthful zeal was not always appreciated. "I felt isolated there," she says. "I was surrounded by some wonderful teachers, but they were very stuck in what they were doing. They were threatened by any new way of doing things." Singer says she was popular with many of her students, and that caused friction with some of the other faculty members. "One teacher made a rule that her students couldn't mention my name in her classroom,"...