The Time of Our Lives by Tom Brokaw Page B

community.
    During one of their conversations the prisoner Moore said to his new friend, “Listen, I have wasted every opportunity I ever had and I am going to die in here so if you can make a difference, you should do it.”
    That prompted Moore to write the book about two men, same name, different fates, and to use their starkly different lives as a call to service in education. He says, “Teachers, tutors, mentors, and volunteers who work with young people are as important to our survival and advancement as a nation as the armed forces.”
    Moore carries that message with him everywhere, and this unique story combined with his passion and charismatic personality has landed him spots on national television shows and a featured role at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He works with returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq to ensure they have the educational opportunities they need to advance their lives, and he does the same for Baltimore kids caught in the criminal justice system.
    While doing this, Moore has a full-time job in financial services but, as he says, “Public service doesn’t have to be an occupation but it must be a way of life.” For boomers and other grandparents, public service as a school volunteer should be a natural calling—an extension of their formative years when they set out to change the world.
    THE PROMISE
    Boomer or other grandparent volunteers can meet and work with a new generation of like-minded activists such as Geoffrey Canada, who runs the Harlem Children’s Zone, an educational and community services oasis in the heart of Manhattan’s storied African American neighborhood.
    The Children’s Zone grew out of the desperate need to do something about the destructive effects of the crack cocaine epidemic of the eighties, and it has proved to be a model of public and private cooperation, providing everything from parenting workshops to classes on how to control asthma, a persistent health threat in the area.
    Canada presides over more than one hundred city blocks of programs and services designed to offer hope to local families, with the emphasis on education and preparing youngsters to take their place in a society beyond their ’hoods. He runs a tight ship, constantly monitoring the effectiveness of programs within the Zone. Those that don’t measure up lose their funding, and he moves the money to those that get the job done.
    Michele Rhee, the dynamic and iconoclastic former chancellor of the Washington, D.C., school system, embodies what a very modern school administrator can become.
    Rhee, a striking and hard-driving Korean American single mom, had no experience as even a junior high principal before she was hired to fix one of the most broken systems in the country. She was a teacher in Baltimore who had attracted attention for her work in Teach for America.
    She came to the nation’s capital and immediately began to raise hell with a school district that was a collection of parental and teacher union fiefdoms, with a student population in constant turmoil. Rhee began by firing hundreds of principals and teachers and replacing them with principals and teachers with proven track records. She took on parents’ groups and consolidated schools to get the efficiencies she needed.
    Perhaps Rhee’s most controversial innovation was a program called “Capital Gains,” in which students received money for good grades and good behavior. They could earn as much as two hundred dollars a month. She worked out an arrangement with a local bank for the students to establish accounts so they could develop money management skills.
    When I visited Rhee at Shaw, one of her middle schools in northeast Washington, she laughed as she recounted critics saying, “You’re paying kids to come to school? Since when do you gotta pay kids to come to school?” Rhee responded, “The crazy thing is not that we’re paying kids to come to school. The crazy thing is that for decades we