This is from The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

It's the birthday of writer and activist Jonathan Kozol, (books by this author) born in Boston (1936). He grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, went to an elite boarding school, then studied literature at Harvard, where he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. But he dropped out of Oxford and moved to Paris to try to write a novel. He lived there for four years, then went back to Massachusetts. He was pretty sure that he wanted to get a Ph.D. and become an English professor, but he wasn't sure what to do for short-term work.

Then he saw an ad for summer tutors for kids in Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston, so he thought he might as well give tutoring a try. And he found that he loved that work — loved kids, loved teaching — so he scrapped his plans for a doctorate and became a public school teacher in Boston.

Since then, Kozol has written many books about the sad state of public education in this country, and about how segregated our schools still are, all based on his own experiences in classrooms and working in poor neighborhoods. His books include Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991) and Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (1995), about kids in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. He said: "Of all my books, Amazing Grace means the most to me. It took the most out of me and was the hardest to write, because it was the hardest to live through these experiences. I felt it would initially be seen as discouraging but, ultimately, sensitive readers would see the resilient and transcendent qualities … that it would be seen as a book about the elegant theology of children." His most recent book is Letters to a Young Teacher (2007), in which — through a series of letters — he combines his opinions on vouchers, No Child Left Behind, and racial segregation with constant reminders about why teaching is so important and beautiful.

He said, "Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win."