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Your One-Stop Shop for Edu-Inaugural Coverage

By Alyson Klein — January 17, 2009 1 min read
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Is right here at Politics K-12.

Education Week reporters and bloggers are breaking out their tuxedos—and their long underwear—to bring you live coverage of the celebration of President-elect Barack Obama’s historic inauguration, including pictures and video. We’ll be chatting with student groups, education advocates, and maybe even some of Obama’s K-12 advisers.

This evening, we’ll be dining with kids at the Junior Presidential Youth Inaugural Conference, a gathering of honor students from around the country.

On Sunday, we’ll drop by the Children’s Inaugural Ball, sponsored by the Every Child Matters Fund, which advocates for making children’s issues a national public-policy priority. We’ll be sure to ask them for their take on that $122 billion stimulus proposal for education.

Then we’re off to a reception sponsored by the National Urban Alliance honoring Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford education professor who served as a key adviser to the Obama transition team. Her involvement generated quite a debate on the editorial pages of major newspapers. Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, who has often clashed with some of Darling-Hammond’s supporters, is invited to attend, along with Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, and others.

On Martin Luther King Day, we’ll be hanging out with kids participating in what the Obama team hopes will be a national day of service. And we’ll be visiting with students from KIPP Academy of Opportunity in Los Angeles, who made the cross-country trip to witness history and blog about it.

Then, on Tuesday, we’ll bring you coverage of the inaugural speech and live reaction from the National Mall. And that evening, my colleague, Andrew Trotter, will be whooping it up over at the Bytes and Books Ball.

In the meantime, you can check out this great video featuring students from Democracy Prep Charter School in Harlem. They stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial yesterday and recited King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. And my colleague, Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, has a great story previewing events around town and examining how schools are turning the inauguration into a hands-on civics lesson.

Be sure to check back often!