Bard College Presents The Long Game, A New Radio Documentary By Award-Winning Journalist Trey Kay, on November 7

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—The Bard Center for Civic Engagement and the Human Rights Project host Trey Kay, award-winning Hudson Valley journalist, who will present his new radio documentary The Long Game: Texas’ Ongoing Battle for the Direction of the Classroom on Thursday, November 7, at 7 pm in Weis Cinema of the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College. Kay is producer of The Great Textbook War, a radio report about the 1974 Kanawha textbook controversy, which was honored with Peabody, Murrow, and DuPont awards. This new report delves into the culture war battles over public school curriculum content that have ebbed and flowed in the Lone Star State for the past 50 years. Kurt Andersen, cofounder of Spy Magazine and host of PRI’s Studio 360, calls Long Game “scrupulously reported and beautifully produced” and “a rigorous, fair-minded, and illuminating exploration of one of America’s fundamental challenges.” A panel discussion with Kay and Bard faculty member Richard Aldous (Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Literature) will follow the documentary. This presentation is free and open to the public.

“For more than a half a century, citizens of the Lone Star State have had intense, emotional battles over what children should and should not be taught in public school classrooms,” says Kay. “While there have been fights over just about every academic subject, debates over history, evolution, God, and country generate the most heat.”
 
Long Game focuses on the fundamentally different mindsets that are pitted against one another when deciding how to educate the next generation. The culture war differences in Texas are not that different from those in other states. The documentary suggests that based on the differences among Texans—those who advocate for a values-neutral classroom and those who see the mission of educating tomorrow’s generation as an epic religious struggle—the prospect of common ground for national Common Core standards may be bleak. Television and radio host Glenn Beck once asserted, “We cannot lose Texas. If we lose the education in Texas we lose the entire country.”
 
Wayne Slater, senior political writer at the Dallas Morning News and author of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential writes this about Long Game: “Compelling journalism and artful storytelling, Trey Kay reports on the deep social divide that affects how students are being taught in classrooms across America. Deeply researched and clearly reported, Long Game examines the characters, issues, and social divide over textbooks and curriculum in public schools in Texas. The war over textbooks has become a red-hot battle over testing and curricula in which ideology too often trumps education. No documentary in memory better explains how we got here and what it means. Every parent should listen to this documentary as if their child’s education depended on it—because it does.”
 
Producer Trey Kay has contributed numerous reports to national programs, including This American Life, Marketplace, Morning Edition, American RadioWorks, and Studio 360. In 2005, Kay shared a Peabody for his contribution to Studio 360’s “American Icons: Moby Dick” program. The Long Game was edited by Deborah George, five-time DuPont winner and two-time Peabody winner.
 
Long Game is a project made possible by the Spencer Fellowship for Education Reporting at Columbia University’s School of Journalism with additional funding provided by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Marist College, the CRC Foundation, and Friends of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
 
The following evening, on November 8, at 7 pm, The Long Game will air on Bard College’s local NPR station, WLHV 88.1FM, as part of Human Rights Radio, a new collaboration between the Human Rights Project and Robin Hood Radio.
 
For more information about this program contact Trey Kay at [email protected], or 917-921-1091.

CAPTION INFO: The Bard Center for Civic Engagement and the Human Rights Project host Trey Kay, award-winning Hudson Valley journalist, who will present his new radio documentary The Long Game: Texas’ Ongoing Battle for the Direction of the Classroom on Thursday, November 7, at 7 pm in Weis Cinema of the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College.
PHOTO CREDIT: Kate McGee, KUT News
TO DOWNLOAD a high-resolution photo, go to: www.bard.edu/news/pressphotos/.

 

This event was last updated on 11-04-2013

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