Education

Evan Hunter died Wednesday at the age of 78. Under the pen name Ed McBain, he was best known for his finely detailed "87th Precinct" novels. Mystery fans call McBain's books "procedurals" for their close attention to police procedures.

In 2002, a federal judge ruled that the "under God" portion of the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional because it violated the separation of church and state. An uproar ensued. But as Richard J. Ellis, author of To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance, points out in his book, those words were not included in the pledge when it was written in 1892 — they were added in 1950. Ellis is the Mark O. Hatfield Professor of Politics at Willamette University in Salem, Ore.

Journalist David Kirkpatrick covers Congress for The New York Times. As part of a series on class issues for the paper, he co-authored a story on the increase of evangelical Christians on Ivy League campuses. The article was published in the Sunday, May 22, edition.

Matt Bennett is the founder of Christian Union, an organization of evangelicals at Ivy League schools whose goal is to reach those who will go on to become part of America's academic elite. The group operates ministry centers at Brown, Cornell and Princeton universities. Bennett, a graduate of Cornell, founded the organization in 2002. Rachel Blair is a student at Princeton and is a member of Christian Union.

Patterson's book Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy looks at the historic Supreme Court case and its aftermath. Patterson also wrote Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974.

In 1949, when he was 24, Greenberg joined the Inc. Fund, which would later be called the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He worked on some of the most important civil rights cases, including representing Martin Luther King, Jr. He also led the Fund's campaigns to help integrate the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi. With others, he tried the Delaware and Topeka cases of Brown v. Board of Education. His memoir and history of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is called Crusaders in the Courts: Legal Battles of the Civil Rights Movement.

She wrote the screenplay for the new movie Mean Girls. It's based on the book, Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman. Fey also co-stars in the film, along with Lindsay Lohan, Tim Meadows, Amy Poehler and Ana Gasteyer. Fey is co-head writer and writing supervisor for Saturday Night Live. She is the show's first female head writer. She also co-hosts SNL's Weekend Update. She and the writing staff won an Emmy Award for their work in 2002. Before SNL, Fey wrote and performed for the famed Second City in Chicago.

His new book is Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Among the commercial activities at many universities and colleges these days are: drug companies giving money to medical schools, industry buying the rights to scientific discoveries and industry-endowed faculty chairs. Bok is critical of such ventures.

Ravitch is the author of the new book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. In her book she chronicles the efforts of school boards and bias and sensitivity committees to edit and shape the textbooks that end up in classrooms. Some examples of this include: omitting the mention of Jews in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story about prewar Poland, changing the expression "My God!" to "You don't mean it," and recommending that children not be shown as disobedient or in conflict with adults.

He is the author of the best-selling novels Clockers, about life in the inner-city world of drug dealing, and Freedomland. Price's new book Samaritan is about a man who returns as a teacher to the New Jersey town where he was raised, and the bad consequences of his good intentions. Price also is a screenwriter of such films as Sea of Love, Ransom and The Color of Money.

Paul Feig is the creator of the now-defunct TV comedy series Freaks and Geeks. He's just written a new book Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence (paperback, Three Rivers Press). Feig was an actor before moving on to writing for TV and film.

Mel Levine, M.D. The founder of the All Kinds of Minds Institute and the Director of the Center for Development and Learning has just written a book called A Mind at a Time: America's Top Learning Expert Shows How Every Child Can Succeed. Levine is a professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School.

Activist Greg Mortenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Central Asia Institute. Since 1993, the organization has opened schools and provided an education for over 4000 girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The schools promote literacy, women vocational skills, public health and environmental awareness. Mortenson splits his time between Central Asia and Montana.

Writer/producer Judd Apatow. His new series for FOX is called Undeclared. He's billed as the creator/executive producer. It's about a group of geeky college freshmen. Apatow also worked on the Emmy award winners Freaks and Geeks and The Ben Stiller Show. He was a writer for The Larry Sanders Show. He began as a stand-up comic and he wrote jokes for Roseanne, Jim Carrey and Garry Shandling.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Dying Animal by Philip Roth.

The Kansas board of Education decided recently to leave evolution out if its required curriculum. Linguist Geoff Nunberg examines how the language of the controversy has changed over the century.

Journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker Nicholas Lemann is the author of the new book "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy" (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). It's a social history of how reformers in the mid 1940s set upon universal testing criteria (the Educational Testing Service, purveyors of the SAT) as a way of creating a new democratic elite, drawn from every section and every background of America. And it's about how that 50 year old system has failed.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "The Fall of a Sparrow," a new novel by Robert Hellenga.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews James Hynes collection of stories, "Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror."