Assistant Professor of Political Science Noel Anderson is a big believer in public education. The son of a secretary and a firefighter (who helped integrate the New York City Fire Department), Anderson was the first in his family to go to college, where professors provided him the tools to think critically.

“Brooklyn College is, for me, the working-class gateway into the middle class,” says this Brooklyn native who went from Tilden High School in Crown Heights, to receiving his bachelor of arts degree at Brooklyn College in 1993. “I found people who trusted my intellectual potential, skills that needed to be developed.”

As proof that trust, Anderson received the Whitney Young Jr. Education Leadership Award from the National Urban League, for developing leadership and college access program curricula being used in 11 cities across the country.

Anderson has also taught in private schools in upstate New York, and in both environments he has found students with the same critical talent and the same capacity who were worthy of the same support. “The difference is that public schools lack even the most basic resources kids need to develop.”

But his faith in public education did not waver, and while he pursued his master’s at the University of Pennsylvania, he went on to teach at Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia and later at PS/IS 35 in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section. Even as he completed his Ph.D. at New York University he remained committed to the idea of providing the tools to think critically to people who’ve been left out. In 2004, Anderson obtained a joint degree in educational policy.

“Education should not be used to reinforce an elite or create a sense of entitlement,” Anderson says. His two upcoming books reflect this.

Youths Talk Back (NYU Press), coauthored with fellow Brooklyn College political science professors Celina Su, Gastón Alonso, and Jeanne Theoharis, examines how students perceive the shortcomings in the New York City and Los Angeles public schools. In Education as Freedom: African American Educational Thought and Activism (Lexington Books), coedited with Associate Professor of Education Haroon Kharem, Anderson writes about two 19th-century intellectuals, Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs, whose ideas echo the debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois over the role of education in the enfranchisement of African Americans.  

When he had to decide where to teach, it was a no-brainer, according to Anderson, for whom teaching at Brooklyn College is a homecoming. “This College reflects my own experience like no other,” hesays. “Kids come here to develop their untapped potential. My role here—our role—is to support them in that journey.”