Dear Mr. Secretary:

We're both huge basketball fans, so I'm wondering if you saw the recent feature on ESPN's SportsCenter about a basketball team at a girls' correctional facility in one of the poorest counties of Tennessee. As regular readers know, I've been bemoaning for some time now the dearth of high-quality stories about teaching and learning. If we're ever going to reimagine education for a changing world, we need to overcome the myriad mental obstacles that prevent us from articulating a different vision of what school can look like. Stories are a central tool to that end - particularly, portrayals of teachers, students and schools that capture the emotional center of the learning process, and inspire us to align policies and procedures around a different set of values.

ESPN's feature on the Carroll Academy Lady Jags does that powerfully. It's a story about a girls' basketball team that has lost more than 200 consecutive games - and a school that has evaluated the success of its program by something other than wins and losses.

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