SRA/McGraw-Hill welcomes the opportunity to present the facts about Patricia Polacco's scheduled appearances in SRA's exhibit booth at IRA on May 2 and 3, 2006.

SRA/McGraw-Hill and Ms. Polacco signed a very clear contract, which can be viewed at http://www.sraonline.com/index.php/home/statement/2094.

In the contract, signed by SRA on Jan. 10, 2006, and by Ms. Polacco on Feb. 8, 2006, Ms. Polacco agreed to be an SRA/McGraw-Hill exhibit booth speaker at four 30-minute presentations on two very specific topics: heroes who made a difference in her life and the real stories that inspired several of her books. In the two-page contract, SRA/McGraw-Hill was identified by name 14 times. She further agreed that her appearances at the SRA exhibit booth would be limited solely to these four presentations.

Ms. Polacco chose not to honor her commitment to SRA/McGraw-Hill. Shortly before the event, she began insisting that she wanted to use her appearances as a platform for expressing her personal views on public education policy. We respect her right to express her ideas; however, since the SRA educational presentations were focused on writing and children's books, SRA did not believe that its exhibit booth was an appropriate forum for a public policy speech. Ms. Polacco's statements about this event are inaccurate and unreasonable.

SRA's intention was to have Ms. Polacco deliver four presentations that would inspire the people who have the greatest impact on educating our children's classroom teachers.

1:23 PM, May 12, 2006

According to the SRA web page, Polacco was asked to speak about "the heroes of [her] life" and "the real life stories that inspired the books Meteor!, The Keeping Quilt, and Thank You, Mr. Falker." I suggest (with 20-20 hindsight, of course) that Ms. Polacco could easily have spun both topics in such a way that made a discussion of NCLB fitting, nay, inevitable. There is nothing in the contract linked above that would have prevented her from doing so. Too bad Polacco showed her cards too soon.

I discussed a similar failure of nerve or imagination in an editorial about Laura Bush and the antiwar poets. It reminds me of something Deborah Stevenson wrote for us years ago in "Rewriting the Rules: Girls and Books" (Horn Book, Nov/Dec '97): "Caddie Woodlawn syndrome, where girls' energy is really an adorable and completely safe sauciness, seems to be alive and well. Feisty and spunky are two words that, unfortunately, also seem to apply with great frequency--unfortunately because they are adjectives reserved for the nonthreatening and the totally unserious, who have the nerve to attempt to be fierce in a world that understands they can be nothing of the kind."