Henry Schwarz
President
“ Hank Schwarz has studied the function of literacy in human cognitive development both in our own 21st century as well as its effects on thought from the time of Plato. ”
After teaching his own child to read at the age of two, U.S. Reading Team Foundation President Henry Schwarz spent a year as a weekly teaching volunteer at the Los Angeles Pepper Street branch library located in Cypress Park, reading with children as developing readers in both English and Spanish. Impressed with their infectious enthusiasm he then served for six years as a weekly school-site volunteer art instructor, teaching economically-challenged (Title 1 poverty percentage 90.3) fifth- and sixth-grade children how to draw, as well as the power and meaning of art, in a program interwoven with other core subject learning including history, social sciences and the language arts.
His primary focus, however, has always been on literacy and the critical importance of reading development to help all children achieve and succeed. To that end he has read from his own books for children in public, charter and private schools, as well as in bookstores and hospitals across the country, and engaged with their teachers as well. He has taught elementary school children about the possibilities and exciting experience of writing in a seminar on “A Writer’s Life.” And as a strong literacy advocate he recently gave a lecture analyzing the history, importance and future of literacy to the state convention of the California Association of Teachers of English (CATE).
Dr. Schwarz holds an AB in Classics from Harvard, along with an MA in Latin-American Studies and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Los Angeles.