Ed. Magazine, Fall 2009

the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education fall 2009 | vol. Liii, no. 1

Also Medical Model Start Your Own School

Arne Duncan

The Man Trying to Change the Status Quo and Put the Department of Education Back on the Map

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Arne Duncan listens as Marian Robinson, mother of first lady Michelle Obama, reads books to children during a “Read to The Top!” summer reading program

Pulling Back the Cover

Duncan Data After reading our cover story, you may think you know Arne Duncan, secretary of education and former Ed School visiting committee member, fairly well. But here are 10 things about him that just may surprise you. l

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Arne’s siblings also work in education: His sister Sarah, also a former Harvard hoops player, runs the Community Schools program at the University of Chicago, and his brother Owen is assistant director of their mother’s afterschool center.

During his four years playing for the Australian National Basketball League, Duncan’s nickname was “the cobra.”

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In 2004, Duncan pushed through a policy that required would-be dropouts to sign a form that warns of the risks.

Phrases on the form included: “I will be less likely to find good jobs that pay well, bad jobs that don’t pay well, or maybe any jobs” and “I will be more likely to spend time in jail or prison.” l

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While overseeing schools in Chicago, he was credited with trying to open the nation’s first gay-friendly high school.

(The plan is currently on hold.)

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Growing up, the Duncan household didn’t have a television set.

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In 2004, Duncan threatened to sue the U.S. Department of Education after the agency pulled No Child Left Behind funding for a district-run tutoring program for 40,000 struggling Chicago students.

This past summer, Duncan recruited White House pals to help read books once a week to local children (including his own: Clare, 7, and Ryan, 4) as part of the Read to the Top series. Duncan kicked off the program with Clifford the Big Red Dog and Where the Wild Things Are. Other readers included David Axelrod (White House senior advisor) who read First Dog and Marian Robinson (first grandmother) who read The Napping House.

Duncan once tried out for the Boston Celtics.

As secretary of education, he’s 16th in line for the presidency.

He’s tall — 6 foot 5.

Ed.

The Magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education | fall 2009 | vol. lIIi, no. 1

features

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Will Obama’s Choice Change Education in America?

After several years as a member of the Ed School’s visiting committee, Chicagoan Arne Duncan is now heading up President Barack Obama’s Department of Education with a team of Ed School alumni — and informal faculty advisors — in tow.

Round and Round What is good teaching and learning? Without a common language or shared practices, educators are often all over the map when it comes to answering this question. Inspired by a practice used by physicians called medical rounds, the authors of a recently published book, Instructional Rounds in Education, look at a new model that could help educators find common ground.

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Construction 101

Cover: Arne Duncan with children from Newberry Academy in Chicago. John Knox/Friends of Newberry Academy

Some get excited about a new idea. Others get frustrated with what they’ve experienced. All face hurdles. A look at Ed School alumni who have started their own schools — barriers, roadblocks, chutzpah, and all.

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departments 3 Dean’s Perspective 4 Letters 6 The Appian Way 34 In the Media

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40 Investing

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42 Alumni News and Notes 48 Recess

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

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Ed. The Magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

senior writer/editor Lory Hough lory_hough@harvard.edu production manager/editor Marin Jorgensen marin_jorgensen@harvard.edu designer Paula Telch Cooney paula_telch@harvard.edu Director of Communications Michael Rodman michael_rodman@harvard.edu Communications intern Amanda Dagg contributing writers Jill Anderson Amanda Dagg Claire Chafee, Ed.M.’09 Amber Haskins David McKay Wilson John McQuaid Amy Rollins Kenneth Russell, Ed.M.’00 copyeditor Abigail Mieko Vargus © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Ed. magazine is published three times a year, free of charge, for alumni, faculty, students, and friends of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

This issue is No. 1 of Vol. LIII, Fall 2009. Third-class postage paid at Cambridge, MA, and additional offices.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 44R Brattle Street Cambridge, MA 02138 www.gse.harvard.edu To read Ed. online, go to www.gse.harvard.edu/ed.

HGSE Alumni Council, 2009—2010 Chair Margaret Jay Braatz, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’99

Rowena Fong, Ed.D.’90

Vice Chair

David Greene, Ed.M.’91, Ed.M.’94, Ed.D.’02

Sarah Levine, Ed.M.’77, Ed.D.’80

Irene Hall, C.A.S.’93, Ed.D.’05

Jiraorn Assarat, Ed.M.’04

Deborah Hirsch, Ed.M.’86, Ed.D.’89

Marilyn Barber, Ed.M.’83

Marc Lewis, Ed.M.’99

Tara Brown, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’05

Tanya Odom, Ed.M.’98

Anthony De Jesus, Ed.M.’97, Ed.D.’03

Douglas Wood, Ed.M.’96, Ed.D.’00

Stella Flores, Ed.M.’02, Ed.D.’07

HGSE Visiting Committee, 2009—2010 Chair P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, A.B.’74 Arlene Ackerman, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’01 Photeine Anagnostopoulos Edith Aronson, A.B.’84, Ed.M.’97 Paul Buttenwieser, A.B.’60, MD’64 Idit Harel Caperton, Ed.M.’84, C.A.S.’85 M. Christine DeVita David Gergen, L.L.B.’67, KSGF’84

Arturo Madrid Richard Melvoin, A.B.’73 Andy Rotherham Patti Saris, A.B.’73, J.D.’76 Steve Seleznow, Ed.M.’89, Ed.D.’94 Dacia Toll David Vitale, A.B.’68 Susan Wallach Roger Wilkins

John Hobbs, A.B.’60, MBA’65 Ira Krinsky, Ed.D.’79

HGSE Dean’s Council, 2009—2010 Sarah Alturki

David Lubin, Ed.D.’77

Kenneth Bartels, A.B.’73, MBA’76

John McArthur, MBA’59, DBA’63

Donald Burton, MBA’89

Ronay Menschel

Jamie El-Erian

Albert Merck, A.B.’47

John Hobbs, A.B.’60, MBA’65

John Nichols Jr., A.B.’53, MBA‘55

John Humphrey, MBA’64

Susan Noyes

Andrea Kayne Kaufman, Ed.M.’90

Patti Saris, A.B.’73, J.D.’76

It’s an Honor American Illustration selected an illustration created by Blair Kelly for the story, “In the Middle,” which ran in the winter 2009 issue of Ed., as one of the best of the year.

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

dean’s perspective Dear Friends: I last had the distinct honor to meet with Arne Duncan in January, shortly after President Barack Obama tapped him to be the ninth secretary of education of the United States. During our conversation, I was struck by Duncan’s steadfast commitment to improving the lives of learners, especially those in struggling districts. During our conversation, I was reminded of President Obama’s words when he announced Duncan’s nomination: “When it comes to school reform, Arne is the most hands-on of hands-on practitioners. For Arne, school reform isn’t just a theory in a book — it’s the cause of his life.”

jonesfoto

Bridging the gap between what we know and what we do is at the heart of effecting positive change in education. During his tenure with Chicago Public Schools, Duncan made difficult choices that were based on evidence and driven by data. He closed schools, invested in early childhood education, and set high expectations for students and teachers alike. As John McQuaid describes in the cover story of this issue of Ed., Duncan launched a comprehensive intervention program aimed at struggling first-year high school students. The program reflected findings by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Public School Research. Duncan’s policies resulted in fewer dropouts, more students going to college, and a stronger sense of community in Chicago’s most troubled districts.

Duncan has made many friends over the course of his career, including several Ed School faculty members. In 2004, Duncan brought his senior leadership team from Chicago to participate in our Public Education Leadership Project, an executive leadership program jointly sponsored by the Ed School and the Harvard Business School. He recently served as a member of our visiting committee. And in his new role as secretary, Duncan has reached out to Associate Professor Monica Higgins and Professor Tom Payzant, as well as Academic Dean Bob Schwartz, for counsel as he begins this role at an important time in our country’s history.

Duncan’s tenure with the Chicago Public Schools could be viewed as a case study in leadership and management through collaboration. As you will read, he initiated bold and potentially controversial programs, while maintaining strong political backing. His personable style won him supporters where there were previously antagonists, and his relentless focus on student learning brought new enthusiasm for education reform, even in communities that had been intensely polarized. Given his track record of implementing evidence-based research to improve student learning, I am confident he will provide muchneeded federal leadership to guide the next generation of education reform.

Sincerely,

Kathleen McCartney September 2009

Ed.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

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letters your story made me smile.

Thanks, and travel well.

“Shout” you a coffee if you ever get to Melbourne, Australia.

Gerry Katz

Murphy’s Fans There could be no finer tribute to Jerry Murphy than your publication of his inspiring article, “Reflections of a Retiring Former Misfit” (summer 2009).

Like Jerry, I retired a dozen years ago without a clear idea of my next steps. I had spent 31 years with the Committee for Economic Development, much of that time helping to enlist the business community in shaping education policy.

Jerry promptly recruited me to serve on the Dean’s Council, and it was there that I developed a deep appreciation of his talents as an education leader and his uncommon human qualities. Jerry was refreshingly frank about the challenges he faced, and he used the Dean’s Council not as a rubber stamp for his decisions and predilections, but as a welcome source of outside advice. The experience was crucial in helping me determine how I would spend my own life after retirement: as a writer on education and an adviser on education policy.

Sol Hurwitz

Jerry Murphy, your tale is delightful!

The wonderful quote from E. B. White speaks to a favorite of mine, found in one of Annie Dillard’s books: “The work is not yours to complete, but neither are you free to take no part in it.” As a fellow misfit of the same age and a few similar experiences, your words inspire me to fill out an application for admission to HGSE — not so much for the degree, but for the experiences that you have so eloquently advertised. Above all,

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

Congratulations and best of luck, Professor Murphy!

Thank you for being the wonderful and dedicated teacher that you were to me and to countless others. God bless you!

David Ward, Ed.M.’07

Hit or Miss?

While we applaud your decision to highlight arts education with Mary Tamer’s recent cover story, we were underwhelmed by “On the Chopping Block, Again” (summer 2009) — not because of its grim portrayal of school districts undervaluing and sacrificing arts, but because it overemphasized a model of delivering arts education in public schools that is rapidly fading. In so doing, the article overlooked many positive gains that have taken place in the field in the last decade.

The article was based on an arts education model that views the relationship between arts and schools through a lens of value deficit. Its underlying assumption is that school districts do not have the resources, knowledge, or desire to bring the arts into their classrooms. The only way, therefore, to ensure arts instruction is to rely on partnerships with external arts providers, many of whom willingly provide their services to schools for free or at deeply discounted rates.

This model, while driven by a sincere desire to improve children’s learning, is flawed. By framing arts education as charity, it perpetuates a cycle in which an enthusiastic teacher, principal, or

district leader secures a patchwork of arts programming for a small number of students. In the event of staff turnover or economic decline, both schools and arts providers struggle to sustain the partnership. There is no infrastructure to ensure that arts instruction remains rigorous and integral to student experience.

In Arts in Focus, a 1999 survey of superintendents and directors of curriculum and instruction in Los Angeles County school districts, respondents were asked whether they thought arts education is of value to all students. 100 percent answered yes. In response, Los Angeles County developed and adopted Arts for All: LA County Regional Blueprint for Arts Education, a strategic plan to restore sequential instruction in dance, music, theater, and the visual arts to all 1.7 million public school students in the county. Its underlying strategy is building arts education infrastructure at the school district level.

The current recession has put Arts for All to the test. While Mary Tamer writes that “prospects for comprehensive arts education in most K–12 public schools appear bleak,” the situation in Los Angeles County shows the opposite.

Ayanna Hudson Higgins, Ed.M.’94 director of arts education Arts for All Talia Gibas, Ed.M.’06 arts education coordinator Arts for All

I read “On the Chopping Block, Again” tonight and it strikes a double chord for me as I started my career as an educator in arts education — I taught creative dance movement to children while and after earning a self-designed major in children’s dance education. No matter where I taught subsequently, dance and the arts were always integrated into my curriculum. For much of my career I worked with students who were secondlanguage learners, and music, dance, visual art, and theater were pivotal to their success in English-language development. It also really hits home as a parent, as my child will be in school in a few years, and it would make me desperately sad if they she did not receive an adequate arts education. The article is a great reminder of what is important and why we do what we do.

Nell Forgacs, Ed.M.’05

It was an enormous pleasure to receive the summer issue of Ed. magazine focused on arts education. As cochair of the Graduate Arts Education Council at Harvard, I am excited to share and discuss the issues raised, which highlight the most salient subject matter, for our upcoming fall meeting. Acknowledging the challenges facing us at this moment, we follow Jessica Davis’ lead and “foster celebration rather than justification, hopefulness rather than despair.” The thoughtful comments solicited from present and former staff, council members, and AIE graduates confirm the signal importance of our work, and I look forward to this coming year as an opportunity for the council to work productively and energetically to develop strategies that will lead us into the next decade.

As a lifetime arts educator, with a 25-year career that has spanned leading a large private arts-in-schools program, serving as a dean and trustee of major private colleges of art, and leading

Join the Conversation Want to weigh in about Arne Duncan’s maverick plans? Feel strongly about starting a new public school? In addition to writing letters to the editor, you can now add online comments. Go to the magazine’s web page (www.gse.harvard.edu/ed) and leave your comments at the bottom of each story.

museum education initiatives at one of the nation’s premier museums, I share both the hopes and concerns in Mary Tamer’s lead article. I have seen the fallow periods, and also the creativity that inevitably reemerges, the new ideas, the new commitments. After all, creativity is the name of our game — as noted, arts educators are mostly, if not all, also artists. (On that note, when I am not working with the AIE Council, I too work an artist — a memoirist and a poet!

While my name does not appear, one of my poems, Reflections, is excerpted in the article about Sara Lawrence Lightfoot’s new book, The Third Chapter.)

too long; one would see his “Everything MUST get done this month” sign, so carefully colored, feel guilty, and begin to leave. Extracting oneself would take too long, but finally his students would leave (not him), believing that the conversations would be continued another time.

He practiced what he preached in his courses, enabling students to dig deeper into ideas about the role of challenge, risk, trust, and community in learning environments by allowing us to form a learning community ourselves. Having lived for 18 years with glioblastoma multiforme brain cancer, he made the most of every day and every interaction.

He was generous to everyone with his time and himself. He is missed.

For information about Steve’s life and memorial, suggestions about donations, or to connect with his family, visit: www.caringbridge.org/visit/stevetruitt.

Holly Bull, Ed.M.’94, Jennifer Dorsen, Ed.M.’94, Laurie Gardner, Ed.M.’94, and Kevin Kecskes, Ed.M.’94

Ronne Hartfield

Missed Mentor We were quite moved recently to learn of the passing of former HGSE Lecturer Steve Truitt on March 10, 2008. For some of us, he and his Harvard Outward Bound Program were the reasons that we came to HGSE, and for others of us he became a central pivot-point during our stay. We remember fondly his cramped office in Gutman, site of long conversations, sparked by a book on the shelf, a recent trip, a mutual friend or admire-ee, or just the neurons firing. They were on “river” time and not “graduate student” time, and would last

Ed.

Ed. magazine welcomes correspondence from all of its readers.

Send letters to:

Ed. magazine Letters to the Editor Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 44R Brattle Street Cambridge, MA 02138 E-mail: letters@gse.harvard.edu Online Comments: www.gse.harvard.edu/ed Please note that letters may be edited for clarity and space.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

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mark morelli

the appian way

Name: David Perkins Title: professor Focus: learning by playing the whole game

“They’ve been practicing their batting without developing a sense of the whole math game.”

Let the Games Begin

By Lory Hough

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

Growing up, Professor David Perkins wasn’t especially good at baseball. In fact, he says he didn’t show much talent for sports at all. Yet it was America’s national pastime that Perkins turned to when he started writing his recent book, Making Learning Whole. Although the results of playing baseball weren’t great, he says the process was. “From the beginning I built up a feel for the whole game. I knew what hitting the ball or missing the ball got you. I knew about scoring runs and keeping score. I knew what I had to do to do well, even though I only pulled it off part of the time,” he writes in the book. And then, the epiphany: “I saw how it fit together.” Why not apply this same logic to teaching, Perkins thought, especially in subject areas like math and history, where students often struggle to make connections? Just after the book was released, Perkins spoke to Ed. about knowing the whole game, “elementitis,” and why we love sport metaphors.

Your basic argument is that school learning is often like learning to bat without knowing the whole game of baseball. Can you give me an example?

When kids learn math in a conventional way, they practice the computational skills but often don’t develop a very good sense of what math is for or how to use it. We know this because many youngsters have a hard time picking out what operation to use — is this a “plus” situation, a “minus” situation, a “times” situation? They’ve been practicing their batting without developing a sense of the whole math game.

Do we ever use the whole learning approach in schools to teach?

We do sometimes teach the whole game, particularly around subjects often — and unfortunately in my view — considered more marginal: athletics, music, the arts. Also, ideally children first learn about reading by being read to a lot, so they have a sense of the whole game, and as they develop their decoding skills they soon practice on simple small-scale texts that nonetheless try to be interesting and meaningful.

Why not for math, science, and history? Is it because that’s how teachers themselves learned?

There are several reasons. Partly, yes, it’s a matter of the way teachers themselves learned. Partly it’s because learning bits and pieces now and putting them together later simplifies the classroom routine: it’s easier to work on isolated pieces. Partly because when kids make mistakes, the most obvious mistakes concern the pieces — arithmetic errors, misspellings, facts not remembered. Partly it’s a failure of imagination, a failure to figure out what small-scale accessible meaningful versions of mathematical modeling or building historical interpretations would look like for children.

Explain the terms “elementitis” and “aboutitis” used in the book.

We educators always face the challenge of helping our students approach complex skills and ideas. So what to do? The two most familiar strategies are learning by elements and learning about. In the elements approach, we break down the topic or skill into elements and teach them separately, putting off the whole game until later — often much later. So students end up practicing meaningless pieces to score well on quizzes without developing a sense of the whole game, like the kids mentioned above who can do the computations but don’t know what operations to use when. This is a persistent plague of education, so to have a little fun I call it “elementitis.”

And “aboutitis”?

In the learning about approach, instead of teaching how to do the thing in question, we teach about it. For instance, we teach information about key science concepts rather than teaching students how to look at and think about the world around them with those concepts, which supposedly comes later. But again, the information tends to be meaningless without a context of use, and often “later” never happens. This is another plague of education, so to have some more fun I call it “aboutitis.”

Elementitis and aboutitis are devil’s bargains. They make learning superficially easier today, but young learners find it dull and also don’t develop the active understandings we really want.

Why do you think people respond well to sports metaphors?

Most people have an early sports learning experience they enjoyed and can relate to, and it always involves learning the whole game at some level. Of course, a lot of people aren’t deeply into sports, but like me have fond memories of casual sports. My sports examples aren’t about the baseball or football star but about very everyday backyard versions. Also, once people get the idea, some people prefer other kinds of examples — learning games or crafts or arts — and these work just as well.

Do you still play baseball? Maybe throw the ball around on a Sunday afternoon?

It would be cool to say yes, but I don’t think I’ve swung a bat for more than a minute since the casual games I used to play with my own kids when they were growing up. Once in a while I play tennis with my wife, and that’s my sports life. I was never a dedicated sports person, but sports were more of a presence in my life years ago than they are now. Realistically, most of my time these days goes enthusiastically into research and writing and teaching around education, learning, understanding, and critical and creative thinking. That’s my whole game!

Ed.

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the appian way Forgotten Schools Remembered

By Lory Hough, Photographs by Claudia Stack

plans for the buildings, which ranged from simple one-room wooden schoolhouses to two-story brick buildings.)

Stack says African American families contributed a staggering $4.7 million toward the schools, which were spread across 15 states, from Maryland to Texas.

“Many of the people were the children and grandchildren of slaves. They perhaps earned 50 cents a day,” she says. In Canetuck, N.C., for example, which is the focus of the student film, Seeing It in Color, families raised $1,200 for their two-teacher school.

“In the early 1920s, for the families to contribute that amount is amazing,” Stack says. “The drive they had to obtain an education for their children and grandchildren was remarkable.” Rosenwald funds contribOvergrown Currie School uted $800 toward the school, and public financing — a third, required component of the funding that was intended to make white school boards It is Julius Rosenwald who gets most of the credit. And by all take more responsibility for the education of African Ameriaccounts, when it comes to the more than 5,000 schools built cans — kicked in $674. in the south for African American children during segrega tion, he deserves much of it. Rosenwald, a wealthy Chicago Hanging on to History philanthropist and part owner of Sears, Roebuck & Company, By 1932, the year that didn’t hesitate when his friend Tuskegee University president Julius Rosenwald died, Booker T. Washington asked him to help finance a new, rural construction grants had school-building program that he hoped would counter the ended for new schools inadequate education that African American children were (except for one school receiving under Jim Crow laws. Rosenwald initially allowed built five years later in Washington to use some of the money he had donated to Warm Springs, Ga., at Tuskegee, later giving $4 million in additional seed money. the request of President By 1928, one in every five rural schools for African American Franklin Roosevelt). students in the South was a “Rosenwald school,” as they came Following the Brown to be known.

But the way Claudia Stack, Ed.M.’92, sees it, the poor African v. Board of Education Walkway in front of the decision in 1954 American families who dipped into their own pockets to help Pender County Training School that read, “Separate pay for the schools should also be getting credit — certainly educational facilities more than they have in the past. are inherently unequal,” many of the schools closed or were “Nothing would have happened without the community repurposed by churches and civic groups. Over time, many contribution,” says Stack, who recently helped high school stuabandoned schools were torn down or left to rot. According to dents near her home in the southeastern part of North Carothe National Trust for Historic Preservation, an estimated 10 lina create a short film about the schools. She is also finishing to 15 percent of original Rosenwald schools are still standing. a full-length documentary of her own. “If there’s anything I “The history has become just a province of alumni,” says would change about the coverage of the schools, it is that the Stack. She became interested while she was working on a emphasis is usually on the philanthropy. The philanthropy is project at UNC-Wilmington to commemorate the 50th key, but it was more of an organizing point.” (In addition to the anniversary of Brown. seed money, the Rosenwald Fund also provided architectural

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

High School. For a semester, these high school students learned how to make a film. But more importantly, Stack says, they met and interviewed surviving Rosenwald alumni.

“There was a dual enrichment that happened when the generations met,” Stack says. “Locally, people don’t talk much about the segregation era.

That history is in danger of being lost. Today’s younger students don’t have much awareness of what went on here. As they learned, it shocked Canetuck School, built in 1922 them and made them understand why the older folks they met were so appreciative of their education. It “I started to gave them a different perspective on what they have.” wonder about the As the process of completing the film went on, students abandoned school started making connections. “One day a student said, ‘Why do buildings that I drove we have to eat in the garage?’ I told her to take it a step further: by every day. What What does that say to you? And what do you think it meant was it really like in when black students were given secondhand books and had to 1954 around here?” walk miles to substandard schools? It was a teachable moment, she says. “I knew they for sure,” Stack says. were school buildings, Recently the 2009 Cine Noir Festival of Black Film screened Inside the Currie School but not much more the students’ film, which can be viewed in part on YouTube. than that. I started Stack hopes to finish her longer documentary, Under the asking questions and I visited one. This one had a narrative Kudzu, by the end of the year. Not only will it highlight Rosenplaque inside, which introduced me to the story.” wald schools more broadly, but it will also dispel myths about At the time, Stack was codirector of the university’s African Americans and how they valued education. freshman learning program and leading two film classes.

“Today, in light of the history of the Rosenwald school She decided to get her students involved in researching and movement, nothing could be further from the truth that documenting local history, including the schools. Eventually, lower-income African Americans have never been interested in Stack also involved students from nearby Pender Early College education or their children’s learning,” she says. “This line that we’ve been fed is really questionable, especially Students in Stack’s film class based on the history of these schools. We just need to reconnect with this rich tradition.”

Stack’s website: www.underthekudzu.org YouTube video: query “Seeing it in Color preview” or go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_bcBrvag9Q Searchable index of Rosenwald schools: http://rosenwald.fisk.edu

Ed.

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the appian way A TO B: Why I Got into Education

The Algebra of Buried Things By Claire Chafee, Ed.M.’09 “Do you see this? Do you see what I am looking at?” the young math teacher asks me. I follow her eyes to the upper part of an equation where she is gently rapping the knuckle of her engagement ring finger under X. She has the answer, is pretty sure I have it too, and gives me a smile of conspiratorial patience that is so lovely, it is hard to deny the tug. But my mind is traveling slowly down an escalator. I feel like I have night goggles on in broad daylight. I was what they would call back then a “difficult learner.” What made this even more complicated was that it was determined that I was “gifted.” For me, a costly combination.

Once you get labeled as gifted or talented, there is little you can do to unstitch it from your sleeve: they believe their own assessments, whatever the glaring evidence to the contrary.

My teachers called me into meetings to praise my potential.

They had approaches, they were armed with concern, they saw my reluctance, but somehow missed my confusion. I had more information than I could comfortably carry. The world of sequence that was presented to me — the calm algebra of variables; the methods to reveal themes in novels so easily discernable to others eluded me.

Once you get off the express train of mathematical progression, whether at the station of fractions, or decimals, or the quiet towns of Sine and Cosine, there is no local to catch. I got off at algebra without my luggage and had no answer for this Y or this X, or any other problem that included a variable.

I knew I had to conquer algebra to go to college, to leave home.

And I was desperate to leave home, a tiny claustrophobic apartment on the Upper West Side with my therapist mother and schizophrenic brother who had dropped out of high school two years before, took the subway at 5 a.m. to bird watch in Queens, and received command hallucinations from taxi cabs. After spending seven straight weekends of family therapy at Yale-New Haven Hospital, I started sending away for college catalogues with a quiet fierceness.

When you live with crazy people, you dream of camouflage, of being an extra on a movie set, of living in as small a place as possible. When a wild, bold idea comes your way, you don’t invite it in; it is already overcrowded in there. I was a Bminus/C-plus student and could not comprehend my teachers’ frustration. They thought, it seemed to me, that I was taunting them with my lack of urgency in mathematics, or history, or English. They wrote “extend this” and “apply this to theme” in red ballpoint pen, pressed hard in the margin. I don’t suppose it ever occurred to my teachers that there was too much traffic in my mind, and I had no intention of adding to it.

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

jeff Hopkins, ed.m.’05

I chose a quiet, Midwestern liberal arts college and majored in theatre, which one could take Pass/Fail, Credit/No Entry. I had never heard these terms before and grew to love them. My classmates found Oberlin boring, but it was a good place for me, tranquil and liberal, the intellectual equivalent of corduroy.

As a junior, I earned a place acting at The Drama Studio, a conservatory in Ealing, a working-class suburb of London. I was improbably cast in Chekov’s Three Sisters to the horror of the British students. Colin, a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, told us he was doing this for money.

“Claire,” he began simply. Then a pause and he pointed to the faces looking at me in the rehearsal room. “Do you see these people here? They don’t want you to f---ing go to Moscow. They want you to just stay here and just f---ing wait.” I nodded. “But you don’t want to f---ing wait.” I shook my head.

“You, my darling, simply want to f---ing go to Moscow! Right?”

Blinking, furious, stunned, I stood there trying to recover.

He pointed his cigarette toward the rest of the cast shouting, “Use it! Use it!” meaning I should bring all those feelings to bear on my next lines. I realized, there and for the first time, that what I had buried — rage, humor, presence of mind, fear — were somehow useful, that characters in plays buried these things, too. And when they could no longer carry them, they came unfurled. How Colin knew I had such things inside me, I do not know. Only that maybe he wasn’t doing it just for the money.

I realize this is an absurd story to surface when thinking about what brought me to education, a field known for its sincerity of purpose and professional approach to adulthood. Such displays as Colin’s would, seen through any lens, embedded in any pedagogy, seem like abusive rant. But I came to teaching to continue the conversation of ideas with people who were so passionate about them, that they appear to list to one side, fix their eyeglasses with a Band-Aid, wear strange

trousers, and exhibit a relationship to their subject that to an untrained eye is identical to the person talking things over with themselves on a subway. In short, I found my best teachers to be misfits; somewhat ill-equipped for life on the outside, but wonderful guides to the art of cutting a hole in the ice, baiting a hook, and lowering it into the dark unknown.

They were embarrassing, magnificent tutors for the rigors of selfhood. I would not have dared to bring as much of my strangeness or my buried love along with me, had I not had

their example: giving long analogies that lost us all, in sweaters just a size too small; riffling through lost pages of a meticulously planned lesson; bridging the world of mistake, and the world where no mistake is worthless.

— Claire Chafee, Ed.M.’09, wrote this piece in Nancy Sommer’s Teachers as Writers class last spring. She moved back to the Bay Area with her partner and four-year-old daughter to continue her work as a playwright and teacher.

First the Feet, and Then the Heart By Lory Hough “I don’t know what I was expecting, but thought that perhaps he would enlighten us with a long and eloquent speech as I’m used to sitting through during my time at Harvard,” she said. “What I got was completely different, and in my mind, so much better. The Dalai Lama’s words were simple yet powerful.”

Tetsuya Takahashi, Ed.M.’09, who had traveled for two months through Tibet, was moved by the Dalai Lama’s message that educators must include compassion in their teaching.

“His speech made me re-recognize the role and the task of educators,” Takahashi said. “He mentioned that he knew the purpose of education — to foster the soul of compassion.” Looking at the front row, where the deans were seated, the Dalai Lama said, “The task is on your shoulders, not mine, so finish it now.”

In her introduction, Dean Kathleen McCartney said the Dalai Lama’s focus on compassion in education was exactly the reason she wanted him to speak again at Harvard. “His name is often translated as ocean of wisdom,” she said, “yet he is quick to offer a translation that is more accurate: teacher.” And although he is a spiritual leader, McCartney pointed out that the Dalai Lama likes to say that kindness is his religion.

His kindness was evident after the speech concluded and he had moved outside to a tree-planting ceremony in his honor. In addition to blessing a pregnant woman’s belly and individually acknowledging the young Tibetan dancers who had performed before the speech, he made sure that the young birch hybrid created at nearby Arnold Arboretum was well taken care of. After the deans and Harvard President Drew Faust each tossed a shovel’s worth of dirt on the tree’s roots, the Dalai Lama circled the tree, covering it properly with many scoops of soil before dousing it with bottled water that had been left at the podium for the speakers.

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mike rodman

First he took off his shoes. And then, after folding his legs under the familiar crimson and saffron robe and settling himself into an ornate wooden chair on the stage of Harvard’s Memorial Church, Tenzin Gyatso, more commonly known as the Dalai Lama, made the audience laugh: “Oh, not very comfortable.”

It would not be the last time the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet joked during his speech, sponsored jointly by Harvard’s education and divinity schools. After telling the bowing audience to “sit down,” he spoke of how honored he was to speak at such a famous institution. “A friend once told me, Harvard is so, so famous that just to walk in that place is something sacred,” he said, followed by a smile. “That is too much, I think.”

His Holiness, as he was addressed during introductions, was also serious as he hit on a number of complex issues: his definition of secularism, the meaning of Islam, and youth violence.

He also addressed the topic of the day’s speech, “Educating the Heart.” In particular, he questioned whether education and intelligence alone bring inner peace.

“Those people who are more compassionate, those people are religious man, community man, family man,” he said. “Much peaceful, much happier.”

In contrast, “there are very smart scholars and professors who are full of competition, full of jealousy, and even full of anger.

Sometimes they even commit suicide,” he said, pausing when he realized who was in the audience. “I don’t mean disrespect to the academic community.”

The Dalai Lama also stressed that compassion starts at home.

“If you see people who are more calm and ready to show love and kindness toward others, those people probably had a mother who provided more affection at a young age.”

The 74-year-old was in the Boston area as part of a four-day tour that included a conference at MIT later that day and an address (wearing a red New England Patriots cap) before nearly 16,000 at Gillette Stadium. The latter raised nearly $450,000 for the construction of a Tibetan heritage center in Boston.

Throughout his Harvard speech, the Dalai Lama’s comments were simple, which surprised Chi Pham, Ed.M.’09.

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the appian way First Impressions A Look at the School’s New Faculty

Ronald Ferguson senior lecturer Focus: teacher quality, youth culture, and racial achievement gaps

Inspiration: My grandmother, Kathryn Chavers, a master teacher

Pre-Ed School: senior lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School*

Historical figure you would like to take to lunch: Any ancestor who was born into slavery and experienced emancipation

Grew up: Cleveland, Ohio Favorite book: Souls of Black Folk

by W.E.B. DuBois

Andrew Dean Ho assistant professor of education Focus: educational statistics and measurement and their interactions with large-scale educational policies

Favorite book: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Historical figure you would like to take to lunch: Charles Darwin

Inspiration: My mom and her mom, both fantastic teachers; my StanPre-Ed School: assistant professor, ford University adviser Ed Haertel; University of Iowa and the high school students in Japan who first gave me a perspecGrew up: Honolulu, Hawaii tive on testing as a tool of policy

Katherine Masyn assistant professor of education Focus: The development and application of cross-sectional and longitudinal latent variable models, specifically, finite mixture models, latent growth curve models, and event history models. I also have strong substantive interests in teacher education and retention, alcohol research, and prevention science

Pre-Ed School: assistant professor, from my graduate students and my University of California at Davis closest colleagues Grew up: Vienna, Va. Favorite book: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Historical figure you would like to take to lunch: Plato

Inspiration: I get my greatest inspirations for work and for life

Mark Moore professor in education, management, and organizational behavior Focus: how individuals have to think and act to make highly leveraged changes in social conditions

Favorite book: Contemporary, Saturday by Ian MacEwan; Classic, Middlemarch by George Eliot

Pre-Ed School: professor, Harvard Kennedy School*

Inspiration: Basic fear of not amounting to anything. Belief that individuals in general, and I in particular, might be able to contribute something of value to the world. The example of many of my teachers. The simple, brute fact

Grew up: Midwestern roots (Oak Park, Ill.), but lived mostly in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Massachusetts as a child and teenager

of unmet social needs that can, in principle, be solved with thought, good will, and collective commitment and effort.

Historical figure you would like to take to lunch: Barack Obama

*continues to hold a joint appointment with the Harvard Kennedy School

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Harry Spence professor of practice Focus: management and leadership of organizations, with a particular focus on moving organizations from a focus on compliance to a focus on learning Pre-Ed School: commissioner of Massachusetts’ child welfare program Grew up: Cranbury, N.J.

Favorite book: Achilles in Vietnam

by Jonathan Shay Inspiration: don Lorenzo Milani, an Italian priest I worked for in Italy in 1965, a radical transformer of education, now the subject of a canonization movement Historical figure you would like to take to lunch: Shams of Tabriz

Marty West assistant professor in education policy Focus: American K—12 education politics and policy

Inspiration: Chris Waters (Williams College), Avner Offer (Oxford University), Paul Peterson (Harvard Pre-Ed School: assistant professor, University), and the many other Brown University dedicated professors I’ve had along the way.

Grew up: Rockville, Md. Historical figure you would Favorite book: The Things they like to take to lunch: Jonathan Carried by Tim O’Brien Edwards

Newly Tenured

Bridget Terry Long professor of education

Nancy Hill professor of education

Focus: access to higher education and college success

Focus: role culture plays in parenting and adolescent achievement

Joined Ed School: assistant professor, 2000

Joined Ed School: visiting associate professor, 2007

Current Projects: improving access to college information and financial aid, understanding barriers and examining interventions, and addressing the problem of insufficient high school preparation

Current Projects: Project PASS (Promoting Academic Success for Students) and Project Alliance/ Projecto Alianzo

Degrees: master’s and Ph.D. in economics, Harvard University; A.B. in economics, Princeton University Ph.D. Thesis: The Market for Higher Education: Economic Analyses of College Choice, Returns, and State Aid Policy

Degrees: master’s and Ph.D. in developmental psychology, Michigan State University; B.S. in psychology, Ohio State University Ph.D. Thesis: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Upward Mobility in Middle Class African American Women

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STUDENT impact

Reasons to Know ...

Raygine DiAquoi Doctoral student

She was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attended public schools until the sixth grade when her parents, wanting her to have every opportunity, sent her to the Hewitt School, a private school for girls on the Upper East Side. Her experience there highlighted the inequities she knew existed in public education. “I was being groomed to be a leader through the styles, tastes, and predispositions that my teachers and mentors were actively cultivating in me,” she says. “This contrasted greatly with the experiences of my family members who were being groomed for a life of disadvantage. They were not being asked to think critically, to be creative, or to lead projects. I now know that their schools, like my school, were simply reproducing and maintaining the status quo.” This Big Sister to a local second-grader is now at the Ed School to figure out why this happens — and what she can do about it.

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With a handful of other doctoral students, she started the Graduate Student Research Collaborative, the student arm of the school’s Achievement Gap Initiative. Their main goal: find a direct link between culture and academic achievement.

Ultimately she says she’s interested in better understanding schools that are successfully educating minority students. She also wants to paint a different image of African American families than the prevailing one that implies they are not interested in education.

Since coming to the Ed School in 2007 following teaching stints at schools in Harlem and at the academic achievement program she attended before starting private school, she has been active in the annual Alumni of Color Conference. “It’s a space where I feel nourished and reminded of why I’m here.”

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martha stewart

This past summer, she worked in Haiti on a Save the Children project designed to help a community track their own school success using surveys and interviews. She created a task force of teachers, students, community leaders, and parents that are doing the tracking and then will share the findings with the rest of the community.

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She can walk on stilts and ride a unicycle. She learned both skills while a counselor at a performing arts camp. “I unicycle now to relieve stress. It’s hard, it’s counterintuitive, but that’s part of the fun.”

CAMPUS BRIEFS Commencement Roundup On June 4, 597 Ed School students became Ed School alumni. The Morningstar Family Teaching Award was presented to Professor Monica Higgins; Professor Dick Elmore, C.A.S.’72, Ed.D.’76, gave the faculty address; student speaker Mark Hecker, Ed.M.’09, implored his classmates to “get to work” changing the world; and Alumni Council Award winner Ernesto Schiefelbein, Ed.D.’69, reminded the soon-to-be graduates that their degrees would open many doors.

Students: Wanted Ed School students are in high demand. Despite the downturn in the job market, on-campus recruiting interviews were up by 15 percent over 2008; the PreK–12 Expo saw a 39 percent increase in participating organizations; and the Social Impact Expo had a 10 percent increase. The online Virtual Career Fair included 129 jobs from 66 organizations — a 222 percent increase in jobs over last year.

Early Honor This summer, Associate Professor Nonie Lesaux was selected for a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Only a handful of education researchers have ever received this honor.

The award was created in 1996 by President Bill Clinton to support young professionals who show leadership potential in science and technology. Winners receive five years of funding from a related federal agency — in Lesaux’s case, the Department of Education — to advance his or her research.

YouToo? With the creation of a new branded YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/ HarvardEducation), the Ed School has joined the online video revolution. Click on the “subscribe” button and you’ll be alerted each time we put up a new video.

To learn more about these briefs, go to www.gse.harvard.edu/ news_events.

With Class

Bi-Laws

The 2009–2010 incoming class at the Ed School includes: 39 doctoral and 639 master’s students from 39 states, the District of Columbia, and 36 countries. Average age of Ed.D. is 32 years, with a range from 24 to 44; Ed.M. is 28 with a range from 21 to 61. Almost threequarters are female and 95 percent will study full time. Students of color make up 22 percent of the group; international students 16 percent.

Two Ed School grads were named deans at two law schools, effective this past July: Martha Minow, Ed.M.’76, became dean of Harvard Law School; Chris Guthrie, Ed.M.’91, became dean of Vanderbilt University Law School.

Must Be Awards Season

Harvard’s Global Day of Service

Associate Professor Vanessa Fong was given a five-year CAREER award by the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology Program. Professor Kurt Fischer received the Transforming Education through Neuroscience Award at the Learning & the Brain Conference. At the American Education Research Association, Professor Carol Weiss was given the Presidential Citation; Professor Christopher Dede was honored as an outstanding reviewer; and Professor Robert Selman was named a 2009 fellow.

On May 9, more than 300 Harvard alumni and students from 13 cities around the world gave back to their communities as part of Harvard’s first Global Day of Service. Sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Alumni Association, the event worked through regional Harvard Clubs to match volunteers with local service organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, Teen Empowerment, and Hands on Tokyo.

Students Selected Student honors last spring: Doctoral candidate Leticia Braga, Ed.M.’03, received the AERA Minority Fellowship in Education Research; Malia Villegas, Ed.M.’05, received the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship; Jennifer Groff, Ed.M.’09, and doctoral candidate Anna Rosefsky Saavedra, Ed.M.’06, received Fulbright Scholarships; Kathleen Corriveau, Ed.M.’03, Ed.D.’09, was named a Koppitz fellow; Wendy Mages, Ed.D.’08, received the American Alliance for Theatre and Education Distinguished Dissertation Award; and doctoral candidates Robert Garcia, Ed.M.’02, Shimon Waronker, Ed.M.’09, Almudena Abeyta, Ed.M.’04, Ed.M.’09, Beth Schiavino-Navaez, Ed.M.’03, Ed.M.’09, and Guadalupe Guerrero, Ed.M.’02, Ed.M.’09, won the 2009 Innovation in Education Award from Phi Delta Kappa for the design of their New American Academy model.

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Daniel Bayer

Will Obama’s Choice Change Education in America?

As Arne Duncan, a former member of the Ed School’s visiting committee, helps school districts across the country Race to the Top and tries to give every child a chance to succeed, this idealist, competitor, and basketball pal to the president has the opportunity to do what no previous secretary of education has been able to accomplish.

By john Mcquaid

A

rne Duncan, the secretary of education, spent the balance of his childhood traveling back and forth each weekday from his Chicago neighborhood to the afterschool center run by his mother, Sue. It was a short trip — the Duncan home was on 56th Street in Hyde Park, the center on 46th in the Kenwood neighborhood. But as in many American cities where privilege and poverty butt up against each other, it was in essence a passage from one world into another. Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago (and, until recently, to Barack Obama and his family) was a famously integrated, upscale community. Kenwood was, in the language of the time — the 1970s — a ghetto.

The Sue Duncan Center was attended by kids from elementary to high school age, nearly all of them African Americans struggling with the grind of urban poverty — crime, drugs, gangs, absent parents. Arne and his younger brother and sister attended the well-regarded University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in the morning, then spent their afternoons as, in effect, junior members of their mother’s staff.

As young kids they earned small change for sharpening pencils and cleaning up. As they got older, they took on more responsibilities: tutoring, supervising, coaching sports and games.

The gulf between their own comfortable circumstances — their father was a professor of psychology at the university — and those of their contemporaries on the South Side bothered the Duncan kids. It became a kind of puzzle, a mental nut they all tried to crack as they grew older. Why did such glaring

inequities exist in Chicago, in America? Who or what was to blame? Unsurprisingly, they focused on what they knew — education. Inner-city Chicago schools were notoriously bad during the 1960s and ’70s; Duncan’s brother, Owen, says that, at the time, the afterschool center didn’t help kids with homework because their teachers didn’t give them any.

“I grew up having a huge amount of anger, frankly, at the local public schools — that what we were trying to do from 3 to 8 p.m. at night wasn’t in most cases happening during the school day,” Arne Duncan says in an interview. “So you had kids who may not have been born with all the advantages, but they were smart, they were committed, they wanted to learn — and they weren’t being challenged. No one was expecting them to do anything.”

Let’s be upfront about it: Arne Duncan is a bona fide idealist. He talks not just about putting kids first, raising test scores, and the relationship of education to economic opportunity — the standard rhetoric of his predecessors — but also about education as a tool for social justice, not a phrase heard very often in Washington policy circles or even among his fellow technocrats in the Obama administration. He believes that government has an obligation to right the wrongs of poverty — or, at least, to do everything possible to mitigate the damage it does to individuals. “In so many places we’re not giving every child a chance, we’re not giving children the chance they need to be successful,” he says. “And where we don’t, I really believe we’re part of the problem. We perpetuate poverty. We perpetuate social failure.”

Chicago investment banker and philanthropist John W. Rogers Jr. met Duncan playing on South Side basketball courts as a teenager and later gave him his first job running an educational mentoring program. “I think he sees this as the fulfillment of his mom’s legacy and his own,” Rogers says. “It’s the opportunity to take his mom’s values and his values and share them with the entire country.”

Problem is, the Department of Education has in its nearly 30 years of existence been something of a graveyard for idealism. The job of secretary is hostage to the basic structure of the U.S. education system, with its tradition of local control and the sway that powerful interest groups hold over national education policy. The department is the smallest federal bureaucracy, with 4,200 employees. Its principal task: to distribute federal funds to states and local school districts amounting to about 8 percent of the total spent nationally on education. Even the signature federal reform, the No Child Left Behind Act passed during the Bush administration, has failed to live up to its billing and is overdue for a revamping.

Given these limitations, the secretary of education has at best only modest influence over what goes on in classrooms — and, if the politics turn sour, flirts with irrelevancy. Duncan knows this as well as anyone. Prior to being handpicked by President Obama, his friend and sometime pickup basketball partner and adversary, Duncan was CEO of the Chicago Public School system, the nation’s third largest with 400,000 mostly minority, low-income students. With Mayor Richard Daley’s backing, he had real power to effect reforms, including shuttering poorly performing schools, expanding charter schools,

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and using data in creative ways. Ed School Academic Dean Robert Schwartz, C.A.S.’68, a friend of Duncan’s, recalls sitting with him on a flight last fall, several weeks after the presidential election. “The obvious speculation at that point was that Arne would be on anybody’s shortlist of potential secretaries, and he wanted to talk about it. I said, ‘Arne, has the secretary of education or the education department been a significant factor in your life as CEO of the Chicago schools the past seven years?’ He looked at me, and the answer was obvious. It was not a relevant factor.”

And yet, this time things might turn out differently. Duncan has an opportunity that none of the previous nine education secretaries could even dream about. Obama’s decisive victory and a severe recession have opened a way for the federal government to make a significant impact on schooling nationwide. The Obama economic stimulus package contains a huge windfall for education, approximately $115 billion — more than double the department’s annual budget, a requested $46.7 billion for the coming fiscal year. Most of those funds are going to avert catastrophic school budget shortfalls caused by the recession. But the stimulus also includes an unprecedented $5 billion in discretionary funds. The largest share belongs to the Race to the Top program, in which states will compete for grants by showing they’re innovating. Duncan’s hope is to leverage that cash to create a brushfire of reform at the local level: funding and ultimately “scaling up” successful reforms and seeding them elsewhere. But his window of opportunity is quite narrow — the money will run out in two years.

“We’re in a place where we have to push very hard for reform at every level — early childhood, K–12, higher ed,” Duncan says. “It presents challenges, but what’s so fun about this is the opportunity to break through. We have unprecedented Shooting hoops discretion and resources. So we have with Obama a chance to move things in ways they’ve never been moved before.

It doesn’t guarantee success. But it absolutely puts you in the game.”

I REUTERS/Ho New

Courtesy of the Sue Duncan Center

Arne tutoring at the Sue Duncan center

f that’s going to happen — and the odds of a decisive breakthrough are still pretty long — it may not be Duncan the idealist who accomplishes it but Duncan the competitor. As a scrawny kid of 12 or 13, he gravitated toward the South Side’s predominant game, basketball. He began traveling alone through some of Chicago’s toughest

neighborhoods, showing up at gyms and talking his way into pickup games. “If you wanted to be a good basketball player you had to go where the good basketball players were,” he says.

“That was inner city, South and West Side. I guess it was pretty unique. I was the only white kid anywhere I played.”

Losers would be kicked off the court, but the winners would keep playing. So anyone who wanted to play had to learn how to win. The games, and the occasional dangers of the inner-city gym culture, forced Duncan to develop some street smarts.

Like Obama, he’s an outsider who has never quite wholly belonged to any of the worlds he moved through, nor to any particular interest group or camp, yet who could be comfortable anywhere: basketball courts, the streets, political meetings, and policy salons.

“It was hugely helpful. Hugely,” Duncan says of the later impact of this phase of his life. “I knew all the streets, I knew all the people. And you really learn how to read people’s character.

There were people who, all I knew were their nicknames, and you trust your life to them, literally. I had people protect me.

And there were other people that didn’t have your best interests at heart. You had to negotiate those things.”

Duncan never nursed many doubts about what he wanted to do, sticking to the parallel tracks of basketball and public education. A sociology major at Harvard, he took what would have been his senior year off, returning to work at the Sue Duncan Center and to research his thesis, titled The Values, Aspirations and Opportunities of the Urban Underclass. It looked at the gap between what people in Kenwood wanted from life and what was actually available to them. He says he was also trying to come to terms with the violent deaths of many of the South Side friends he’d made over the years on the basketball courts. One pattern was obvious. Everyone who had been killed had dropped out of high school; friends who had stuck it out and graduated survived (they are a diverse group, including actor Michael Clarke Duncan and R&B singer R. Kelly). “It was this real, absolute dividing line,” Duncan says.

“There’s this idea that we talk about how important education is — but in these really, really tough communities, it was literally between life and death.”

The year off had also been a test to see if he wanted to pursue urban education as a career, and he decided the answer was yes. But basketball still beckoned. Duncan had been cut from the Harvard varsity squad his freshman year, a major blow at the time, but by the time he returned for his senior year in 1986 he was made cocaptain and led the team in scoring and steals. A scout had told Duncan he was good, but would never make it in the NBA, and he set his sights a bit lower. He played for the Rhode Island Gulls of the summer U.S. Basketball League, then decamped to Australia, where he played for a series of teams, both professional and semi-pro: the Eastside Melbourne Spectres, the Launceston Ocelots, and

the Devonport Warriors. He spent four years there, playing, coaching, devoting free time to working in a national foster care program — and, for good measure, met Karen Donnelly, whom he’d later marry and with whom he’d have two children.

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uncan returned to Chicago and in 1992 took a job offered to him by a childhood friend from the basketball courts — John W. Rogers, the founder and CEO of the nation’s largest minority mutual fund firm, Ariel Capital Management. Duncan ran the Ariel Education Initiative, a program that mentored children at one of the city’s worst-performing elementary schools, then followed them year to year (and later helped pay their college tuition bills).

After the school was closed, Duncan reopened it as a successful charter school with a finance-oriented curriculum, the Ariel Community Academy.

Only 27 at the time he started with Ariel, Duncan’s rise was quick. He joined the Chicago Public School system in 1998, as a deputy chief of staff to CEO Paul Vallas, where one of his jobs was supervising the creation of magnet programs in troubled schools. Three years later, Mayor Daley pushed Vallas out and installed Duncan in his place. The Chicago Tribune headlined its story “Obscure Deputy Was Daley’s Second Choice,” noting that Duncan had never held a post high enough to merit his own secretary.

Duncan pivoted from his predecessor’s bottom-line approach. “During Vallas’ time, there was a strong push on ending social promotion, using standardized tests. They were less focused on how to intervene in schools, in classes and with individual kids,” says Timothy Knowles, director of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute. “Duncan and his team brought to Chicago a set of ideas about how to improve teaching, learning, and leadership — not focused exclusively on accountability and governance.” He drew in part on expertise from Harvard’s Public Education Leadership Program, run by the graduate schools of education and business, dispatching teams of staffers each summer.

As CEO, Duncan pursued a mix of programs — some system-wide, some fine-grained. The centerpiece is Renaissance 2010, an ambitious effort to shut down 60 troubled schools and create 100 new state-of-the-art schools across the city. As part of that plan, Duncan pushed to expand the city’s roster of charter schools — it now stands at 67 — and embraced the turnaround concept, in which a school is temporarily shut down, staff members fired, transferred, or asked to reapply, and a new staff built from the ground up.

One of the biggest problems plaguing school reform is the absence of good data tracking the performance of students, teachers and schools over time. So Duncan took particular

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Speaking to reporters in Milwaukee about grants to retrain displaced workers

interest in the detailed data analyses done by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Public School Research. One long-term study found that only 3 percent of African American and Latino male students who graduated from Chicago schools ever got bachelor’s degrees.

Duncan’s team tried to identify exactly where students got off track. Consortium research showed that while elementary school students with low test scores and other problems stood a good chance of improving later on, troubled high school freshmen almost never did so.

Duncan focused resources on mentoring and intervention at that level.

Another initiative was modeled on his own experience: partnering with local organizations to turn schools into de facto community centers open through the afternoon and into the evening. “I think our schools should be open 12-13-14 hours a day,” Duncan said recently on The Charlie Rose Show. “Not just lengthening the school day, but a wide variety of afterschool activities: drama, art, sports, chess, debate, academic enrichment. Programs for parents: GED, ESL, family literacy nights, potluck dinners. At home we attached health care clinics to about two dozen of our schools. Where schools truly become the centers of the community, great things happen.”

Duncan’s efforts on school overhauls — as well as his more unconventional ideas, such as a program that paid students for good grades — stirred up resistance from affected communities and teacher organizations. He was persistent, but also unfailingly good-natured and collegial, unusual attributes in a job that usually requires sharp elbows. “Arne is a nonpolarizing figure,” says Vallas, now superintendent of the New Orleans Recovery School District. “Despite his strong support for charters, accountability, and closing failing schools, he doesn’t have the type of personality that grates on people. He has a really easygoing, relaxed manner to him and can be really disarming.

And it’s real, not contrived.”

In Chicago, however, Duncan could afford to be gracious.

He was backed with the wide-ranging power over schools granted the mayor. In Washington, his power is considerably more diffuse. If national education policy demands a bold, paradigm-busting leadership, some critics suggest that Duncan may be too cautious. After seven years, Duncan’s Chicago record was innovative but hardly revolutionary. “The record suggests that even when playing with a pretty strong hand, he was a cautious, incremental operator, who left with everyone saying nice things about him but had not used the political capital he had to pick any of the really tough fights,” says Frederick Hess, Ed.M.’90, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “That might have been the right call in Chicago; that might have been who he is.”

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f course, Duncan wasn’t hired to blow up an old system, but to build on the work of his predecessor. And his current job is, if anything, more of an incremental game than the previous one. The agenda spans proposed changes in preK to college, pounding the bully pulpit to promote charter schools, merit pay, and national standards, and what’s likely to be a contentious fight over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. Besides his $5 billion pot of discretionary money, Duncan has several things working in his favor. Over the past decade sharp partisan divisions over education policy have softened, in part because of the progress made by reformist big city superintendents including Duncan himself. That doesn’t mean a big breakthrough is imminent; the landscape is simply more fractured than before. “There is some bipartisan agreement, center-left, center-right. But both Democrats and Republicans are divided on education,” says Cynthia Brown, vice president for education policy at the liberal Center for American Progress.

The national political foment has been accompanied by a flood of experimentation and new policy thinking, and Duncan wants the department tapped into it. Among other things, he’s brought in Monica Higgins, an associate professor at the Ed School, to organize a series of 90-minute roundtables every three to four weeks in which outside policy experts and practitioners meet with Duncan and his top deputies for an open discussion on a particular topic — teacher performance, turnaround in schools. Duncan has also seeded key positions in the department with Ed School graduates. Martha Kanter, Ed.M.’74, the undersecretary of education, had been chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and is an expert in two-year colleges, a focus of Obama’s goal to increase college attendance and graduation rates. Gabriella Gomez, Ed.M.’01, meanwhile, is running Duncan’s congressional relations. Robert Shireman, Ed.M.’89, founder of the Institute for College Access and Success, has been appointed to oversee college tuition and finance issues. Schwartz continues to advise Duncan informally.

Right now, anything seems possible. That’s not going to last.

“Everybody goes through this period, enjoying the honeymoon phase. But then when it gets down to reality of who gets money, who gets approved, who are the real innovators and drivers, there it gets much harder,” says Duncan’s predecessor, Margaret Spellings. One obstacle is the caps that many states maintain on the numbers of charter schools — a policy Obama and Duncan are pushing them to relax. “Imagine a governor of a state that has fairly severe caps on charter expansion and a need to get in an application under Race to the Top. It will take an act of the legislature in New York, for example, to change caps,” says Russ Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former head of the Department’s Institute of Education Sciences. Congress will also be skeptical — as it was recently when Senate and House committees grilled Duncan on his plans for Title I funding.

As in Chicago, Duncan’s plans ultimately depend on his relationship with his boss. “He gets this,” Duncan says. “Before I came to Washington we talked a lot about what we want to do here. And he, like me, feels this huge sense of urgency, this real sense of impatience, and this real sense of possibility. He helps create the space and the latitude to make the changes we need to make.”

Duncan and Obama met in the early 1990s (through basketball, Duncan already knew Michelle Obama’s brother Craig

Robinson, now the men’s basketball coach at Oregon State).

They crossed paths occasionally after Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 representing Duncan’s home base, Hyde Park and Kenwood on the South Side, and frequently when Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate and Duncan ran the school system. They also began playing basketball regularly — they played on election day in Chicago, and occasionally manage it in Washington. “It’s really, really lucky when you’re not trying to build a relationship now,” Duncan says, “when you’ve got this history of working together, when you tend to see the world very similarly and have a similar set of values.”

Education, of course, must compete with other items on Obama’s ambitious agenda, as well as with erupting crises that will inevitably distract the White House. If the president pushes education reform consistently and wagers political capital on it, Duncan has a chance at success. Duncan’s membership in the close-knit group of Chicago transplants in the Obama administration — including top advisors David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, and social secretary Desiree Rogers (John W. Rogers’ ex-wife) — will help him keep his issues in the mix. ­ John McQuaid is a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer based — in Washington, D.C. This is his first piece for Ed. To access his stories and blog, go to www.johnmcquaid.com. Ed.

From the Charles to the Potomac We’re not a school of government, yet Ed School graduates play a huge role in education policy around the world, especially in Washington, D.C. In fact, graduates are employed in nearly every agency and department, from the departments of labor, energy, and commerce to the Consumer Product Safety Commission to the Library of Congress. Many, of course, also work for the U.S. Department of Education as undersecretaries, writers, policy analysts, and education program specialists, to name a few. Below are a sampling of positions held by Ed School graduates currently working for the federal government.

U.S. Department of Education

U.S. Congress

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Martha Kanter, Ed.M.’74, undersecretary; Marshall “Mike” Smith, Ed.M.’63, Ed.D.’70, senior counselor to Secretary Arne Duncan; John Silvanus Wilson Jr., Ed.M.’82, Ed.D.’85, executive director, White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities; Robert Shireman, Ed.M.’89, deputy undersecretary; Gabriella Gomez, Ed.M.’01, assistant secretary for legislation and congressional affairs; Zakiya Smith, Ed.M.’07, director of government relations

Roberto Rodriguez, Ed.M.’98, senior education advisor, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA); Sophia King, Ed.M.’99, chief of staff, Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY)

Paul Shapiro, Ed.M.’66, senior environmental engineer

U.S. Department of State Erin Renner, Ed.M.’05, Laura Hochla, Ed.M.’05, Francis Cheever Jr., M.A.T.’71, Jennifer Lawson, Ed.M.’05, and Dina Tamburrino, Ed.M.’08, foreign service officers

U.S. Department of Energy Barbara Twigg, M.A.T.’72, communications officer, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Edward Wright Jr., C.A.S.’74, senior budget officer; Julia Chiu, Ed.M.’03, disaster assistance directorate

Peace Corps Nanayaa Kumi, Ed.M.’08, recruitment and placement specialist, Peace Corps Response

National Institute for Literacy Lynn Reddy, Ed.M.’98, deputy director

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RO Borrowing a page from the medical school world, educators at the Ed School are showing teachers and school leaders how to find common ground when it comes to learning and instruction.

By lory hough illustrations by cathy gendron

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arah Fiarman, Ed.M.’05, Ed.D.’09, remembers being with a group of educators as they sat in a classroom observing a reading lesson. The teacher was asking lots of questions and students were constantly raising their hands. All of the textbooks were open.

Afterwards, the group of principals, superintendents, and union leaders gathered to talk about what they saw. As Fiarman remembers it, the comments were all over the map.

“Some left feeling like, Wow! Did you see how engaged the students were? Others thought the text wasn’t useful,” she says.

Other comments were directed at the teacher’s performance.

Fiarman herself felt like no real learning had taken place.

Now a principal at a K–8 school in Cambridge, Mass., this former teacher realizes that everyone was on different pages when it came to describing the scene and evaluating the classroom. “We didn’t have a shared practice,” she says. “As educators, we have such different ideas of what effective teaching and learning is.”

Now imagine that the educators are medical students and instead of observing a class, they are in a hospital room with an experienced doctor visiting a patient. Later, huddled outside in the hallway, the group talks about what they saw. Their comments are factual and based on evidence: I noticed this; the patient did that. Questions get asked. Eventually, a diagnosis is offered, as well as potential treatments. Everyone is on the same page before they move on to the next patient.

Could this same medical training model — one that includes a shared language and a common sense of what’s effective — work for educators?

Common Ground According to Fiarman, the answer is yes. In fact, as she explains in the recently published book Instructional Rounds in Education, written with Professor Richard Elmore, C.A.S.’72, Ed.D.’76; Lecturer Lee Teitel, Ed.D.’88; and Executive Leadership for Educational Excellence Program Director of Instruction Elizabeth City, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D.’07, this model is already working in several school districts across the county, as well as in Australia.

Called instructional rounds, the model is fairly straightforward: Initially a group of educators (referred to in the book as a network) is formed. In some cases, the group is rolespecific — in Connecticut, where a network has been in place since 2001, only superintendents. Some networks are more diverse and also include principals, teachers, staff members, and local union leaders. These networks can be formed in one school or one district (as is the case with Cambridge, which formed in 2006), multiple districts (Connecticut), or statewide

(like Ohio and Iowa, which both started in the past two years).

Once the group forms, they identify a problem that the school or district is struggling with, observe classrooms, debrief, and then focus on what needs to be done next.

In some ways, this doesn’t sound all that new or innovative. Across the country, principals and superintendents visit classrooms every day and then meet to discuss solutions. The problem, say the authors, is that what typically happens is these educators, no matter how motivated or well meaning, “do not have a common definition of what they are looking for.”

In one case described in the book, a school knew that when it came to reading and writing, the students were doing fairly well on decoding, vocabulary, and simple writing tasks, but not as well on comprehension. Even after teachers started working with students in small groups, the school found that there was no consistency in how the groups operated. Despite best efforts, school administrators were at a loss when it came to moving forward.

Teitel hears similar stories all the time when he and the other Harvard facilitators start working with networks. “Often people don’t know what high-quality teaching and learning is,” he says. “We’ll show a video of a class to district leaders and ask them to describe it or rate it. There’s usually no common understanding of what ‘good’ looks like.”

Another problem with traditional class visits (called walkthroughs or learning walks) is that the focus is often on style, not substance.

“Administrators descend on classrooms with clipboards and checklists, caucus briefly in the hallway, and then deliver a set of simplistic messages about what needs fixing,” the authors write, and the fixing is usually the teacher. (It’s no wonder some teachers refer to these visits as “drive-bys.”)

In contrast, the rounds model stresses separating the personal from the practice — something Elmore says medical

“

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

We’ll show a video of a class to district leaders and ask them to describe it or rate it. There’s usually no common understanding of what ‘good’ looks like.”

— Lecturer Lee Teitel

professionals do well, but not educators. “Educators . . . tend to confound and confuse the practice with the person,” he writes.

“Indeed, for most educators, their practice is who they are.”

Teitel says he’s not entirely convinced that doctors have an easier time being impersonal compared to teachers, but agrees that “in the education world, there’s definitely a tendency to use language such as ‘good teachers,’ not ‘good teaching.’ It’s so pervasive.”

As a result, teachers can become guarded about their work.

“Teachers are justifiably skeptical about opening up their classrooms to outsiders, because it often results in conflicting and vague advice that has little practical value to them or their students,” the authors write.

Tom Fowler-Finn, a rounds participant in Cambridge who is now helping to expand the model in Australia, experienced this privacy barrier when he was superintendent.

“It is more a function of the cellular classroom and the fact that education has not developed practices adopted long ago by other professions, like the medical rounds that instructional rounds are based upon,” he says. “Then too, it does take time

for people to be straightforward and question or confront each other when they have not been in each other’s classrooms or shared the work.”

Which is why Teitel says he and the other facilitators spend a lot of time at the beginning helping rounds participants understand that everyone involved — not just teachers — is working on their practice.

The authors also stress the importance of collecting meaningful, raw evidence when observing a classroom, and to do it without judgment. “We call this the ‘unlearning’ part of rounds,” Teitel says. “We have to learn to be nonjudgmental.”

Even one nondescript comment can be harmful. “Once a judgment slips into a conversation,” the authors write, “they have a habit of reproducing like rabbits.”

The foundation of rounds is based on describing what was observed in the class instead of immediately asking if the teacher held the students’ attention or if too much time was spent on a certain activity. (The facilitators value this stage so much that they spent the first year and a half of a two-year process working with one principals group on just the descripEd.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

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tive phase.) The tendency in education, says Fiarman, is for educators to jump to solutions without really understanding the problem.

“There’s tremendous value in slowing down. We go in and watch a reading lesson. Normally the observers want right away to say, Wasn’t her approach fabulous? or, Oh! We use that book, too, instead of, What went on in there? How did that student learn?” she says. “Rounds is stopping to really try to understand those interactions. It’s a leap of faith for any people that taking the time will bear fruit for understanding the issues.”

Without this understanding, the authors write, solving problems in education is “a bit like doctors discussing whether a patient is healthy without identifying vital signs, or like lawyers discussing whether someone is guilty without assembling facts, or like carpenters discussing whether a house looks sturdy without describing the construction materials and joints. Such discussions generate lots of heat without much light.”

Andrew Lachman, executive director of the Connecticut Center for School Change, the nonprofit that organized the rounds group in Connecticut, says Elmore made it very clear

“

The standard was set at the first visit. Some of the supers talked about ‘good teaching,’ ‘warm climate,’ and ‘engaging teaching,’ while Richard clinically described what he saw: a paraprofessional working on the initial consonant B sound with three students.”

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— Andrew Lachman

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

when he first started working with the group that their language needed to be strictly descriptive.

“The standard was set at the first visit. Some of the supers talked about ‘good teaching,’ ‘warm climate,’ and ‘engaging teaching,’ while Richard clinically described what he saw: a paraprofessional working on the initial consonant B sound with three students,” Lachman says. “We’ve done video observations several times to help calibrate our skills. I mention staying at the bottom of the ladder of inference at every debrief, and people either call each other out or note when they’re moving to judgment. We also review the transcripts to keep us on our toes.”

Network Model At some point — maybe after a year of class visits and debriefings — the final stage of rounds begins. Here, a basic question is asked: What is the next level of work? The network meets to explore strategies and discuss resources needed to address the initial problem they identified. A plan of action is created and follow-up visits are scheduled to gauge how well the plan is working.

The ultimate goal, say the authors, is for the protocols and practices learned doing instructional rounds to become as much a part of the culture of education as they are a part of the culture in medicine. If rounds is seen as just “another activity,” the authors write, “then it will probably go the way of most good ideas about school improvement.”

Teitel says he’s very optimistic that this model will not fade into oblivion, but could be taken to scale. In November, for example, a brand new instructional rounds executive program will take place, introducing a new crop of educators to the model. “I feel hopeful,” he says. “There’s been a lot of interest in expanding the work into other places.”

In April 2008, a group of principals and regional staff from the Gippsland region in Australia observed rounds groups in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

“We visited schools and classrooms and spoke with principals, leadership teams, and superintendents to learn about the application and outcomes of instructional rounds, and in particular, to learn about the change in culture one could expect from such experiences,” says Karen Cain, assistant regional director of the Gippsland region for the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development.

The group liked what they saw and decided to try out the instructional rounds model in Latrobe Valley, a region with 39 schools. They based their model on the Cambridge model, which focuses on principals, but includes the superintendent and central office staff. Knowing that having a skilled facilitator

“

This is a network of people learning from one another and being honest with what they don’t know. They come to understand this as a strength.

That’s very countercultural to leaders, maybe especially with education leaders. A lot of school leaders are afraid to look like they don’t have all the answers. We want the network to be proud to be learning and not have all of the answers.”

— Sarah Fiarman, Ed.M.’05, Ed.D.’09

was key (with the initial networks, the Harvard team served as facilitators), they invited Fowler-Finn to advise them. When he retired as Cambridge’s superintendent in February 2009, he joined the existing Australian team with the goal of expanding the network.

Cain says the feedback collected so far has been extremely positive, “with principals indicating a significant change in their view of classroom practice and their roles as instructional leaders.”

Another reason why the instructional rounds model has been viewed so positively by those involved, says Teitel, is because it is collaborative.

“The process is about the individual learning, but also about organizations learning,” he says. In the medical world, rounds is the major way that doctors in training learn, but “more importantly,” the authors write, it is “the major way in which the profession builds and propagates its norms of practice.”

Teitel stresses, however, that medical and instructional rounds are not entirely mirror images of one another.

“We spring off of medical rounds but don’t take all of it.

There are some aspects of the culture that we don’t try to export,” he says, mentioning the tendency in medicine toward hierarchy and the senior-doctor-knows-best mantra. “We feel like we’re all learning from the instructional rounds model, regardless of rank. We’ve done a few debriefings and at one, a teacher from Ohio told us that she couldn’t believe she was sitting with a team of teachers, superintendents, union leaders, and principals, all as peers.”

Teachers, he says, often spend their careers being told what to do, including “mysterious compliances” that filter down.

“With rounds, it’s pretty energizing for teachers to have an opportunity that says we’re jointly constructing what this should look like,” he says. “That’s a dramatically different way to work for people within a district.”

Fiarman says this group-learning mentality — which centers on the idea that everyone involved is working on their practice — helps especially with superintendents and principals who, having achieved a certain level in their career, are reluctant to admit they don’t have all of the answers.

“This is a network of people learning from one another and being honest with what they don’t know,” she says. “They come to understand this as a strength. That’s very countercultural to leaders, maybe especially with education leaders. A lot of school leaders are afraid to look like they don’t have all the answers. We want the network to be proud to be learning and not have all of the answers.”

She says this “network model” has been particularly helpful in Cambridge. “School leaders started looking at each other as resources to learn and share ideas,” she says. “I was there as a teacher for isolated days of professional development that never went anywhere. Now the teachers and principals are part of a network where they can discuss what they saw and learned.”

Fiarman says she would love to one day see this model played out across the country with all educators speaking the same language and following shared practices.

“It would be great if we had a coherent, national model of what effective teaching is. Even if all the schools of education were teaching the same practices, that would be a miraculous feat,” she says. “But we would still need to get folks to talk about the real practices they see in front of them. It’s a practice, not a theory. You need to see it in action. It’s also not a formula. Teaching, like medicine, is a complex craft that requires a deep conceptual understanding of what you’re doing. You can’t follow a formula if you teach something and the students aren’t following you. As much as anything gets documented in textbooks, you still need to have discussions about how you make decisions.” Ed. Ed.

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By david mcKay wilson

Construction 101 Starting your own school isn’t easy. Beyond having a good idea, you need ingenuity, nimbleness, patience, tolerance for risk-taking, flexibility, and courage. Oh, and a bit of chutzpah helps, too.

A look at a few Ed School graduates who have tried to start their own.

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year into planning for the school he wanted to establish, David Silver, Ed.M.’01, was despondent. Two teachers he’d lined up had quit. He still didn’t have a building, and he had discovered, to his dismay, how much he needed to learn about managing people.

Quite frankly, Silver wanted to give up. He was ready to call it quits on creating an elementary school in an impoverished Oakland, Calif., neighborhood called Fruitvale, where 70 percent of the students were English language learners and more than 90 percent came from lowincome families.

But Silver, then 29, persevered, determined to create an elementary school with strong family involvement and collaboration between teachers and community, all united around the vision that every student would one day go to college. The Think College Now Elementary School opened to great acclaim in the fall of 2003, yet by the end of its first year, just 8 percent of his students were proficient in English language arts, 23 percent in math.

Achievement was slow to rise, despite Silver’s best intentions.

Then he engineered a major shift in the school’s approach, and by 2008, proficiency had risen to 54 percent in English, and more than 63 percent in math. Silver is expecting increased achievement in 2009.

“When I started the school, I thought that the kids would do well if everybody was working together and passionate with a common vision,” recalls Silver, now 36 and the school’s principal. “But we realized we needed to get our assessments aligned with California standards and use data from those tests to inform our instruction. We were focused on process and details instead of people and outcomes. Now we are getting results.”

For Silver, those results validate his decision in the late 1990s to look beyond the strictures of traditional American classrooms and dream boldly about what could be done to reach low-income minority children struggling to make the grade. He quickly realized that starting a new school took much more than a good idea. He also needed ingenuity, nimbleness, patience, tolerance for risk-taking, flexibility, courage, and a healthy dollop of stubbornness. Those qualities — and more — were needed to develop curriculum, find a building, drum up community support, and convince policymakers that his vision deserved support.

Silver opened his school at a time in the history of American education when innovators could get traction for their

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dreams, with support from private foundations, state governments, local boards of education, and graduate programs like those at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Many of these new schools are focused on solving one of our society’s most intractable problems: how to close the achievement gap between low-income minority students in our nation’s inner cities and their white middle- and upper-class contemporaries in the suburbs.

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ilver has plenty of company among alumni from the Ed School who have established new schools from California to New York City, creating charter schools outside the purview of local school boards, innovative schools within municipal school districts, or independent schools with a new twist.

Some, like Silver, are young and idealistic. Many launched their careers in poor communities, where they grew frustrated with the traditional public school system’s resistance to change. They came to Harvard, where their ideas incubated in the scholarly community, and then blossomed in new schools that got planted upon graduation or soon thereafter.

“I was young, optimistic, and a little arrogant,” says Xanthe Jory, Ed.M.’00, founder and executive director of the Bronx Charter School for the Arts. “I was 27 then and had taught in a public school with a culture of failure that prevented any positive change from taking place. I thought I could do better.”

Others, like Paula Evans, M.A.T.’67, and Regina RodriguezMitchell, Ed.M.’74, are veteran educators who have long worked within the system and now want to use what they have learned over decades Rodriguez-Mitchell, cofounder of the National Collegiate Prep Public Charter High School in Washington, D.C., says she wanted to use her quarter-century of experience in urban education to create a school where inner-city teens could thrive. Her school, which opened in the fall of 2009, will be among 59 charter schools in the District of Columbia that serve 36 percent of the city’s public-school enrollment.

“It takes some chutzpah to think you can do it,” says Rodriguez-Mitchell. “Over 25 years, I’ve seen how schools have worked and how they haven’t worked. I have such passion for kids. I’d like to see if I can get it right.”

The 21st century has proved a heady time for educational entrepreneurs. The emergence of charter schools in the 1990s

“

It takes some chutzpah to think you can do it. Over 25 years, I’ve seen how schools have worked and how they haven’t worked. I have such passion for kids. I’d like to see if I can get it right.”

says. “You have to believe that the safety net will appear or you may not even need it.”

Professor Patricia Albjerg Graham, former dean of the Ed School, notes that the past 100 years in U.S. education have seen at least two waves of new schools that swept across the education landscape when dissatisfaction mounted challenges to the status quo. At the start of the 20th century, many Roman Catholic parishes established parochial schools to make sure that their parishioners’ children were raised both American and Catholic. Decades later, dissatisfaction with excessively regimented schools led innovators to create “progressive” schools that emphasized the arts and distinctive modes of instruction.

“All of these efforts were supposed to improve the learning of students, though it has never been absolutely clear what will do that,” says Graham.

The current wave of innovation in charter schools differs from earlier reforms by focusing on governance, with charter schools freeing educators from oversight by elected school boards. The charters can also operate outside of rigid work rules and tenure protection enjoyed by unionized teachers across the nation.

That was one of the motivating factors that inspired Evans to found the Community Charter School of Cambridge in 2005 in the city’s Kendall Square neighborhood. Evans, who worked for 15 years at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, returned to Cambridge in 1999 to serve as principal of Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, the city’s main public high school. She left after three years, making the choice to start a charter, which has a board of directors but does not report to a board of education.

“I was asked to come in to Rindge and Latin to make the school more equitable and raise the standards,” says Evans.

“It was good work, but it was difficult work. The politics got in the way.”

With her charter school, there’s no tenure protection. Her 27 teachers — eight of whom are Ed School graduates — work on one-year contracts, which Evans decides whether to renew.

“If you can’t dismiss someone who clearly is not doing the job, it does a real disservice to the kids,” she says. “If a kid in a suburban district like Wellesley or Newton has one bad teacher, it’s not going to matter that much. But if one of my kids has an incompetent teacher, that’s a huge hole that isn’t going to get filled at home. This is urgent work we are doing.”

— Regina Rodriguez-Mitchell, Ed.M.’74 provided manifold possibilities for educators to create new schools outside the purview of local school boards, where innovation and experimentation were encouraged. The smallschools movement has created opportunities within school districts, as sprawling comprehensive high schools are split up, and smaller entities are created to offer more personalized instruction.

There are also educators like recent graduate Will Yeiser, Ed.M.’09, who opened an all-male independent middle school this fall in Asheville, N.C. His new school, called the French Broad River Academy, has no more than 12 students per class and uses the river and the surrounding watershed as the basis of study. The program includes outdoor and experiential education as well as global understanding through international travel and study.

Yeiser became disillusioned with traditional schools after teaching Spanish for three years in the Asheville City Schools.

He brought his idea for a new school to Harvard, where he fine-tuned his concept, learned about financial management, and took courses to develop his skills as a leader. Now he’s learning to handle financial risk. During the first year, he’ll rely on tuition and most likely take out a loan. He needs a minimum of 12 students to start the school; he’s hoping for 16 and would love to attract 24.

“It’s a scary economic time to do be doing this, but if you believe in something, I think you have to make the leap,” he

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djunct Lecturer Linda Nathan, Ed.D.’95, teaches a class at the Ed School called Building Democratic Schools. She has more than 20 years experience starting up new schools and was also instrumental in setting up the Boston’s first performing arts middle school — an experience she shares in her class, which is for students thinking about becoming educational entrepreneurs.

“You have to be able to balance many spinning plates at the same time,” she says. “You have to suddenly be as good at teaching and instruction as you are at figuring out what to do with the window sills in your building.”

Peter Turnamian, Ed.M.’99, who interned with Nathan in 1999 during the Boston Arts School’s first year of operation as part of his educational leadership program at Harvard, was hired in May 2000 to serve as the founding director of the Greater Newark Charter School in New Jersey. The school has had its charter renewed three times, and Turnamian is now looking to expand the school, which serves grades 5–8, to include grades K–4 by August 2010.

While he has won a $250,000 grant from the Newark Charter School Fund to finance the expansion, he still needs a building to rent for the younger grades because his current school doesn’t have room. (The state of New Jersey does not provide capital funds to construct schools.) Turnamian doesn’t want to replicate the experience his current school had over its first three years. For two years, it operated at a church.

The next year the school rented three doublewide classroom trailers that he parked behind the YMCA, which let him use its gymnasium for physical education class. The school finally found a home in a parochial school that had been closed by the Archdiocese of Newark. In 2008, Turnamian signed a 10year lease.

“If you don’t have a stable facility, it can undermine everything else,” he says. “It was a real victory for our school to have

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the stability provided by the archdiocese. It was a good deal for us, and the archdiocese has a permanent tenant.”

Juliana McIntyre, Ed.M.’64 knows the importance of that all too well. Every Friday for 15 years after founding the Princeton (N.J.) Junior School in the basement of a church in 1983, McIntyre and her four teachers would pack the school’s materials in her car trunk to make way for church programs, and then unload them each Monday. (They’d also need alternative classroom space on days that weddings or funerals were held.)

Her patience paid off: Today, the school, which serves grades preK–5, is housed in a spacious building constructed in 1998 in Lawrenceville, N.J. “It was very improvisational at the beginning,” says McIntyre.

Which is why keeping in touch with others going through the same struggles can help. Over the years, as Turnamian’s charter school came together, he kept in touch with Nathan, to get her advice and share the travails in the trenches. Amanda Gardner, Ed.M.’04, the founding principal at Boston Preparatory Public Charter School in Hyde Park, Mass., says she continues to tap into the Ed School network that was formed during her year in the School Leadership Program. Many still live in the greater Boston area, and they meet monthly at Charlie’s Kitchen in Harvard Square to talk about the new schools they are building. They also keep in touch with an email listserv for those in their program who live elsewhere.

“It has been a great support network,” she says.

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inning permission from local and state education authorities for one’s dream school can be an arduous process, testing an educator’s patience and ability to please a broad range of constituent groups.

Dean Leeper, Ed.M.’03, is in the final stages of winning approval to open the Kindezi School in Atlanta, a K–8 school with just six students per class. It has been a long journey for Leeper, who grew up in Atlanta and now has his fourth application for his school before state authorities.

“I’m thinking the fourth time’s a charm,” he says.

“

You have to be able to balance many spinning plates at the same time. You have to suddenly be as good at teaching and instruction as you are at figuring out what to do with the window sills in your building.”

— Adjunct Lecturer Linda Nathan, Ed.D.’95

Leeper, 32, began his education career teaching second grade in 2001. He came to Harvard a year later, then taught fifth grade in a Washington, D.C., charter school. While there, he became frustrated teaching a classroom with 24 students. He saw so many students who didn’t thrive in such a large group, and he felt the traditional public school system precluded him from giving his students the attention many of them needed.

“I had one student having problems who would come in early, and in those moments in the morning, in the small situation, he’d be getting the attention he wanted,” recalls Leeper.

“I started thinking about a school with small classes. It was a crude vision, and I’ve been working towards it ever since.”

After a dispiriting experience at the D.C. charter school, he moved back home in 2004, and that summer ran a summer program for children at his local food cooperative, telling parents that if they liked his approach, he’d homeschool them for free in the fall to test out his model. They agreed, and that September he welcomed six students from fourth through seventh grade. It was a labor of love, with Leeper doubling as teacher and his homeschool’s bus driver.

He was going deeper in debt, but by 2005 felt the model worked and began the process of starting up a charter school in southwest Atlanta, one of the city’s poorest areas. His first board, however, included members who often became embroiled in shouting matches at community meetings. That wasn’t helping to build community support, so he dissolved that board, recruited new directors, and finally applied to the Atlanta Public Schools in 2007, hoping to open in 2008.

The proposal was kicked back for revisions, submitted again in 2008 so school could open in 2009. The school board approved the plan, which triggered a $250,000 grant from the Walton Family Foundation to support the start-up and early years.

But then the Georgia State Board of Education balked, unwilling to back Leeper’s school governance experiment, in which the teachers would be organized like attorneys in a law office’s partnership, and have the power to hire and fire teachers as well as the principal.

Leeper was in a bind. He already added two more employees to the staff, and he’d selected 14 of 16 teachers selected for the school, which would open as a K–3 and add an additional grade over the next five years.

So he had to retrench, telling the teachers they wouldn’t be needed in the fall. He became the school’s lone employee again. He presented the revisions to the state board of education in May and as an educational entrepreneur, remains optimistic that he’ll be approved in December.

Besides, the extra year will give him more time to make sure his school is ready when it’s time to open.

“There’s a huge learning curve to starting a school,” says Leeper. “And it’s such a rollercoaster. The highs are really great, and the lows can be crushing. But I’m patient. I’m confident my school is going to open.”

— David McKay Wilson is a New York-based freelance journalist. His last piece for Ed. looked at the pros and cons of families being involved in school. Ed.

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in the media

with

courstesy of Jim Gray

with

oneonone oneonone

Jim Gray

Jim Gray, Ed.M.’94, Ed.D.’99, remembers when he realized that learning and fun could coexist: He was a freshman at Michigan State University with no idea what he wanted to do with his life. During an overseas study program to Copenhagen to get a social science requirement “out of the way,” he watched as an older teacher in overalls crouched on a playhouse roof with a hammer in her hand, enthusiastically building a learning structure while the preschoolers played around her. “That image of the teacher and her young students is still vivid in my mind,” he says. “They were happily exploring, playing, and learning, and she seemed to be having as much fun as they were.” Twenty-five years later, it is no surprise that Gray found his own way to combine education and fun: as director of learning at LeapFrog, the technology-based toy company based in Emeryville, Calif., just east of San Francisco (and home to another kid-centered company: Pixar Animation Studios).

You oversee LeapFrog’s Learning Team.

What does that involve?

At a strategic level, we advise the company on educational directions, like incorporating more conceptual understanding across the curriculum, 21st-century skills, or environmental science. We write curriculum guides for specific product lines and provide a learning roadmap for the company overall. On a daily basis, we approve the learning design of individual products under development.

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Learning design means . . . ?

How well the educational content and goals align with the interaction design and likely learning outcomes.

Give me an example.

One area of research that I’m especially excited about is our new capacity to assess products with studies of actual logging data. Our new connected

products like the Tag Reading System and Leapster2 handheld gaming platform log time spent on a book or game level, response patterns, etc., and present it to parents through a secure online website called the Learning Path. In aggregate form, these data can be used to improve product designs and understand how children learn with these kinds of technologies. There’s even potential for university researchers to collaborate with us on these studies.

So after a child plays with one of these products, the parent connects the toy to a computer and gets a report explaining what skills were used and what supplemental questions the parent can ask? Why not just let the child play?

Kids like our products because they are fun, but parents also appreciate their educational qualities. We started developing the connected products I mentioned and created the Learning Path as a way for parents to gain insight into what their kids are learning, what they may be struggling with, and their interests. It also facilitates more learning by guiding kids to specific additional activities, online and offline. The Learning Path has only been available for less than a year, and it seems to be valuable for many families.

Do you ever get to work directly with children?

I was hired in early 2004 as research manager to run the lab and in-home studies. We have two onsite kid labs where we test products with approximately 50 children per week.

I still spend some time in the lab but wish I could spend more.

Best part of your job?

Knowing my work has a direct, positive impact on the experiences of millions of kids.

photo/illustrations: istockphoto.com

You write on your blog that your first job was as a preschool teacher.

I worked as a preschool teacher for a total of five years, for three years while completing my bachelor’s degree, then for a year with infants and toddlers at a hospital daycare center, and finally in a “reverse mainstream” early intervention classroom for children with

developmental delays at the University of Kansas. That’s where I first discovered innovative ways to use technologies with kids, including videotaping them on field trips as a prompt for language and literacy development. I’ve also taught middle school kids in summer programs and graduate students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Rochester Institute of Technology, plus various online courses. I’m an eternal teacher and student.

You’re 6’6”. Was that intimidating for your preschoolers?

Believe it or not, it rarely came up. I was pretty quick with a deep knee bend to get face-to-face with them and somehow fold myself into position on their little chairs. As I remember, when they did notice I was taller than other adults, I’d engage them in an estimation game called “can Jim touch the ceiling?”

Would you be as good in your job if you had not had that hands-on field experience?

Probably not, although I hire people with expertise I don’t have, so I could manage. I’m actually very proud of the team.

They all have at least 10 years of teaching experience, doctorates in education, and passion for their areas of expertise.

On your blog, in response to criticism of too much screen time for kids, you’ve said that instead of counting minutes, parents should instead take a more balanced approach.

What would be appropriate for say, a three-year-old?

I suggest they look at what their child is actually doing in front of screens

and take that into account. For a threeyear-old, I would look for physical, cognitive, and social activity. X number of minutes hopping and bending with friends in front of the TV with a Wii game or our new Zippity counts more positively than watching similar educational content from the couch alone.

Even then, I would balance that experience with time outside or with blocks or dress-up clothes. I think of this variety as a “healthy toy box” approach to play, similar to a balanced diet of food.

At LeapFrog, do you use any of what you learned at the Ed School?

Absolutely, in terms of knowledge about research, child development, learning, and in other ways. This week I remember discussing primary and secondary emotions in relation to a Tag Junior book for toddlers. I refer often to concepts like “deep understanding” and “authentic assessment” that I learned while working at Project Zero and the ATLAS Communities project. Plus, my professional network certainly reaches back to Cambridge, and I use it when planning activities for my staff. For example, a couple of us attended a recent workshop on causal patterns by [Assistant Professor] Tina Grotzer, and I’ve had [Lecturer] David Rose and [MIT Professor] Mitchel Resnick as guest speakers.

Do you have children or are there neighborhood kids who benefit from your cool job?

We don’t have kids yet, and our extended family is at a distance, but we do have several friends with LeapFrog-age kids, including our favorite five-year-old neighbor and her 18-month-old sister.

They visit often for play dates with me and my wife, whom, by the way, I met at the Ed School in the computer lab.

— Lory Hough

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in the media Books Can I Wear My Nose Ring to the Interview?

Ellen Gordon Reeves

Workman Publishing Co., 2009

Based on the author’s experience in hiring, counseling, and resume-doctoring, Can I Wear My Nose Ring is a guide for young job-seekers faced with increased competition and fewer jobs. The book goes over the arsenal of a successful applicant: the art of writing strong cover letters and resumes, how to dress for an interview, things to be honest about, how to use parents in your networking efforts, and things not to say. Ellen Gordon Reeves, Ed.M.’86, serves as résumé expert at the Columbia Publishing Course in New York.

Changing Course Lauren Causey and Lettie McGuire Self-published, 2009

For the 10th year in a row, the student group ALANA (African, Latino, Asian, and Native American Alliance) has published an anthology of student poetry, short essays, journal entries, illustrations, and photography. This year’s issue centers on their definitions of transformation and newness, which was inspired by President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech.

Lauren Causey, Ed.M.’09, and Lettie McGuire, Ed.M.’09 are recent graduates of the Ed School, where they were active members of ALANA. Classroom Motivation

Eric Anderman and Lynley Hicks Anderman Pearson, 2010

In this study of achievement motivation, the authors link the growing disconnect between what motivation researchers discuss and recommend and what teachers know and think about students’ motivation. Key topics discussed include the use of rewards in classrooms, choosing motivational academic tasks, evaluating

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student progress, grouping students for instruction, and creating positive learning environments for all students. Eric Anderman, Ed.M.’86, is professor of educational psychology at Ohio State University and associate editor of The Journal of Educational Psychology.

Ed.M.’05, Rebecca Miller, Ed.M.’05, and Mara Casey Tieken, Ed.M.’06, are doctoral candidates at the Ed School and on staff at the Harvard Educational Review.

Don’t Bite Your Tongue: How to Foster Rewarding Relationships with Your Adult Children

Bernie Schein

Ruth Nemzoff

Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Don’t Bite Your Tongue seeks to counter the popular belief that parents must let go of their adult children and silence themselves. Through the use of vignettes, the book demonstrates how functional the parent/adult child relationship can be by encouraging dialogue between the two generations. This book can serve as a guide to navigating the ambiguities and everchanging realities of the lives of parents and their adult children. Ruth Nemzoff, C.A.S.’76, Ed.D.’79, is a resident scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center and adjunct assistant professor at Bentley College.

Education and War

If Holden Caufield Were in My Classroom: Inspiring Love, Creativity, and Intelligence in Middle School Kids Sentient Publications, 2009

By the time Bernie Schein’s students arrive in his middle school classroom, they are little more than a gaggle of psychological defense mechanisms. For more than 30 years, Schein has worked with students in middle-class Atlanta, helping them rediscover who they really are. Through stories from his classroom, he describes how true emotion, rather than pure reason, is the key to discovering real relationships and personal truth. Bernie Schein, Ed.M.’71, has been a principal, director of teacher training, and teacher of creative writing and literature at the middle school and high school levels.

In Our School: Building Community in Elementary Schools Karen Casto and

Edited by Elizabeth Blair,

Jennifer Audley

Rebecca Miller, and Mara

Northeast Foundation

Casey Tieken

for Children, 2008

Harvard Educational

In Our School is intended for school leaders and study groups seeking inspiration and practical ideas for building schoolwide community. The book begins with a framework for building schoolwide community, followed by articles showing what schoolwide community looks like at more than 20 schools — rural, suburban, and urban; small and large; public, private, and charter. The authors offer suggestions for building common knowledge about the school’s values and rules, establishing schoolwide routines, creating opportunities for cross-age learning, and involving families in all aspects of school life. Jennifer Audley, Ed.M.’98, is a full-time staff writer/editor for the Northeast Foundation for Children and a former classroom teacher.

Review, 2009

This book examines the complex relations between educational institutions and societies at war. Drawn from the pages of the Harvard Educational Review, the essays provide multiple perspectives on how educational institutions support and oppose wartime efforts. The first half of the book explores how students, educators, and communities work within established educational systems to reinforce existing conditions or to promote change, while the second half looks at how they work around or beyond existing school systems to promote political and social transformation and to create new educational opportunities in response to conflict. Elizabeth Blair,

ON MY BOOKSHELF: Professor John Willett Currently reading: A novel called The

Noneducation genre of choice: I par-

Crooked Cross by an English author that no one has heard of: Michael Dean.

book’s premise is that if Hitler had been prosecuted in 1931 for the murder of Geli Raubal (the daughter of his housekeeper), modern history would be different.

ticularly like novels about the origins of religion, myths, and lost kingdoms, time travel, and the “big picture.” I also enjoy looking at good cookbooks, especially those with colored photos of food and cooking techniques. I really recommend Julia Child’s The Way to Cook to anyone who wants to make it in the kitchen.

Book you have read over and over again:

Next up: Now that I have answered

I am fascinated by the two great novels of Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey and, even better, The Eighth Day.

these questions, I feel like reading The Eighth Day or perhaps The Magus [by John Fowles] again. Now, those are two books that everyone should read!

First impressions: It’s intriguing. … The

To read a longer version of Professor Willett’s responses, visit www.gse.harvard.edu/ news_events/ed/2009/fall/media.

tanit sakakini

Favorite spot to curl up with a good book: In bed!

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

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in the media Just Breathe Susan Wiggs Mira, 2008

This novel introduces Chicago cartoonist Sarah Moon as she is forced to tackle her own real-life issues that, in the past, she had only ever imagined for her syndicated comic strip, “Just Breathe.” Readers follow Sarah through conception issues and a crumbling marriage to the town where she grew up. There she finds a new beginning just as she is revisiting her past. Susan Wiggs, Ed.M.’80, is a novelist and workshop leader in the Pacific Northwest.

The National PTA, Race, & Civic Engagement, 1897–1970 Christine Woyshner

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

The PTA, the largest voluntary educational association in the 20th century, has over the course of 100 years lobbied for national legislation on behalf of children and families, played a role in shaping the school curriculum, and allowed for participation of diverse community members in dialogue about the goals of public schooling. In this book, the author examines the National Parent Teacher Association in relation to its racial politics and as a venue for women’s civic participation in educational issues. Her argument is that the PTA allowed for discussions about race and desegregation when few other public spaces, even the schools, did so. Christine Woyshner, Ed.D.’99, is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Technology in Education at Temple University.

Paper Clarity at a Glance: What to Keep and When to Let Go Laura Moore

ClutterClarity at Home, 2009

Paper Clarity at a Glance is a reference tool that seeks to answer the nagging question we all ask: Do I need to keep this document or can I shred it now? This book contains a chart of more than 100 personal financial, medical, and legal docu-

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ments and records, as well as tips, storage recommendations, and guidance on taxes and audits. The book is intended for all who are challenged by the volume of paper in their lives. Laura Moore, Ed.M.’89, is principal of ClutterClarity at Home in Concord, Mass.

The Right to Literacy in Secondary Schools: Creating a Culture of Thinking Edited by Suzanne Plaut

Teachers College Press, 2008

This resource challenges educators to view adolescent literacy as a “civil right” that enables students to understand essential content and to develop as independent learners. The book is a call to action and a practical guide for reform-minded schools and districts, and for teachers seeking to help all adolescent learners achieve at high levels. It includes illustrations of exemplary classroom practice across all content areas. It also offers frameworks to help teachers implement those practices in their own schools. Suzanne Plaut, Ed.M.’99, Ed.D.’04, is vice president of education at the Public Education & Business Coalition.

Rumer & Qix: The Race to Terra Incognita Kathleen Wilson

BookSurge Publishing, 2009

Rumer & Qix — a futuristic adventure novel for young adults — follows 16-yearold reporter Rumer and her sidekick, Qix, as they become obsessed with several reliable reports of bizarre nature sightings. The sightings are odd since, in the 31st century in which they live, all natural plants and animals have been replaced by synthetic replicas. The mysterious nature sightings are dismissed as lunacy by everyone but Rumer, who finds herself enlisted

by MoNa (Mother Nature) to help fight an epic battle to turn things around on the planet before its too late. Kathleen Wilson, Ed.D.’88, is a media consultant and adjunct professor at New York University.

Is Paper Getting You Down?

We don’t want to lose you as a reader, but we understand the need to whittle down your mail pile and do good for the environment, so we’re giving you the option of opting out of the hardcopy version of the magazine that you receive and instead letting you read it online. To do this, send us an e-mail at letters@gse.harvard.edu with the words OPT OUT in the subject line. We will send you an e-mail alert once a new issue comes out and is available for you to read online. www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/ed

Why Did This Happen?

Content, Perspective, Dialogue: A Workshop Model for Developing Young People’s Reflective Writing Susan Wilcox

The Brotherhood/Sister Sol, 2008

Why Did This Happen? is designed to help young people engage in critical inquiry, develop a love of learning, and transform their lives. It includes strategies, illustrations of real teaching moments, youth writings, and suggested resources.

Through this model, The Brotherhood/Sister Sol works to develop in youth a lifelong love of learning and an ability to utilize their knowledge and skills to transform themselves, filling the gulf between the traditionally structured teacher-learner dynamic and young people’s natural curiosity. Susan Wilcox, Ed.M.’92, has created curriculum for schools and community organizations and taught at Eugene Lang College at the New School and Teachers College at Columbia University.

Why He Didn’t Call You Back: 1,000 Guys Reveal What They Really Thought About You After Your Date Rachel Greenwald

Crown Publishing Group, 2009

Why He Didn’t Call You Back is based

on the author’s own research, which she performed through “exit interviews” with 1,000 single guys who confessed the true reasons they really didn’t call women back after dates. Greenwald found the top 10 reasons straight from the men themselves.

She also relates success stories from real women who used exit interview feedback to find Mr. Right. Rachel Greenwald, Ed.M.’87, is a dating coach, matchmaker, and New York Times bestselling author.

and students can do right now to help themselves stay healthy. Kirsten Olsen, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D.’05, is a writer, educational consultant, a national-level Courage to Teach facilitator, and principal of Old Sow Consulting.

The Why…? Series

John Merrow

Pandwe Gibson

BookSurge Publishing, 2009

The Why…? Series is a new children’s book series that incorporates various academic interests while instilling the importance of family and community in its young readers. The books present opportunities for parents and children to learn together about science, literature, history, math, critical thinking, imagination, and social entrepreneurship. The series consists of three multilingual books created to support inquiry-based learning through science and social studies curricula. Pandwe Gibson, Ed.M.’08, is an educator with New Orleans Recovery Schools and New Leaders for New Schools.

Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture Kirsten Olsen

Teachers College Press, 2009

In this new book, Olson brings to light the consequences of an educational approach that values conformity over creativity, flattens students’ interests, and dampens down differences among learners. Drawing on emotional stories, she seeks to show that current institutional structures do not produce the kinds of minds and thinking that society really needs. Instead, according to Olsen, the system tends to shame, disable, and bore many learners. She also presents the experiences of wounded learners who have healed and shows what teachers, parents,

Blogs and More Ed Beat www.learningmatters.tv/blog/news-desk Ed Beat is a daily education blog run by Learning Matters, a nonprofit production company focused on education founded

by Merrow in 1995. The site includes news articles, videos, and podcasts relevant to education today. Merrow can also be followed on Twitter, at http://twitter.com/ john_merrow. John Merrow, Ed.D.’73, is president of Learning Matters and a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at Stanford.

Reach Incorporated www.reachincorporated.blogspot.com Mark Hecker

When Hecker launched his new nonprofit, Reach Incorporated, in the summer of 2009, he felt well prepared for the strategic planning and program design that goes into any start up. But it was the day-to-day operations that took him by surprise, and through which the real progress can be measured. On the companion blog to Reach, Inc.’s website (www.reachincorporated.org), Hecker sheds light on what goes on behind the scenes of a new organization trying to find its footing. From applying for tax exempt status to making new contacts to buying the right office printer, Hecker leaves no detail out. Mark Hecker, Ed.M.’09, is founder and executive director of Reach Incorporated, an organization that aims to teach academic skills through employment.

My Pop Studio www.mypopstudio.com Renee Hobbs and Sherri Hope Culver

Funded under a contract from the Office on Women’s Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, My Pop Studio is a “creative play experience” that aims to help girls aged 9–14 better understand and process how their attitudes are affected by various media.

Activities centered on magazine, television, music, and digital areas are fun and engaging, while increasing media literacy and knowledge of women’s health. Renee Hobbs, Ed.D.’85, is an associate professor and director of the Media Education Lab at Temple University.

Ed.

Ed. magazine provides notice, on a spaceavailable basis, of recently published books, blogs, podcasts, and websites by HGSE faculty, alumni, and students. Send your name, degree, and year of graduation, along with the title of the book, the publisher, and date of publication, or a URL link to your blog, podcast, or website.

Ed. magazine, In the Media Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 44R Brattle Street Cambridge, MA 02138 E-mail: medianotes@gse.harvard.edu Fax: 617-495-7629

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • fall 2009

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investing in education The Great Leveler

By Jill Anderson

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By 1971, Ottaway had joined The Washington Post, where he spent the bulk of his career working as a national security reporter, foreign correspondent, and investigative reporter. Being a journalist, Ottaway says, taught him “how good people can be and how horrible people can be. You see the best and worst of people and everything in between.”

With the daily grind of journalism behind him, Ottaway continues to write books in his retirement, including the recently published The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Outside of writing, he also dedicates much of his time and efforts to addressing issues in education with his wife, Marina, who has taught at universities around the world.

As a resident of Washington, D.C., for more than 30 years, Ottaway became alarmed watching repeated education efforts to improve the city’s schools fail. “This has led to a very vibrant charter school movement in Washington in part of the great search to find out what kind of education or educational system will establish better school systems for all — white, black, brown, yellow,” Ottaway says. “What concerns me is how difficult it is to make any progress. There is no overall sustained system of education that we’ve been able to define that works for all.”

The lack of progress, particularly among African Americans and Latinos, drives Ottaway to continue being a advocate for and provide scholarships to minority students and urban schools. “Education is the most powerful tool for giving them an even chance in the world,” Ottaway says. “Education is a great leveler.” jill anderson

Many years ago David Ottaway contemplated whether to become a teacher or a journalist. He chose the latter. With more than 30 years working as a journalist under his belt, Ottaway admits that he doesn’t regret the decision, even though he has always kept one foot in the world of education. Today he remains devoted to supporting many education initiatives, including the Ed School’s Urban Scholars Fellowship program.

Looking back on Ottaway’s long journalism career, it’s easy to see why he doesn’t regret his choice.

He has witnessed some of the 20th century’s most notable moments in world history, including the overthrow of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom in South Africa, and the departure of a million French people from Algeria.

In what he considers the most dramatic piece of history, Ottaway stood only 40 yards from the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at a parade in 1981. “There was so much chaos, I was able to run down to the podium to find out whether he survived and nobody stopped me,” Ottaway recalls. “That was quite an event. There have been a lot of interesting stories.”

For Ottaway, journalism was, more or less, in his blood.

Raised in upstate New York, his family founded the Ottaway Group of newspapers, which consisted of publications in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and the West Coast.

By the 1960s, though, the family sold the newspapers to Dow Jones & Company, and Ottaway went to study history at Harvard College.

After graduating, Ottaway began working abroad for The New York Times and Time Magazine. At the time, Algeria was fighting for independence from France and Ottaway found himself covering it firsthand. “At that point, I had some idea what it was like being able to witness history in the making,” he says.

Together, Ottaway and his wife helped launch the SEED School in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit that partners with urban communities to provide innovative educational opportunities that prepare underserved students for success in college and beyond. With two successful schools completed to date, plans are underway for additional schools in the future.

While working on Harvard University Committee on Student Excellence and Opportunity from 2005 to 2008, Ottaway learned of the Ed School’s Urban Scholars Fellowship — a program that provides tuition and health insurance fees for nine selected educators from urban school systems. The program resonated with Ottaway, who became intrigued by

By Amy Rollins

In 2006, the Ed School introduced the Urban Scholars Fellowship program, a scholarship program with a specific focus on students committed to improving the nation’s urban schools. “We want to provide a reward to people who have worked in urban public schools, which we view as an important public service to this nation,” said Dean Kathleen McCartney at the time of the program’s launch. “We believe that this fellowship will provide an incentive for people to return to urban public schools in leadership roles.”

The selection of candidates for the fellowship program is rigorous. The scholars are chosen from among those who rank in the top 10 percent of the Ed School’s applicant pool and have demonstrated a commitment to working in urban school systems.

Each of the 13 master’s programs admissions committees reviews their top candidates and nominates students based on experience, background, test scores, academics, and engagement with the challenges of urban education.

In addition to completing the standard master’s curriculum, the students participate in an interdisciplinary program designed to create a network of professional colleagues who share the same passion for improving public schools in urban areas. Throughout the year, the urban scholars have regular meetings under the guidance of Jennifer Petrallia, assistant dean for master’s students.

These meetings provide the students with information from researchers and practitioners in the Boston area who focus on issues and challenges specific to urban education. The students also get behind-the-scenes opportunities at the university on a wide range of issues, such as how geographical information

Urban Scholars at a reception with David Ottaway

jill anderson

Scholorship Purpose

the urban scholars’ determination to continue as teachers in urban schools.

The Urban Scholars Fellowship program is part of a larger effort at the Ed School to provide additional financial aid to master’s students. For many of the students awarded the fellowship, without it, graduate school wouldn’t be an option.

Though Ottaway is modest about his support of the Urban Scholars Fellowship program, he sees teachers as key to solving education’s problems. “If they can help save the public school system, God bless them,” he says. “What is important is that they go back to urban schools and don’t get sidetracked because the urban schools need so much help.”

systems are being used in scientific research on urban education and where to find hidden secrets in the university libraries or museums. This year, the scholars met for special seminars on topics like counseling in urban schools, economic research, special education, and being an urban superintendent. Ultimately, the sessions create strong relationships for the students with practitioners from across the country and with each other.

The Urban Scholars Fellowship program is one example of the school’s recent efforts at building fellowship and scholarship programs that address the financial burdens facing practitioners in the field. According to McCartney, the Ed School’s leadership team believed it was important to create a prestigious fellowship to encourage the best students to come to the school — and return to their urban school systems — unburdened by heavy loan payments.

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alumni news and notes 1941

1965

1962

1966

Jesse Dossick, Ed.M., passed away in April. A story on Dossick and his yearly $25 donation to the Ed School was featured in the winter 2008 issue of Ed.

Judith Brown, Ed.M.’54, Ed.D., has been named distinguished professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. She is a professor of anthropology.

Joanne Creighton, M.A.T., will step down as president of Mount Holyoke College at the end of the 2009–2010 academic year after nearly 15 years of service. (See profile below.)

Marilyn Stevens, M.A.T., passed away in July after a long battle with brain cancer. A tribute written by her daughter, Jennifer Stevens, Ed.M.’09, can be found at www.marilynstevens. blogspot.com.

1969

Francis Amory, M.A.T, continues to serve as a full professor in urban studies at Worcester State College with a private practice in clinical social work on the side. He writes that good work is a blessing, and he has many fond memories of the Ed School.

Ernesto Schiefelbein, Ed.D., received the 2009 Alumni Council Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education at the HGSE Convocation in June.

1971

William Fitzsimmons, Ed.M.’69, Ed.D., was honored

by Access, a nonprofit organization that provides financial aid, scholarships, and advice to Boston high school students.

He is dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard College, and was honored for his work ensuring that institutions of higher education are affordable and accessible to everyone.

Ben Barnhart

PROFILE

Joanne Creighton, M.A.T.’65,

is too busy to ponder what she is right now; that will be a task for her sabbatical.

For Joanne Creighton, M.A.T.’65, retirement is not the end to her career in education, it is merely a sabbatical. Creighton, who will vacate her position as president of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., at the end of the 2009–10 academic year, is in no rush to decide on her post–Mount Holyoke life, however. “I will have time to reflect on what I will do next,” she says. “I need this ‘gap year’ before making any commitments for the future.”

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Creighton’s career in administration happened unexpectedly.

In fact, her reason for coming to the Ed School was simple: “I liked school and decided to keep going,” she says. And she kept on going, first, to the University of Michigan for her Ph.D. in English, then to Wayne State University, where she was working as an English professor when she was approached to take on the “temporary” position of associate dean. “That detour was to change the trajectory of my career,” she says. “From then on I was lured from one administrative assignment to the next,” including time as interim president at Wesleyan University. She came to Mount Holyoke in 1996.

She calls her choice to retire in 2010 a “natural transition,” as it is also in that year that Mount Holyoke completes a major fundraising effort, The Plan for 2010. During her tenure, she has shepherded two such plans designed to strengthen the school’s mission: “educating a diverse residential community of women at the highest level of academic excellence and fostering the alliance of liberal arts education with purposeful engagement in the world.” Among the plans’ many successes are a larger, stronger applicant pool, significant growth of the faculty, and dramatically improved financial resources.

Creighton does plan to continue her affiliations with both Mount Holyoke — at “a respectful distance,” she says — and Women’s Education Worldwide, the first-ever global alliance of women’s colleges that she cofounded in 2003. But for now, she, ever the student, is looking forward to her next challenge: “I haven’t had much leisure time in many years, so I’m pretty inexperienced at it,” she says. “But I do expect to learn more about how to enjoy leisure time after I step down as president.”

— Marin Jorgensen

1974

Sally Mahe, Ed.M., had the book she coauthored, A Greater Democracy Day by Day, chosen by the Tri-S Foundation as its book club choice. She also recently launched her website, www.democracydaybyday.com, as a way to keep her passion for a greater democracy kindled and shared.

1975

Alan Woodruff, Ed.D., is running for Congress as representative of New Mexico’s First Congressional District, greater Albuquerque. A detailed discussion of his positions on educational matters is included on his website at www.alanwoodruff.com.

1976

Martha Minow, Ed.M., became dean of the Harvard Law School in July. A member of the Harvard faculty since 1981, Minow was a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Minow has taught at the Ed School.

1979

Ron Kronish, Ed.D., was recently the subject of an article in The Times (of London). He is a rabbi and staff member at the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel.

Chinaka Esiaba, Ed.M., writes, “I hope the light still shines as we left it in 1962.”

Dilafruz Williams, C.A.S., elected in 2003 and 2007 to the Portland (Ore.) School Board, serves as secretary-treasurer of the Council of Great City Schools. On March 16, she participated in a roundtable discussion on the American

Recovery and Reinvestment Act with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at the White House.

1980

Barbara Kittredge, Ed.M., has been tutoring children of Mexican immigrants, grades K–6, for eight years. She calls it a “gratifying experience.” She writes, “This year [I] have a 5-year-old [who didn’t] know colors or how to hold a pencil — last week he wrote his name, ‘Luis.’ Wow!!!”

1982

Sarah Milburn, Ed.M., received her Ph.D. in political science on May 20, 2009, from Rutgers University, where she studied comparative politics, political theory, and military and security issues in postcolonial French-speaking central Africa. For more than 20 years, she has been a Central Africa country specialist for Amnesty International USA, working on Chad, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic.

Tamara Nash, Ed.M., was honored as Member of the Year and appears in the 2008–2009 edition of the Madison Who’s Who Registry of Executives and Professionals. She is the director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.

1986

Janine Bempechat, Ed.M.’79, Ed.D., was awarded tenure at Wheelock College in Boston.

1989

Robyn Hallowell Griswold, Ed.M., was promoted to

PHOTO FINISH They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Now it’s also worth an alumni note. Starting with the next issue of Ed. (winter 2010), we will be including alumni-focused photos in the alumni section of the magazine. (Either the alum is in the photo or the photo is connected to the graduate — a photo of a new baby, for example.) Send your high-resolution digital photos to classnotes@gse.harvard.edu. Photos that are not in focus or that are dark may not be usable. Please identify the people in the photo and include a few lines of context.

Due to space constraints, we may not be able to print all photos but we will do our best!

chair of the newly established Social Sciences Department at Nashua Community College in Nashua, N.H. She is also an associate professor of social sciences.

Leo Shea, Ed.M., was named to the board of directors of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society in March.

He is clinical assistant professor of rehabilitation medicine at New York University School of Medicine, staff psychologist at the Rusk Institute, and president of Neuropsychological Evaluation and Treatment Services in New York City and Quincy, Mass.

1991

Chris Guthrie, Ed.M., became dean of Vanderbilt University Law School this past July.

He is a seven-year veteran of Vanderbilt’s law school and the school’s former associate dean for academic affairs.

1994

Mike Walker, Ed.M., is the head of civil affairs for the Marine Corps in Iraq. He was mentioned in the May 2009 Ed.

Vanity Fair article, “Heads in the Sand.”

1996

Erik Carneal, Ed.M., was appointed by Piper Jaffray & Co. as managing director in the firm’s business services group with a focus on the educational sector.

Walter Stroup, Ed.M.’91, Ed.D., published “What Bernie Madoff Can Teach Us About Accountablity in Education” in the March 18 issue of Education Week. He is an associate professor of curriculum and instruction, an Elizabeth G. Gibb Fellow, and the chair of the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Graduate Studies Committee at the University of Texas at Austin.

1999

Camia Hoard, Ed.M., has been named a winner of the 2009 Kohl McCormick Early Childhood Teaching Awards for leading her Chicago firstgraders to success by challenging negative perceptions of urban education, inspiring

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alumni news and notes them to do things they didn’t believe they could, and exemplifying best practices in quality early childhood education.

2000

Virginia Kerrigan, Ed.M., relocated to San Diego in 2006 and is now married to Keith Joseph Ruehrwein. They were thrilled to welcome Jonah, their first child, in March 2008.

Kerrigan launched her own educational support business in the summer of 2009: www. thetotalstudentsite.com or www.virginia.ruehrwein.com.

2002

2005

2003

Nia Ujamaa, Ed.M., was named one of the 52 American members of the Apple Distinguished Educator program of 2009. She is currently the instructional technology specialist for the Mirman School for the Gifted Child in Los Angeles.

Amalia Cudeiro, Ed.M.97, Ed.D., was named superintendent of the Bellevue School District in Washington state.

Tyler Hodges, Ed.M., is dean of students at Laguna Blanca School in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he oversees discipline and student life for the Upper School. Previously he worked for six years as a history instructor and academic dean at Episcopal High School (Va.).

Hodges and his wife, Tristan, have two daughters: Madalene, 3; and Hannah, 9 months.

Hannelore Rodriguez-Farrar, Ed.M., was named assistant to the president at Brown University beginning July 2009.

2006

Erby Mitchell, Ed.M., began his new position as assistant head for enrollment management at the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Conn., in July.

2007

Ethan Gray, Ed.M., recently became vice president of The Mind Trust, an education nonprofit based in Indianapolis that supports education entrepreneurship.

PROFILE

Kevin Roberts, Ed.M.’09, When Kevin Roberts, Ed.M.’09, was contacted by the Farm of the Child, a nonprofit orphanage in Honduras, its staff was finalizing plans for a professional development trip and were looking to buy new language arts textbooks for its school.

They asked Roberts, who had done prior volunteer work for the organization, if he would be willing to help them obtain materials and create activities to strengthen their language arts program. With two other International Education Policy master’s students, Roberts proceeded to research professional development strategies, crosscultural exchange strategies, and textbook options.

Eventually he found himself back in Honduras. “The trip itself was a dose of reality for everyone who went,” Roberts says of the group of teachers from the Espiritu Santo Catholic School in Safety Harbor, Fla. who accompanied him. “It is not until one is on the ground experiencing the reality of the situation that can one begin to conceive what life is like for the rural Honduran.” It can be a shock to some, explains Roberts, to experience the intense heat, and to observe the simple things that the open-air classrooms lack, such as overhead projectors and, on occasion, electricity.

Journeying back to the orphanage after four years away was personally gratifying for Roberts. In spite of the many emotional and physical barriers the students must overcome, as well as the lack of resources, they have ranked among the highest performers

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courtesy of Kevin Roberts

is ready to take on the world.

in math and reading on Honduran national assessments. For Roberts, “it was great to see the children growing up and doing well.”

He hopes the trip has broadened the worldview of the Espiritu Santo volunteers and made them aware of the realities in which most of the people in this world live. “To actually see, smell, touch, and interact with people living at this level can have a profound effect and change perceptions on reality,” he says.

With graduation just a few months behind him, Roberts hopes to continue promoting education and creating opportunities for those whose situations may not allow for the best education to explore their abilities. “To me, it does not make much difference if I am doing this for people in Boston or Guayaquil [Ecuador], with a nonprofit or a government organization. I just hope that somehow I can use my abilities to help others to achieve their full potential.”

— Amber Haskins

PROFILE

life-cycle journey using her engagements with early childhood education, health and nutrition, adolescent development, and media sectors to educate and communicate for development.

The last time Kerida McDonald, Ed.M.’85, Ed.D.’89, had visited the Ed School was to attend her graduation. As she rushed around campus last spring, the memories came flooding back. “Rastafari, I wonder what happened to . . . ,” she would say as she remembered an old acquaintance.

In the 20 years since her graduation, the Jamaica native spent her time mothering five children, consulting on early childhood development, and serving as an international civil servant. She joined UNICEF Jamaica in 1998 and spent the next six years supporting policy and legislative frameworks for early childhood development. As a Rastafari, her spiritual home is Africa and, in 2004, she traveled there as head of the Health, Nutrition and Early Childhood Program in UNICEF Tanzania.

“It was a powerful feeling to be there . . . to be where your ancestors were shipped from. It was an eerie feeling to walk into the dungeons in Zanzibar, to see where our forefathers were first held as slaves,” she says, shaking her head as if in disbelief.

The struggle for justice, a core tenet of Rastafari, informs McDonald’s passion. “I am a child of the universe, wanting to see a better world for us and our future generations. … To be able to connect to the continent and apply what I have gained

Elizabeth Hawkins Lincoln, Ed.M., recently accepted the role as program director for Hope Walks, an educational program of Global Strategies for HIV Prevention. She spent the summer in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo visiting orphan programs funded by Hope Walks and conducting research.

Derrick Florence, Ed.M., was recently the subject of an article in the Los Angeles Times which profiled him for his work as coach of the girls’ basketball team at Centennial High School in Compton, Calif., and a mentor of one of his players who will be attending the University of California at Santa Barbara on a full scholarship.

2008

Tim O’Brien, Ed.M., is working as a professional development specialist for the Washington, D.C., public schools, training math and literacy professional developers.

Andrew Barron, Ed.M., recently published the article “Speaking for Democracy” in the Coalition of Excellent Schools Journal.

in the West to development in Africa is a big privilege.”

Recently she moved to Ethiopia to her current post as chief of communications for UNICEF. Her work focuses on behaviorchange communication around immunization, sanitation, and nutrition. “While at Harvard, and even in Jamaica, early childhood was about education; in my current work, it is about survival.

When 30 percent of children do not [live] to their fifth birthday in Tanzania, you need to understand early childhood development differently,” she says.

She says is grateful to the Ed School for opening doors that would be closed to a Rasta. It is apropos that she returned to campus for the 2009 Alumni of Color Conference’s panel on international experiences with discrimination. “Slavery and colonialism still has an anchor that is very heavy,” she says. “It still determines the tribalism and divisions that we have not been able to get past.”

courtesy of Kerida mcdonald

Kerida McDonald, Ed.M.’85, Ed.D.’89, is on a multicountry

— Kenneth Russell, Ed.M.’00, is a third-year doctoral student in Cultures, Communities, and Education and a native of Jamaica.

Intellectual Contribution/Faculty Tribute Award Thirteen graduating master’s students were recognized in June for their dedication to scholarship, the result of which made positive impact on their peers. The recipients are nominated by students and ultimately selected by the master’s program directors. This year’s recipients were: Emily Almas, Ed.M. Joe Baker, Ed.M. Angelica Brisk, Ed.M. Elisha Brookover, Ed.M. Andrew Cabot, Ed.M. Ashton Wheeler Clemmons, Ed.M. Jerome “Jay” Green, Ed.M.

Suzannah Holsenbeck, Ed.M. Melissa Mayes, Ed.M. Mangala Nanda, Ed.M. Nancy Schoolcraft, Ed.M. Terri-Nicole Singleton, Ed.M. Kathy Yang, Ed.M.

Visit www.gse.harvard.edu/commencement for more information.

Ed.

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alumni news and notes Commencement ’09 Clockwise, top to bottom: Happy graduates; student speaker Mark Hecker, Ed.M.’09; Ernesto Schiefelbein, Ed.D.’69, recipient of the 2009 Alumni Council Award; graduates in the yard; Will Yeiser, Ed.M.’09, and his son Jack posing onstage with Dean McCartney; smiling faculty; and a trio of doctoral marshals.

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In Memory Catherine Foster Largay, M.A.T.’38

Albert Benson Jr., Ed.D.’64

Shirley Johnson, C.A.S.’90

Eleanora Vogel, Ed.M.’40

Beverly Aronson, Ed.M.’65

Rachel Siebert, Ed.M.’88, Ed.D.’91

Jesse Dossick, Ed.D.’41

Elizabeth Wright, M.A.T.’65

Anne Saks Yates, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’05

Robert Ray Neuenschwander, M.A.T.’47

Marilyn Stevens, M.A.T.’66

Evan West, M.A.T.’48

Paul Gilman, M.A.T.’67

Joan Osterman Yalman, M.A.T.’48

Mary Leeds Johnson, Ed.M.’68

Paul Burke, Ed.M.’50

Roger Prokop, M.A.T.’70

George Frederick Miller Jr., Ed.M.’51

Thomas Minter, Ed.D.’71

Elaine Blanche Bye, Ed.M.’53

Edith Aldrich, Ed.M.’73

John Christopher Howard Jr., Ed.M.’53

Nancy Nauts Dobbs, Ed.M.’73

Frederick Clark, Ed.M.’54

Hanna Hastings, Ed.M.’79

Gertrude Houghton, Ed.M.’55

Maria Montenegro, Ed.M.’79

Joseph Pynchon, Ed.M.’55

Fred Schatz, C.A.S.’80

Elihu Harris, Ed.M.’56

Robert Choate, Ed.M.’81

Donald Parsons, M.A.T.’56

Jeffrey Woodworth, Ed.M.’82

Joseph Marion Carroll, Ed.M.’53, Ed.D.’58

Mary Jane Burbank Crotty, C.A.S.’84

Margaret Irish Porter, Ed.M.’59

James Bowman, Ed.M.’76, Ed.D.’85

Ruth Crawford-Brown, Ed.M.’61

John Baird, C.A.S.’86, Ed.M.’89

Gail Kendrick, M.A.T.’63

Linda Bayer, Ed.M.’90

CLASSNOTES/ADDRESS UPDATE NAME: YEAR(S)/DEGREE(S): ADDRESS: CITY: STATE:

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Classnotes will appear either in Ed. or on the Alumni Relations website.

Please e-mail your classnote to classnotes@ gse.harvard.edu or submit online at www.gse.harvard.edu/alumni_friends/ classnotes/submit_note.

Classnotes can also be mailed to: Ed. magazine, Classnotes Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 44R Brattle Street Cambridge, MA 02138

r I do not want MY classnote on the web. r I want MY classnote only on the web.

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recess A Harvard First by Amanda Dagg

courtesy of harvard university archives

Recently we received an e-mail notifying us of the death of Harriet Rattray Gemmel, Ed.M.’31. In it, the writer inquired whether Gemmel could have been the first woman to receive a graduate degree from the Ed School. After a little research and an afternoon at the Harvard Archives, we discovered that that honor belongs not to Gemmel, but to Lorna Myrtle Hodgkinson, Ed.M.’21, Ed.D.’22.

In fact, in addition to being the first woman to receive a doctoral degree from the Ed School, Hodgkinson was also the first woman ever to receive one from Harvard University.

Hodgkinson was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1887 and grew up in Perth. She spent the first decade of the 20th century earning her teacher’s certificate and working as an assistant at the Perth Infant’s School, where she first showed an interest in the education of mentally challenged children.

By 1913, Hodgkinson had become a public school teacher, and she then took a position with the Department of Public Instruction as director of special work among feeble-minded children.

She was offered paid leave in 1920 to travel to America and attend the Ed School, where her degree application indicates that she pursued a special field called “education psychology,” and her coursework reveals the type of student Hodgkinson might have been: mostly As and only a few Bs. “I can say she would have been extremely hardworking, probably a perfectionist and driven, which probably didn’t allow for too much more than having her head stuck in a book or research,” says Kathryn Hodgkinson, Lorna’s cousin twice removed. Kathryn has been researching Lorna’s life for the past few years and hopes to produce a feature film about her legacy. (Lorna never married and had no children of her own.)

It was upon her return to Australia that Hodgkinson’s career path dramatically changed. She assumed a new position at the Department of Public Instruction and, shortly afterward, publicly criticized Australia’s neglect of its “feeble-minded” citizens before the Royal Commission on Lunacy Law, earning the reputation of being an “outspoken lady doctor.”

By shedding light on this issue, she also drew the ire of her employer: The director launched an official inquiry into the validity of her admission to Harvard. In a letter to Henry

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Wyman Holmes, then-dean of the Ed School, Director S.H. Smith wrote that Hodgkinson was “not qualified to speak with authority” about issues of education and mental defectiveness, and suggested that the school cancel her degree, implying that she had exaggerated her credentials for admittance to Harvard. Despite these charges, Dean Holmes wrote to the commission offering his support and speaking to her proven qualifications. (Despite the support, Hodgkinson was removed from her position and her pay was cut in half. Her dissertation still has not been published in Australia.)

Hodgkinson decided to start a private school for mentally disabled children. The Sunshine Training Institute opened in 1924 with six students. In a January 1925 Society article on the institute, she explained why she founded it. “I had to because nobody else would do it, and there is not even a state institution to which such cases can be sent for proper treatment,” she said.

Today, the school, now called the Lorna Hodgkinson Sunshine Home, supports more than 400 people with disabilities.

— Amanda Dagg, a 2009 Harvard graduate, is now teaching in Nashville with Teach For America.

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Where’s Ed.?

After chasing eight-year-old Johanna and six-year-old Daniel around Conroy Commons for an hour, doctoral student John Roberts, Ed.M.’03, stopped long enough to read through a recent issue of Ed. magazine. The Bandler kids, who were hanging out with their mother, Rebecca Holcombe, Ed.M.’90, also a doctoral student, repaid John for his efforts by flashing bunny ears. Or as their mother told John afterwards, the kids “were helping you rediscover your inner child, which you’d misplaced somewhere between a Bonferroni test and a quadratic transformation.”

Send us a picture of yourself reading Ed. magazine — preferably in a locale more exotic than Conroy — and you may just be in the next issue of Ed. magazine!