Ed.
THE MAGAZINE OF THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION SUMMER 2014
B
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
March 24, 2014 Abbey Road or Appian Road? On a rare warm day in March, five British Parliament members on the Education Select Committee visited the Ed School campus to meet with students and faculty members and, no doubt, thought, Here comes the sun! The MATTHEW WEBER
Fab Five was touring the United States to learn more about teacher training, professional development, charter school recruitment, and other education issues. Of course, no Mean Mr. Mustards here. Instead, the members are, from left to right: Chair Graham Stuart, Ian Mearns, Alex Cunningham, Craig Whittaker, and David Ward. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
1
contents SUMMER 2014
22
Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education and 40 years after Milliken v. Bradley, many consider these cases to be two of the most pivotal decisions related to education made by the U.S. Supreme Court during the 20th century. The collection of essays in this issue range from the personal to the political and are written by people involved in the cases, those affected by the cases, and those who study the cases.
a l s o of i n t e r e s t
10 After American Idol, master’s student Janelle Bechdol, Ed.M.’14, is traveling the country with another musical experience: the Hall Pass Tour.
4 6 45 48 49
Letters Appian Way Alumni News and Notes Recess Investing
12 Ever wonder how involved the Ed School community is with the education community in Boston?
18 A look at how reading short lines on small devices like smartphones can benefit those with dyslexia.
19
Find out why Senior Lecturer Katherine Boles, Ed.D.’91, got hooked on Blueberries for Sal and books by David McCullough.
Letter from the Editor
I’ve been thinking a lot about letters to the editor, specifically, how things have changed with the rise of social media. We still get letters, many thoughtfully composed, as you’ll see below and in past issues of Ed., but we get fewer that are substantial. Many are simple comments like “great article” posted on our website or the school’s Facebook page. An endorsement, yes, and an indication that people are reading and sharing, but not the back and forth that longer letters have added to the public discourse. Why the change? Perhaps we’re not writing engaging enough content or content that pushes buttons. Or maybe it’s because, as the Ryerson Review of Journalism recently wrote in the article, “Are letters to the editor still worth reading?” readers no longer cherish getting their words published in print magazines or newspapers. “Letters to the editor have been around since the dawn of newspapers,” the review wrote, “but over the years, they’ve lost their cultural cachet.” Nowadays, anyone with a Facebook page or Twitter account can comment and be published — instantly — on any topic. In some ways, this is a good thing. Social media has made public discourse more democratic — you don’t have to be chosen by the editors to have your thoughts shared. Assuming people respond to your online comment, the back and forth can be gratifying in ways that a one-time printed letter can’t. But social media has also made, at times, for less thoughtful commenting and, as we’ve seen here at Ed., more “sharing,” “liking,” and “favoriting.” As the resident Luddite in the office, I miss the longer comments and letters, especially the handwritten ones. What do you think — are letters to the editor still worth reading and writing?
Read for Pleasure
Bravo Karen Brennan
Great story! (“Brennan by Design,” winter 2014.) I’ve been taking a similar path, though not as extreme or extensive as yours, until realizing that being in a constant state of learning and teaching others is my destiny. Interestingly, I finally came to this realization when I took your Creative Computing Online Workshop last summer and shortly after I started teaching Scratch as an afterschool activity. — Noam Koren 4
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
Fantastic! (“Followup: Homework Policy Still Going Strong,” winter 2014.) Reading has largely become compliance-driven in many schools, including my own children’s. Sadly, I feel as though I am fighting against school practice in encouraging my children to read for pleasure. Their school has adopted the Accelerated Reader (AR) model, so instead of reading for pleasure, my kids read for AR points. They are generally restricted to texts that are formulaically determined to be within a specific reading-level range. Little regard is given to student interest in subject matter. When they finish a book, they take a multiple-choice test based on details from the book. This program needs to go away! My kids have had “AR silent reading time” during class
every day, no matter what the grade. They could be spending that extra time developing math concepts or writing skills or doing more content reading in science or social studies. Ask this: What is the one type of homework that you can almost guarantee every child will be able to accomplish at home, without the assistance of the teacher? It’s reading for pleasure! There is so much research out there to show that even the very presence of books in the home has at least a correlational relationship to long-term academic success, so send those books home for kids to read. — Cris In nations like India, too, the homework question is fiercely debated. Unfortunate that there are no clear answers. With family time being more digital, is homework a boon or a bane? Difficult to answer. — Alfred Devaprasad
letters I wish I had this woman in our community. I back her up 100 percent and am currently dealing with a new school that is giving three to four hours of homework a night with my sixthgrader. Kids need down time, too, to absorb the information they’ve learned and make connections from other experiences. Higher reading levels benefit their comprehension, vocabulary, etc. It’s a win for all. My poor daughter does not even have time for leisure reading any longer. She is a very high-level reader since we don’t have a television with any viewable channels, and she has been a straight-A student who started reading beginning chapter books in kindergarten. We, too, are all about reading and teaching our children about balancing work and play. Sadly, school has just become a place to prep kids to work 60- to 80hour work weeks when they graduate. I am not far from pulling her and my youngest and homeschooling. — Gee
UDL Uniqueness
When I took this course (“All Along,” winter 2014), it struck me as more adaptive than mechanical. The innovation of the [UDL] framework is in its value of human uniqueness and agency. The mechanics of design follow from the genuine premise that each person in the room has gifts to which we all need access. — Christopher McEnroe, Ed.M.’12
EDITOR IN CHIEF Lory Hough lory_hough@harvard.edu PRODUCTION MANAGER/EDITOR Marin Jorgensen marin_jorgensen@harvard.edu SENIOR DESIGNER Paula Telch Cooney paula_telch@harvard.edu
The day after Brown v. Board of Education was announced, Nettie Hunt sat on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court and explained the decision to her daughter.
DESIGNER Angelina Berardi angelina_berardi@harvard.edu
In Case You Missed It... Morehouse Connection
Very powerful and inspiring (”Maroon to Crimson,” winter 2014). I am proud of my Morehouse brothers. — Corey Hardiman Note: In the “Maroon to Crimson” story, where we highlighted the many Morehouse graduates who have come to the Ed School to continue their educations, we forgot to credit John Silvanus Wilson Jr. (above), the current president of Morehouse, with both of his Ed School degrees. While here, he earned an Ed.M. in 1982 and an Ed.D. in 1985. Talk about turning crimson!
Missed Mention?
Sarah Peteraf, one of the three who started Spark Academy (“A School on the Move — Literally,” winter 2014) went to Princeton. She was a worldclass soccer player. She worked for Teach For America. She is the youngest of the three partners. The last three items were well worth mentioning as contributions to the success of this unusual program. Mentioning the other Ivy school would have been nice, also. — Claire Kelly Sturr, M.A.T.’61
ASSISTANT DEAN OF COMMUNICATIONS Michael Rodman michael_rodman@harvard.edu CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Katie Gibson Mary Tamer, Ed.M.’13 PHOTOGRAPHERS Jill Anderson Martha Stewart Matthew Weber, Ed.M.’11 ILLUSTRATOR Daniel Vasconcellos
COPYEDITOR Abigail Mieko Vargus © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Ed. magazine is published three times a year. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138
We know you can’t keep up with everything, so we’re spotlighting a few stories, videos, and interviews that appeared on the school’s homepage that you may have missed. Temple Grandin came to the Ed School in March. Watch the Askwith video and a 10-minute Harvard EdCast with the famous animal scientist and autism activist. Ecuador. New York City. Washington, D.C. Silicon Valley. Check out our snapshot of some of the amazing education-focused work our students did during spring break. Former Ed School dean Kathleen McCartney, now president of Smith College, joined current dean James Ryan, Children’s Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman, and others to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the organization that Edelman started. Read Dean James Ryan’s thoughts on the ongoing Vergara v. California court case.
v visit gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras
aclickaway HGSE gse.harvard.edu events gse.harvard.edu/news_events/events twitter twitter.com/hgse facebook facebook.com/harvardeducation youtube youtube.com/harvardeducation issuu issuu.com/harvardeducation tumblr harvardeducation.tumbler.com instagram instagram.com/harvardeducation HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
5
JILL ANDERSON
appian way lecturehall Visiting Professor Pasi Sahlberg
H
e’s become the go-to guy for comments about “the Finnish miracle,” as The Atlantic recently called it. As director general of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation under the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, Pasi Sahlberg is constantly contacted by media outlets and education experts across the world wanting to know how Finland, with an unremarkable education system just a few decades ago, has surged ahead to become one of the international leaders in education, scoring at the top or near the top on the ever-important PISA survey for nearly 15 years. Conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), PISA compares 15-year-olds around the world in reading, math, and science. In January, after arriving at the Ed School to teach International Lessons from Successful Education Systems as a visiting professor, Sahlberg spoke to Ed. about his country, responsibility, and Neil Young.
Do you ever tire of talking about PISA?
I have become tired of talking about PISA as a league table of countries. It is almost like a global beauty contest. Frankly speaking, in many places, these international comparisons in education have gone too far. … Last December when the OECD released the fifth PISA survey, I received requests to comment on these results from 20 countries and more than 40 different news agencies. But I still feel that as an international public intellectual, it is my duty to comment.
What is the most important thing the world can learn from Finland?
Finland is perhaps the best example of a system that has systematically improved its performance by investing in equity in education. Equity in our school system has been the leading principle since the 1970s.
What can’t we learn?
Finland has a very peculiar support system for all children far before they start to go to school at age seven. This
support — health, counseling, wellbeing — continues throughout schooling. Finland has a very strong emphasis on whole child development as part of its equity-focused school system. Many of these ideas don’t fit very well in school systems in other countries.
Finnish academic scores have declined in recent years. How are fellow Finns reacting?
Most people, educators included, give very little attention to international comparisons like PISA. We are mostly concerned that our children are happy and feel well in their schools.
Is it true that Finland doesn’t have the term “accountability,” at least when it comes to education?
True. If you come to Finland and try to have a conversation with educators about accountability, most teachers won’t know what you’re talking about. Accountability in Finnish is a word, tilivelvollisuus, used only in business administration. With education, we talk about responsibility, vastuullisuus.
Responsibility in what way?
Responsibility is both the means and the ends in Finnish schools. One of the first things that our children learn in elementary school is to become a responsible girl or boy. This includes learning to take responsibility of your own learning and behavior. In places like the United States, teachers and principals are taking responsibility for the learning. That’s very different.
You once taught, correct?
I was actually born and raised in school. My parents were schoolteachers in a small rural primary school in northern Finland. Since I remember, I have wanted to be a teacher. I love mathematics, and therefore becoming a math teacher was a natural choice. I taught my first seven years in a wonderful old school in Helsinki — math, physics, and chemistry to junior high school and high school students.
You use Twitter a lot with your Ed School students. Why? Twitter is the best social media tool I know to share information and knowledge. Also influence. My assumption is that many of the students will go on to work in education policy areas, so learning to use it in a proper way is important. The influence of education policy is happening in personal blogs, on places like Twitter.
You’re a Neil Young fan. How many albums and what is your favorite song?
Sixty. Something that always talks to me is After the Gold Rush. — Lory Hough v on twitter, follow @pasi_sahlberg v watch his askwith forum at gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras and his education “sauna” talks, held live after each class, at youtube.com/harvardeducation HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
7
problemsolving problem
solution
The research is clear: Number sense — that intuitive feel
Connell’s solution? Native Numbers, an application
for numbers — is the foundation for really understand-
created by his company, Native Brain. The iPad
ing math. Mike Connell, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D.’05, knew that
app gives young learners a deep introduction to
because math is cumulative, kids who didn’t develop
early numbers. It starts by getting kids familiar with
number sense at a young age, usually by kindergarten,
numbers in multiples — sets of animals or a bunch
fell behind, especially when they moved on to algebra,
of rods — and then helps them learn to match and
trigonometry, and calculus. So developing a solid number
order numbers, make judgments such as greater
sense is not just helpful, it’s absolutely critical, he says.
or lesser than, count up and down, and understand
“Having it or not can literally set children on a different
how numbers relate to one another. Each section
learning trajectory.” The problem is that young kids often
has modules that learners master in order to unlock
get only a shallow introduction to numbers.
the next level. Connell points out that the app is more than just pretty pictures; it’s based on extensive research on how kids learn generally, as well as how they learn specific skills. The app also lets parents and teachers track progress and intervene when needed.
v to learn more about native numbers, go to www.nativebrain.com
8
appian way
First Look at First Years A few years ago, Professor Richard Light was teaching a freshman seminar in Harvard Yard. About halfway through the semester, after reminding the class about their final research papers focused on higher education, one student asked for a meeting. “I have an incredibly basic question to ask,” the student said to Light. “What is a research paper?” After Light answered, the student told him he had never been asked to write anything like that in high school. The student also explained that he was the first in his family to go to college. For his final paper, the student decided to interview a dozen other first-generation students at Harvard to get a sense of the challenges they were facing. “It was the best paper I got that year,” Light says. The paper, and the experience, got Light thinking about firstgeneration students. He called up his friend and former student Bill “Fitz” Fitzsimmons, Ed.M.’69, Ed.D.’71, dean of admissions at Harvard College. Fitzsimmons, himself a first-generation college student, told Light that this was the fastest-growing group of admitted students at Harvard. Together, Light and Fitzsimmons brainstormed ways to help these students truly succeed in an academic and social world that likely was very different for them. At the time, a fairly big body of research already existed on helping first-generation students succeed at larger schools, but what they realized was that there was almost none on helping students at more selective private campuses like Harvard. “People always ask, is there really a difference?” Light says. “The answer is yes. Schools like Harvard or Georgetown are so darn demanding.” For example, a few years ago, Light researched how many hours a week students at various schools work on academics outside of class. He found that the average at Harvard, Yale, and Swarthmore was 29 hours. At one large public university in the Midwest, it was 11. At one on the East Coast, 6. “Imagine going to a campus that asks for roughly 29 hours a week, week after week,” Light says. “It’s a different world for some students.” Light and Fitzsimmons decided to start what would become the First Generation Student Success Project with three other universities: Duke, Georgetown, and Brown. After an initial meeting in 2012 with admissions directors, deans of students, and other top administrators, the four schools agreed to each interview, in person, about 30 randomly chosen first-generation sophomores at their schools, plus 20 students from college-going families. Using a shared set of questions,
they wanted to get a sense of how these students adjusted or struggled during their freshman year, in and out of class. Of the first-generation students at Harvard, Light says, “The students were delighted to talk. No one had ever asked them these questions before.” Last May, the four schools met again to share findings. They agreed to do another round of interviews with a new set of sophomores this year. When the students are seniors, the plan is to reinterview each of them so they can reflect on their entire college experience. Although the project has not released preliminary findings, Light says his “tentative inklings” about what they are starting to see includes something obvious: For first-generation students at highly selective schools like Harvard, the kind of high school they attended is a big shaper of their experience in college. Also, some of these students are angry, “bordering on furious,” Light says, when they realize the kids down the hall got a better education. “They realize they were shortchanged,” he says. Current doctoral student Rachel Gable, Ed.M.’14, has helped with research and interviewing, and wrote a report for the project’s working group. She says what’s become clear to her is that researchers and college administrators need to meet students where they are. They need to “truly listen to their stories, learn from their experiences, and respond to their needs to help maximize their college experience.” Beyond academic rigor, a big need is to look at life outside of class. For many first-generation students, money to pay for books or supplies, or even to participate in social events, is often an issue. Students who don’t come from college-going families often have difficulty describing aspects of university life to parents. One student told Light that he struggled to explain to his mother what “being a sociology major” meant. For others, being exposed to new things that are common for some students is jarring. During one of the project’s meetings, a dean of admissions, a former first-generation student, recalled a classmate asking him where he “summered.” Light says, “That was the first time he heard summer used as a verb.” This reminded Light of a Harvard student he interviewed who constantly heard talk about “Andover” and “Exeter” when he first arrived in Cambridge. “This student had no idea what those places were,” Light says. “For all he knew, they Read about Melissa Cotignola, Ed.M.’14, could have been candy shops and her virtual internship with the nonprofit in the Square.” — Lory Hough I’m First at gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
9
Program: Special Studies Program Tool for Change: Music and life stories in schools Hometown: Lots of places, N.Y.
studybreak Janelle Bechdol
10
MA RT HA ST
EWAR T
T
he hall pass. It’s usually given to students in schools to show that they have permission to be out of the classroom. But for Janelle Bechdol, Ed.M.’14, hall pass means something entirely different: It’s a music tour that has, literally, changed her life. Bechdol, a former American Idol contestant and college music major, cofounded the Hall Pass Tour with a DJ friend who was managing a hip-hop artist named ScienZe. ScienZe had just released a mix of songs called Hall Pass, where every track was about schools and learning. Bechdol was fresh from her Idol experience and had been asked by one of her mentors, Rick Dalton, Ed.M.’79, Ed.D.’88, founder of College for Every Student, if she would sing at a low-income middle school in upstate New York. While she was there, Dalton also wanted her to share her amazing journey from a struggling student in poor communities to Idol contestant and program manager on Ernst & Young’s corporate social responsibility team. Bechdol went to the middle school expecting the kids to be mildly interested, but to her surprise, she was mobbed: Kids were dancing in the aisles and wanted to know more about her. She knew that this same combination — music + life stories + schools — could inspire other struggling students to pursue their dreams, take charge of their futures, and, hopefully, go on to college.
appian way
During Hall Pass concerts, you and ScienZe perform. Do the students? Yes. The kids are the opening act, but before they can perform, they have to tell the audience their goals and dreams.
Pop star idol when you were a kid: r
Madonna
4 r
Mariah Carey
r
Whitney Houston
Kids are interested because: We get it. We’ve lived their lives. We get why they might want to zone out or not understand why school matters.
Before Dalton, you had another mentor, Patty, who was a big influence. How?
r
I met Patty through an internship program called INROADS that places high-performing minority college students in corporate and business settings. She helped me change from saying “if ” I make it in music to “when” I make it in music. It was great to have an adult who wasn’t a parent or a teacher say, “I believe.”
Why? It was really my older sisters,
At Ernst & Young, you: Helped start the College MAP project, which connects low-income college students to mentors. It’s a way to provide kids across the country with their own Pattys.
Alanis Morissette
who are all black, who wanted to make sure I knew what it was like to see someone who was biracial. They always played Mariah’s music and music videos, and we’d dance in the mirror to her.
Your American Idol audition started with 15,000 singers at the Georgia Dome. Then what? That number got cut to 150. Then I went to Hollywood!
Why come to the Ed School? Although my work at Ernst & Young with College MAP was going well and the Hall Pass Tour was growing, questions started keeping me up at night. Why do kids need mentors? Why do some kids not see the connection between studying and life? I looked around and realized I needed to be here. Not just any school, but here.
Taking a class with Lecturer Marshall Ganz helped because: I was telling the class the story of my life that I thought people wanted to hear — I was on Idol, I found success — but Marshall pushed me to talk about the other part, about what it means to struggle between two worlds — black and white — about having to partially raise my teenage brother, about visiting family in the projects and then going to my fancy office next door in a nice shiny building.
After Harvard, you plan on: Making the Hall Pass model replicable and scalable. More schools, more kids, more artists.
Music: Motivates everyone. — Lory Hough
To learn more about the Hall Pass Tour and to watch a video of Bechdol at the Ed School, go to gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
11
ALUMNI We have hundreds of graduates working in education in Boston, as educators in Boston Public Schools (BPS), as leaders in educational nonprofits and foundations, and as staff and faculty in the many colleges and universities across the city. Here are just a few: In BPS: Rasheed Meadows, Ed.M.’97, Ed.L.D.’13; Drew Echelson, Ed.M.’05, Ed.D.’13; and Mary Skipper, Ed.M.’06, are assistant superintendents of networks. Meg Campbell, C.A.S.’97, Ed.M.’05, is executive director and founder of Codman Academy Charter Public School, which employs half a dozen other Ed School graduates. Michele Brooks, Ed.M.’08, is the assistant superintendent for the Office of Student and Family Engagement. She was a recent member of the Boston School Committee. Melissa Dodd, Ed.M.’01, is BPS chief of staff. At Boston colleges and universities: Jake Murray, Ed.M.’94, is senior director of the Aspire Institute at Wheelock University. Chen Shen, Ed.M.’12, is a student support coordinator at Northeastern University. Karen Wacks, Ed.M.’90, is clinical training coordinator for the music therapy department at Berklee College. Jose Alicea, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’96, is associate dean of academic affairs at Roxbury Community College. David Horton, Ed.M.’63, is supervisor of student teachers and aspiring principals at Simmons College. Nancy Stoll, Ed.D.’88, is dean of students at Suffolk University. At Boston education nonprofits: Lindsay Laguna, Ed.M.’11, is the manager of curriculum and learning initiatives at FUEL, which focuses on college access and success for students and families. Samuel Albertson, Ed.M.’10, is the site director at Tenacity, Inc. Tenacity coordinates literacy, life lesson, and tennis instruction for BPS students. Max Klau, Ed.M.’00, Ed.D.’05, is vice president of leadership development at Boston-based City Year.
DATA WISE In January, the Data Wise Project partnered with the BPS director of data inquiry and two inquiry facilitators to deliver an intensive one-week course for master’s and doctoral students on using collaborative inquiry to improve learning and teaching. This spring, multimedia case studies from a Boston high school and elementary school will be used to train educators from around the country and world on how to use data wisely.
FACULTY Lecturer Pamela Mason, M.A.T.’70, Ed.D.’75, director of the Language and Literacy Program and the Jeanne Chall Reading Lab, served on the Board of Trustees of Cathedral High School in the South End and supervises language and literacy students placed at the high school through the Field Experience Program. Professor Kay Merseth, M.A.T.’69, Ed.D.’82, has been arranging visits to Boston schools for Harvard College undergraduates as part of their coursework for her class, United States and the World 35: The Dilemmas of Excellence and Equity in K–12 American Schools. Lecturer Rick Weissbourd, Ed.D.’87, director of the Human Development and Psychology Program, founded Lee Academy, as well as two interventions for at-risk students in Boston: ReadBoston and WriteBoston. Associate Professor Meira Levinson is working with teachers and principals in a number of Boston public schools to identify and help them reflect about dilemmas of justice that arise in school. Professor Catherine Snow is working with two Boston elementary schools in a randomized trial of her extended Word Generation Project AND served on a committee established by former mayor Tom Menino to review policies for K–3 literacy. BPS is also implementing an evaluation of STARI, Snow’s sixth-througheighth-grade program for students reading three or more years below grade level; the work is led by Lowry Hemphill, Ed.D.’86, an associate professor at Wheelock College. Lecturer Jacqueline Zeller worked with students, parents, and staff as a school-based psychologist in partnership with BPS.
PELP Boston is one of the original Public Education Leadership Project (PELP) partner districts, spanning the superintendent tenures of Tom Payzant, M.A.T.’63, C.A.S.’66, Ed.D.’68.; Carol Johnson; and now John McDonough. Senior Lecturer Karen Mapp, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’99, once the deputy superintendent for family and community engagement in BPS, is now a member of the PELP core faculty. In close collaboration with the district, a case study, “Staffing the Boston Public Schools,” was authored by PELP and used in both Ed School classes and PELP’s 2007 Harvard Ed Press publication, Managing School Districts for High Performance.
12
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
PPE Educators from BPS have consistently attended offerings by Programs in Professional Education. In the past year, more than 20 participants took part in Principals’ Center leadership institutes and K–12 teaching and learning programs such as The Transformative Power of Teacher Teams and Data Wise: Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning.
STUDENTS Nine Teacher Education Program master’s students spent last semester interning in BPS, including Jim Hatzopoulos (Another Course to College), Carol Stoll (Boston Arts Academy), Max Price (Brighton High), Sara Cole and Kyle van Leer (Edwards Middle), Shannon Moran (Irving Middle), Natalia Cuadra-Saez (McCormack Middle), Rene Reyes (New Mission High), and Chris McCoy (Snowden International). Ellen Bryson and Tri Huynh interned at Cristo Rey, a Catholic school in Boston. Ed.L.D. student Kimberley Ednie is completing her Ed.L.D. residency with BPE, a Boston-based education nonprofit that includes the Boston Teacher Residency program, which was launched in 2003 by then-Boston Superintendent Tom Payzant. Several Ed.D. students are also involved in Boston: Eve Ewing, Ed.M.’13, is communications and development manager with the Urbano Project, which recruits local artists to work with young people in Boston to design justice-oriented works of art. Jenny Jacobs, Ed.M.’03, Ed.M.’12, is teaching Sheltered English Instruction to residents in the Boston Teacher Residency program. During the past year, Bonnie Mackintosh has been conducting classroom-level observations and child assessments in community-based preschool programs throughout Boston’s Circle of Promise and East Boston neighborhoods as part of an initiative to improve access to high-quality early childhood care and educational programs. Monica Yudron, Ed.M.’12, is the initiative’s evaluator. Meghan Lockwood, Ed.M.’09, is preparing a case study on teacher collaborative inquiry at Boston International Newcomers Academy for the Data Wise Project.
appian way
Master Class
CAREER SERVICES BPS participates in many Career Services Office events, including a preK–12 Expo in March and a diversity reception in April. Since last fall, they also posted more than 200 Boston-based jobs.
ontheground Boston In this issue of On the Ground, we look at our neighbor, affectionately known as the city on the hill. Boston has had many educationrelated firsts during its long history, including the country’s first public school, the first school for the blind, the first all-female law school, and the first public school for black students. Here is a look at some of the ways that the Ed School community is involved in education in Boston.
HEPG Harvard Education Press recently published several Boston-connected books: Restoring Opportunity by Professor Richard Murnane and Greg Duncan features a BPS preK program. Character Compass by Scott Seider, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D.’08, focuses on three Boston schools that have made character development central to their missions. The Quest for Mastery focuses on the positive aspects of out-of-school programs, including several in Boston. Learning from the Experts features work going on in Boston and the voices of Boston teachers.
The idea was to invite inspiring teachers from across the university to teach a onetime class at the Ed School. Afterwards, a facilitator, with the help of the audience, would then interview the teacher and ask questions about his or her teaching. They might even talk about what didn’t work or make sense. The hope was that this new series, called Master Class, wouldn’t be just a typical lecture, but a way to learn about craft from magnetic teachers. It was also, as Dean Jim Ryan pointed out at the first-ever session held in February in Askwith Hall, a way to celebrate good teaching around the university. “Harvard is well known for having some of the very best researchers, but it’s also known for having some of the very best teachers,” he said. “At the Ed School, we are intensely interested in what makes for good teaching.” In February, armed with props like peanut butter and jelly, David Malan, a senior lecturer on computer science from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, proved he was worthy of the master teacher title. He started his The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth class by tearing apart a printed phone book as a way to talk about problem solving, algorithms, and being precise. Throughout the class, the fast-talking, constantly pacing Malan used other hands-on demonstrations to explain his ideas. At one point, he pulled out a loaf of bread, plates, peanut butter, jelly, and a knife. He asked a simple question: Who knows how to make a PB&J sandwich? Almost every hand in the audience went up. Malan then asked them how. Following orders exactly — “open bag” with Malan ripping the bag and bread flying — he reminded them of an important lesson: Be more precise. Five minutes and 21 sometimes-funny steps later, Malan said this “overthe-top” demonstration “revealed the assumptions or carelessness with which a lot of us typically think. This doesn’t fly when it comes to programming.” The exercise is one that Malan uses when teaching CS50 at the college — a computer science and engineering course he once took as an undergraduate and has since elevated to “must take” status. In 2006, the year before Malan joined the Harvard faculty, roughly 130 students were enrolled in CS50. After Malan started teaching it, enrollment skyrocketed, reaching 700 in 2013, when it had to be moved to the spacious Sanders Theatre. Last year, the number of undergraduates concentrating in computer science also jumped to about 50, including 21 women — up from about 25 in 2006. Following Malan’s Master Class, Matt Miller, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’06, associate dean for academic affairs and a lecturer at the school, said the approach was not only engaging and experiential, but also community building. “We were thrilled to see members of the wider Harvard community participating along with Ed School faculty and students at the event,” he said. “That’s just what we hope to spark with each master class — an authentic experience of learning that brings Harvard together to reflect on how great teaching and learning happens.” Last fall, a similar process took place during the school’s inaugural Teaching and Learning Week, where Ed School faculty taught mini classes and got feedback from students. After Malan’s Master Class session, facilitator Karen Brennan, an assistant professor at the school, had Malan talk about how he thought the class went. When asked if it’s easier or harder to use props and do experimental demonstrations when there’s a large audience, Malan was honest. It’s easier with a larger crowd, he said. “There’s an energy you can build on. If there had been just 12 of us, it would be completely awkward for me to be making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” v to watch the session, as well as the master class second session with jennifer roberts, a professor in the department of history of arts and architecture, go to youtube.com/harvardeducation HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
13
The Things They Carry — and Make Since last fall, master’s students Christan Balch, Ed.M.’14, and Saskia Leggett, Ed.M.’14, have been lugging around a plastic bucket filled with seemingly random items: clay, bananas, magnetic poetry pieces, paper clips, giant graphite pencils, a laptop or two, construction paper, crayons, and a couple of MaKey MaKey boxes — small invention kits created at MIT, by Eric Rosenbaum, Ed.M.’03, that allow you to turn any conductive item into a computer input. Their goal? To see what happens when they show up, unannounced, in public spaces with the bucket of items and let people tinker in meaningful ways that might propel them to be creative throughout the day. The idea was inspired after Assistant Professor Karen Brennan set up a similar DIY maker space in a fall class they were both taking, Designing for Learning by Creating. Balch and Leggett knew that at a creative place like the Ed School, maker spaces made sense, and students would generally feel “safe” when tinkering. “But, we wondered, what if we did this kind of thing in a space where people wouldn’t normally interact with creative things?” Leggett says. Armed with their bucket, they decided to see, going into a bar; a big, open outdoor area in Harvard Yard; and to the lobby of a busy subway station in Boston. What they found is that the space itself affected how potential makers responded. The open space at Harvard was easy: People were used to engaging, and the mix included students, families, curious kids, and tourists; the busy subway station was difficult, with people rushing to catch trains or tired after work. Many seemed “bothered” by strangers, they say. Sometimes, Balch and Leggett had to figure out how to engage strangers who were reluctant to interact or ask questions or tinker in public, especially if they thought they were not the creative type. They tried to make it easy for people. At one location, for instance, they only put out the magnetic poetry pieces on a white board, with a sign that read, “Play with me.” At another, they set up an interactive lead drawing and a playable piano keyboard using the laptop, small cables, and clay.
14
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
Often, though, the two new Technology, Innovation, and Education Program graduates found that the techie components of what they offered were daunting for strangers. “Potential makers would see wires and technology and become nervous to engage with us,” Balch says. “Technology has, for many people, become something that can be very scary or confusing to try to understand. This seems especially true if the potential user has a preset idea of personal skill level being lacking.” But, she says, technology doesn’t have to be so mysterious. “There doesn’t need to be a curtain between the user and the ‘magic’ of how technology works. Through our Guerrilla Maker Space project, we are attempting to make technology more accessible to the user — where the user may program the technology rather than continue to let the technology program the user.” Leggett says, “We want people to know that they can create their world.” In that way, Balch says, “We’re trying to reveal Oz to everyone.” v to follow balch and leggett as they bring their bucket to the harvard ilab and into schools to see how this translates to teaching and learning, read their blog:
guerrillamakerspace.sqsp.com/#what-is-gms v follow them on twitter: @GuerrillaMakers
appian way
The App Age and Creativity For adolescents growing up in the digital age, there is good news and bad news. The good news? Researchers who analyzed hundreds of pieces of art by high schoolers found exceptional examples of creative output that exceeded those found in works produced by teenagers 20 years prior. The bad news? In the same time span, creativity in writing by high school students has all but disappeared, with fantasy-based tales replaced by formulaic essays filled with informal language. For doctoral candidate Emily Weinstein, Ed.M.’14 — the lead writer of “A Decline in Creativity? It Depends on the Domain,” published in January’s Creativity Research Journal — the vast difference between the stories produced by high school students between 1990 and 1995 and between 2006 and 2011 was remarkable. “This was not even a questionable finding,” she says. More of the stories written in the first time period they studied stayed with the reader. For example, she says one piece was about a psychiatrist who is a crab. “Compare that to today’s more narrative, totally realistic essays, and it is even more striking. … There is a lot of realistic and self-centered writing that pervades adolescent daily life now. Also, as we teach kids to write well on standardized tests, there is a formulaic way to score well. … We wonder if there is a lot of time in class helping kids to write well for a particular structure.” Weinstein, along with University of Washington Assistant Professor Katie Davis, Ed.M.’02, Ed.M.’09, Ed.D.’11; Zachary Clark, Ed.M.’12; and Donna DiBartolomeo, Ed.M.’12, reviewed more than 350 pieces of artwork from a monthly magazine for teens and 50 fiction writing samples produced by high school students from a similar publication. In both genres studied, the researchers were able to sample works compiled by the same writing teacher and the same art journal editors, for the time periods reviewed. The research, which is also documented in a chapter in The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy,
DANIEL VASCONCELLOS
and Imagination in a Digital World by Davis and Professor Howard Gardner, was part of Project Zero’s Developing Minds and Digital Media Project. According to Davis, “We wanted to explore how young people today are different from 20 years ago and what changes we could relate to digital media.” Although creativity in writing had lessened, the results for visual arts were more promising, with observed works demonstrating “more complexity” in design and subject matter, Davis says. In this area, digital media could be having a positive effect on creativity. “The Internet exposes us all to more visual media than ever before, and you don’t have to go to the Louvre in Paris or other places around the world to see this art.” Overall, she and Weinstein both say that more research is needed to draw specific conclusions about the impact of digital media — and standardized testing — on creativity and the willingness by students to take risks and break away from the standard mold. “I would hope policymakers and schools administrators would see this work and ask whether how we construct the school day supports 21st-century skills and risk taking,” Davis says. “I think the answer, to a large extent, is no.” — Mary Tamer, Ed.M.’13, is overseeing the Ed School’s Usable Knowledge project, launching in September. 15
The Jains Go Out on the Balcony The quote on the front page of the Heritage School website basically sums up Manit Jain’s education growing up in India: “For most children, schooling is about being leashed, not unleashed.” Jain, Ed.M.’14, who started the Heritage School in 1999 and spent the last year at the Ed School in the master’s program along with his wife, Smriti Jain, Ed.M.’14, explains, “There was no authentic relationship with learning. If I asked, ‘Why am I learning what I’m learning?’ the only answer was, ‘If you don’t study this, you won’t do well on the exam. If you don’t do well on the exam, you won’t do well in life.’” The problem with this approach is that while it may help students cover the syllabus and score well on the critical grade 12 exam that decides in India where you’ll go to college, it also “robs children of the ability to be themselves. With that kind of system, there’s a lot of judgment and ranking,” Jain says. As a result, students end up developing strategies for doing well in school. “I’ll be this way with this teacher and that with that teacher and this way with the principal,” he says. “Students also begin to see everything as a job. There’s no sense of meaning or purpose. This pattern of ‘hard duty’ is difficult to break out of, and it isn’t limited to school. Eventually we even see the sense of hard duty when parents are playing with their children or taking a spouse out to dinner.” When he was young, he says, “I never had moments in my childhood where I went home and said, ‘Wow, Mom, I learned this!’” In 1999, Jain decided he wanted to offer a different option for students in India. Along with his father, a teachertrainer, he opened the first of three Heritage Schools. He admits that it took a few years to work out the kinks. “I knew what I didn’t want to do,” he says, “but I didn’t yet know what I did want to do.” They started out fairly traditional. Then, just as he was beginning to rethink the schools, he met two Ed School alums, Anustup Nayak, Ed.M.’02, and Ashish Rajpal, Ed.M.’02, who were also interested in transforming education in India. Together, they began a complete school overhaul — hearts and minds, 16
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
Jain says. There was pushback, of course, given the deepseated belief in rote learning among parents and teachers in his country. Smriti was a teacher there at the time. “Teachers were resisting. We were all a product of similar rote learning,” she says. “What changed was starting to ask hard questions. We asked ourselves what we really want or believe in. It was the first time, as teachers, that we felt empowered. The key was a lot of dialogue and reflection. Structure within the school also changed. Teachers started to collaborate, and they let the students express their opinions. It went from an authoritative atmosphere to one that was more equal.” They got rid of formal testing and uniforms and made learning project-based. They put an emphasis on teamwork while also celebrating the uniqueness of each child. They pushed hard to make every student and teacher feel respected and included. They encouraged parents to be more involved. Today, the hope is that they are creating a progressive model for learning in India, weaving in elements taken from other progressive schools, such as Sudbury Valley in the United States and Reggio Emilia in Italy. The difference, Jain says, is that they want to show that their model can work at big, 2,000-student schools like theirs — not just at small, intimate schools. He estimates that they have covered about half of what they want to accomplish. That’s partly why the couple decided to spend a year at the Ed School. Smriti says they had been thinking about applying for at least seven or eight years. They finally filled out the applications after Vishnu Karthik Ramani, Ed.M.’12, head of their senior school, came back to India after graduating from the Ed School and talked about what he had learned.
appian way
ISTOCKPHOTO
American Teachers
“I knew we needed to look at our systems from the outside. We needed to get on the balcony,” Jain says, using a phrase they learned from Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer Ron Heifetz after taking Heifetz’s January-term class. The idea is that in order to lead, you need to step back from the day-to-day and see the whole picture. Since they arrived last August, the Jains say they’ve mainly focused on classes that will help them revamp or refine certain areas of their schools that still need work, such as inclusion and Universal Design for Learning, as well as technology. “We thought, rather than reinventing the wheel with these issues, let’s go to Harvard to see what’s already happening,” Smriti says. Some of her classes, particularly in the arts and instructional coaching, also reaffirmed the path they were already taking at Heritage. As the couple heads back to India, Jain says they feel more prepared. “I have a better appreciation,” he says, “for what the gaps are and what my blind spots are.” — Lory Hough
When the oversized, glossy, hardcover book — with more than 220 pages and color photos — arrived at the Ed. office, it was stunning not only for its high-quality publishing, but also for the book’s focus: spotlighting 50 extraordinary teachers from across the country. Not surprising, two teachers in American Teacher: Heroes in the Classroom are graduates of the Ed School: Michael Goodwin, Ed.M.’12, an English teacher at Concord-Carlisle High School in Concord, Mass., and Greg Schwanbeck, Ed.M.’08, a physics and astronomy teacher at Westwood High School in Westwood, Mass.
v for a look inside the book: welcomebooks.com/americanteacher/teachers.html
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
17
PLOS ONE
Narrow the Page
MOOC at the Starting Line In March, the Ed School’s first free MOOC, or massive open online course, began. Offered through HarvardX, the course, Unlocking the Immunity to Change: A New Approach to Personal Improvement, was taught by Professor Robert Kegan and Lecturer Lisa Lahey, Ed.M.’80, Ed.D.’86, and included 70,000 students. HarvardX is a university-wide initiative supporting faculty experimentation in teaching and learning through technology.
v to learn more about new education courses offered through harvardx, including leaders of learning with professor richard elmore:
18
ED.
harvardx.harvard.edu
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
Paper or electronic device? When it comes to reading, people often have strong opinions. But a new study, conducted with the help of fourth-year doctoral student Chen Chen, Ed.M.’10, found that for readers with dyslexia, the choice may be clear: an electronic device, as long as the screen is small. Researchers at the Laboratory for Visual Learning at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics studied 103 teenagers who were attending a school specifically for students with lifelong reading difficulties such as dyslexia. What they found was that reading comprehension and speed increased significantly for many students when they read short lines — one to three words per line — on a small-screen electronic device like an iPod Touch or smartphone. “People don’t read in a continuous line. They jump words. Sometimes they jump back to read,” Chen says. “Researchers used to believe that people with dyslexia jumped back to read significantly more because they didn’t understand what they were reading. Our research shows that’s not entirely the case. It is possible that for people with dyslexia, their attention is not following their fixation” — keeping their gaze in one place. When typical readers fixate on one part of a sentence, they are able to control words on the left and right. “But for people with dyslexia, there’s often an issue with what’s on the left. There’s more reading back,” he says. “Their attention is not following their fixation.” Using an eye tracker to measure the point of gaze — where students were looking as they read — Chen and others found that by narrowing the page with only a couple of words per line, they cut off the words on the left. As a result, readers with dyslexia read significantly faster and better. Chen, who worked at a preschool in China for autistic children before coming to the Ed School, joined the dyslexia project while working with former Associate Professor Jenny Thomson, who was serving as his adviser and who collaborates with Matt Schneps, lead author of the research and director at the Laboratory for Visual Learning. The lab was created to study how disorders such as dyslexia and ADHD affect how people learn science. Chen stresses that the primary goal of this research was not to promote iPods or any particular brand of smartphone. In fact, their theory applies to words on paper, too, but, as he points out, there are advantages to using small electronic devices: They’re prevalent, and it is much easier to reformat font size and spacing. Moving forward, Chen says this is just phase one. As they discovered, short-text reading doesn’t seem to help everyone with dyslexia. “Now we are going to look deeper into the profiles of those who benefited compared to those who didn’t,” he says, adding that app developers are already interested in what they find next. — Lory Hough
onmybookshelf Senior Lecturer Katherine Boles, Ed.D.’91
The thing that drew you to it: I got hooked on McCullough after a historian friend told me to read The Great Bridge years ago. I was fascinated by the story of the building of the [Brooklyn] bridge and the back story of the lives of the workers who built it. They were poor Brooklyn Irishmen, and the book gave me a sense of my own ancestry. As I read the book, I kept thinking of a story my father told me about my grandmother, who, as a little girl, before the building of the bridge, hid in a barrel that her laborer father was transporting across the East River. She hid in the barrel to save the nickel it would have cost had she been a passenger. It was a favorite story in my family.
Favorite book from childhood: Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey was my favorite. I remember my mother reading it to my younger sister, and then I read the book myself a million times to my own children. Now it’s the gift I give to every new mother and father I know.
Favorite spot to curl up with a good book: On a small couch in the living room, feet up. — Marin Jorgensen
Favorite books you were asked to read for school: I loved A Tale of Two Cities in high school. I remember the feel of the black cover, the characters, and the setting in Paris. Then in college, I loved Germinal by Emile Zola. In grad school I hung on every word of The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change by Seymour Sarason. Seymour was my husband’s mentor at Yale, and when I started writing about teaching and teachers, he became a staunch supporter of my work. I was so proud. I loved The Culture of the School, and I adored Seymour.
JILL ANDERSON
Currently reading: David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. It’s incredibly long, and it’ll take me months to finish it, but I am totally in love with the way McCullough writes.
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
19
books
Pathways to Teacher Leadership
Teachers versus the Public
TechnoTeaching
Marya Levenson
Michael Henderson, Paul Peterson, and Martin West
Julie Wood and Nicole Ponsford
What roles are pursued by teachers leading change? What pressures and challenges do they face? How can schools support effective leadership? These are some of the questions that Levenson, Ed.D.’84, poses in Pathways to Teacher Leadership. Offering examples, case studies, and more, this book offers a critical understanding of teacher leadership and how it can help in moving toward authentic school reform.
20
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
In Teachers versus the Public, Henderson, Peterson, and Associate Professor West examine the first experimental study comparing public and teacher opinion, showing a wide divide on a number of issues, including merit pay and teacher tenure. While the study suggests that public support for school reforms changes with added information about school quality, in most instances, teacher opinion is unaffected.
In TechnoTeaching, Wood, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’99, and Ponsford provide a clear blueprint that educators of all experience levels can use to help transform their classrooms by adding new digital and web tools to meet the specific needs of students. For teachers who remain reluctant to enter the digital teaching age, this manual will help them transform technology from an enemy into a friend.
The Time Is Now: Understanding and Responding to the Black and Latina/o Dropout Crisis in the U.S.
Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice
Louie Rodríguez
In Universal Design for Learning, Meyer, Ed.M.’75, Ed.D.’83; Lecturer Rose, Ed.D.’76; and Gordon present the first significant new statement on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) since 2002, drawing on more than a decade of research and implementation to set forth an engaging exploration of ideas and best practices for implementing UDL at all levels and across a variety of subjects.
While 30 percent of all high school students eventually drop out, the same is true for nearly one in two students of color. In The Time is Now, Rodríguez, Ed.M.’99, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’05, offers a 10-point plan to respond to this crisis, focusing on school culture and providing a practical plan of action aimed at challenging the way schools and communities work together to transform education.
Anne Meyer, David Rose, and David Gordon
To read the full list of books featured in this issue, go to gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras
v if you’re part of the ed school community and you’ve recently published a book, mail us a copy or let us know at booknotes@gse.harvard.edu
— Briefs by Rachael Apfel HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
21
Two cases, one known by all, the other hardly known outside legal and academic worlds. Both, however, have dramatically shaped public education in the United States.
BETTMANN/CORBIS
On the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and the 40th anniversary of Milliken v. Bradley, we invited a range of people — including those involved in the cases, those affected by the cases, and those who study the cases — to look at the positive and negative impact these two major cases have had, and will continue to have, on both American education and American society.
— Chief Justice Warren Burger writing for the majority, Milliken v. Bradley, July 25, 1974
— Chief Justice Earl Warren writing for the Brown v. Board of Education unanimous court, May 17, 1954
AP IMAGES
Students arrive at Fleming Elementary School on Detroit's east side, Monday morning, January 26, 1976, as the courtordered busing within Detroit’s city lines began.
N
early everyone has heard of Brown v. Board of Education, but relatively few have heard of Milliken v. Bradley, a case out of Detroit decided 20 years after Brown. In many ways, the Supreme Court’s decision in Milliken has been just as influential on the current state of education in this country as the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Brown sought to tie the fates of white and minority students together by declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” but the promise of Brown has never fully been realized. Milliken, by contrast, limited the reach of Brown by making clear that desegregation would not touch the suburbs. As a result, the education of urban and suburban students remains a world apart. In 1970, there were 290,000 students in the city of Detroit, about 64 percent of whom were black. By contrast, in the surrounding suburban districts just outside of Detroit, there were 490,000 students, 98 percent of whom were white. Stephen Roth, the district court judge in Milliken, realized that busing within the city limits of Detroit would be futile and instead devised a busing plan that encompassed both Detroit and school districts in three surrounding counties. Roth’s decision was affirmed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which warned that “if we hold that school district boundaries are absolute barriers to a Detroit school desegregation plan, we would be opening a way to nullify Brown v. Board of Education.” But in 1974, the Supreme Court reversed the court of appeals, ruling that school district lines could not be crossed to desegregate schools absent proof of an interdistrict violation. In short, poor, minority students would stay in the cities, and the suburbs would be spared from busing. The Milliken decision effectively ended any hope that the educational fortunes of urban and suburban schools, students, and parents would be bound together through school desegregation. Additional attempts to bind the fate of urban and suburban students have similarly failed, leaving the two worlds of urban and suburban education largely separate.
james ryan DEAN AND FACULTY MEMBER, HGSE
Our country continues to live in the shadow of Milliken. Most African American and Latino students attend urban schools. The higher the percentage of minorities in an urban school, on average, the higher the percentage of poor students. And students who attend high-poverty schools generally score lower on standardized tests, are less likely to graduate, and are less likely to go to college. School finance reform, the remedy sought by urban districts and activists in the post-Milliken era, has made less difference than one would have hoped and has done little to bring most urban schools up to par with suburban ones. Brown asserted that separate is inherently unequal. One might quarrel with the term inherently. But even if separate is not inherently unequal, it quite often results in inequalities, especially where separation occurs along lines of socioeconomic status, race, and political power. Milliken thus both limited the reach of Brown and confirmed the wisdom of its premise — that we are unlikely to see truly equal educational opportunities as long as we continue to separate the advantaged from the disadvantaged and educate them in separate school systems. James Ryan is the dean of the Ed School. Before coming to Harvard, he taught at the University of Virginia as a professor of law and a research professor of civil liberties and human rights. In 2011, he wrote Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
23
A
s the nation pauses to remember the 60th anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board desegregation case of May 17, 1954, most people are unaware that four other cases were included in the decision. Brown also included cases from South Carolina; Delaware; Washington, D.C.; and Prince Edward County, Va. When Barbara Johns — 16-year-old niece of Vernon Johns, the preacher who preceded Martin Luther King Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. — led 460 students on a walkout of the all-black Robert Russa Moton High School in April 1951, it was to protest inadequate and unequal physical facilities. They were no longer willing to attend school in three makeshift tarpaper shacks. They wanted the county school board to build a new brick school A legal doctrine, building, putting the “equal” in the prevailing confirmed in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of policy of “separate but equal.” 1896, that allowed stateThe students sought the help of my father, sponsored segregation. the Rev. L. Francis Griffin Sr., known for his more progressive views. He allowed the use of his church and agreed to be their adviser. He also called Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson, NAACP lawyers from Richmond. The lawyers told the students their new strategy was to seek an end to segregation. If the students could get their parents to agree to join the effort to end segregation, they would take the case. On May 2, 1951, there was a standing-room-only mass rally at my father’s church to decide on a course of action. Using a text from the book of Isaiah, my father preached on the Prophecy of Equality. That night, more than 100 students and their parents consented to be a part of a class action suit that became Davis v. Prince Edward County, one of the five cases consolidated in Brown v. Board. The decision to become involved in the struggle to desegregate Prince Edward County schools gave purpose to my father’s life
24
leslie “skip” griffin jr. PLAINTIFF, GRIFFIN V. COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD OF PRINCE EDWARD
and shaped the destiny of the lives of everyone I knew — friends, neighbors, and my family. My father told me years later that Barbara and the student leaders were to him like Nahshon, the Israelite in the Jewish Midrash, who walked into the Red Sea before the waters had parted. To him, their student-led protest was the earliest such action in the modern civil rights movement. The Brown decision was cause for celebration in Topeka, Kan., and throughout the national black community. This was especially so in Prince Edward — there was a sense we were a part of changing history. But in Virginia, and Prince Edward particularly, the party was over quickly. Local and state politicians were swift and decisive in demonstrating their commitment to maintaining segregation. While most of these localities made an effort to comply with the court mandate to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed,” Senator Harry Byrd conceived of an approach called massive resistance, based on the old John C. Calhoun doctrine of interposition. The Virginia Legislature passed resolutions in support of this approach in 1956. The notion was that states had the right to resist federal edicts. The Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors elected in 1959 to defund and close all public schools rather than allow white and black children to attend integrated schools. The authorities dismissed teachers, turned out the lights, and chain-locked the doors. Many people were surprised when the announcement was made in the fall of 1959 that there would be no schools. I was not. My father and Vernon Johns had already started to take me under their wing. I knew that Prince Edward County was an important battleground in the effort to make Brown a reality. And I knew it was a battle the segregationists did not want to lose. My father and the NAACP knew that it was a battle they did not want to lose, either. There was a belief that giving up on the struggle in Prince Edward would diminish the impact of Brown and set back the cause of integration, perhaps permanently. My father went “all in” to build a movement to get the public schools reopened, and to advance the cause of school integration. My three sisters and I became the Skip Griffin, Ed.M.’74 (right), during his Ed School days.
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
plaintiffs in a new case against the county. Although my father became the visible leader, there were many unsung heroes in this story. My father’s willingness to step out front and to stay involved in the Prince Edward battle for 13 years earned him the nickname “The Fighting Preacher.” I knew from my newspaper reading and dinner table discussions that Senator Byrd; James Kilpatrick, then with The Richmond News Leader; J. Barrye Wall of the local Farmville Herald; and others planned to resist school desegregation no matter what. Prominent Prince Edward business leaders founded a segregationist group called Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, which became a 12,000-member organization that provided advice and assistance to communities throughout the south searching for ways to block desegregation efforts. Virginia patricians didn’t condone bombings like their Mississippi counterparts, but their “gentlemanly” resistance was just as effective and debilitating. Various forms of economic reprisals, psychological harassment, and subtle threats were used in an attempt to break the cohesion and will of those involved. People were threatened with the loss of jobs or lack of access to credit if they were discovered to be cooperating with movement leaders like my father. His best friends, M. Boyd Jones, principal of the black high school, and John Lancaster, a county farm agent, lost their jobs due to their association with my father. In September of 1959, chains with padlocks were placed across the doors of all the county’s school buildings. The stark white board signs with large black lettering, “NO TRESPASSING,” were placed at school driveways. The memory of the chains and signs haunted me in my sleep for years. For those of us who grew up in Prince Edward, these signs caused more pain than the “white only” and “colored only” signs displayed throughout the South. I went through several years of therapy before I stopped having nightmares of being forced to repeat high school. The schools remained closed from 1959 to 1964, making Prince Edward County the only locality in the United States that did not provide some form of free public education. Robert Kennedy thought this was a disgrace. He said, “The only places on earth not to provide free public education are Communist China; North Vietnam; Sarawak, Singapore; British Honduras — and Prince Edward County, Va.” For most of the five years, many families that were used to being close-knit were forced to break up. Some families sent their
children to live with relatives or banded together to rent houses in neighboring counties so their children could attend schools. As a result of a program organized by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, 60 to 75 students were placed with out-of-state host families to attend school. After missing two years of school, two of my sisters attended school in California, and I was sent to Newton, Mass., leaving the summers as the only time we were together. My youngest brother for years thought I was an uncle. Sadly, however, most black children received little or no education for the entire five years. These people formed the lost generation, paying a steep price for securing rights for others. White students enrolled in a segregated whites-only academy financed in part by state funded vouchers or tuition grants. By all accounts, plans for this private whites-only school were developed as early as 1956. County officials found ways to sell equipment, books, and desks — even the lights from the public school athletic field — to the academy at discounted prices. With each passing year that schools remained closed, the knowledge of the way this transfer took place made us bitter. The Farmville Herald editorials all ended with this request: Citizens of Prince Edward, stand steady! In the end, it was the black community that remained united and firmly committed. In March The U.S. Supreme Court held in of 1964, I traveled to the U.S. 1964 that the decision by the Supreme Court to hear arguments County School Board of Prince in Griffin v. County School Board of Edward County, Va., to close all local, public schools and provide Prince Edward, the case in which vouchers to attend private my sisters and I were plaintiffs. schools was unconstitutional. Thirteen years after black students walked out of Moton High, 10 years after Brown, and five years after schools closed, the Supreme Court ordered the schools reopened. Some question what Brown achieved and whether the protracted struggle in Prince Edward was worth it. The children of Prince Edward experienced firsthand the depth of southern politicians’ commitment to segregation. I am De jure segregation means certain it was necessary to challenge it happens because of de jure segregation. But I also believe laws. De facto segregation Brown was a beginning, not an ending. just happens. The Brown ruling determined that segregation was illegal. The Griffin ruling affirmed and protected public education. Neither Brown nor Griffin guarantees minority children the type of education needed. No court decision can do that. What is required is for citizens of good will to join together, now that laws no longer keep us apart, to create a better future. Leslie “Skip” Griffin Jr., Ed.M.’74, is currently a director and senior consultant at Dialogos, a consulting firm in Cambridge. In addition to being a plaintiff in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward, he was also a part of the receivership team at South Boston High School from 1976 to 1980. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
25
frankenberg
am one of millions of adults whose AUTHOR, INTERGRATING SCHOOLS IN A CHANGING SOCIETY educational experiences and life trajectories were shaped by the Brown v. Board of Education county was an intellectual puzzle that has since motivated my decision 60 years ago and by subsequent court decisions career and was why I chose to study with [former Professor] Gary and federal policies and enforcement that put Brown’s ideals into Orfield at the Ed School. The resegregation of schools, particularly reality. My experiences as a student illustrate the promise and in the South, that my Civil Rights Project colleagues and I have limitations of how the decision has been interpreted in its impact documented is reflected in the enrollment in my high school and in on K–12 schools. the district more generally. The growth of school choice and changI grew up in a southern Alabama countywide school district ing demographic patterns could potentially help mitigate resegrein which no black and white students gation trends but only if structured carefully in a way cognizant of attended the same school until two black Murphy High in Mobile was existing racial segregation and inequality in our society. students in 1963 waded through 200 one of the first in Alabama Despite the legal and political setbacks to fully realizing the Alabama Guardsmen to desegregate my to begin integrating black and white students despite promise of Brown, I am hopeful that as we continue to learn more future high school. It wasn’t until 25 years public protests by the about the benefits of desegregation, the country’s growing diversity later that the district finally stopped resiststate’s then-governor, will make issues of racial segregation and inequality impossible to ing legal efforts for more comprehensive George Wallace. ignore. Further, as those of us who benefited from a desegregated desegregation and agreed to create six education take on leadership roles in local communities or are magnet schools, reflecting one of the most able to influence federal policy or law, we can adapt lessons from popular desegregation remedies of the late 1980s, even if this Brown of courageous plaintiffs, lawyers, judges, educators, local only affected the schooling of a fraction of the district’s students leaders, and federal officials who brought tremendous change to (six of approximately 100 schools). A couple years later, as a our schools and society. middle-schooler, I enrolled in one of these magnet schools, where I had one of the most integrated experiences of my life: The school Erica Frankenberg, Ed.M.’02, Ed.D.’08, is an assistant professor drew students from across the county, had a diverse faculty, and in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. She had no tracking as every student enrolled The theory states that has published several books, including Integrating Schools in a in college preparatory classes, reflecting under the right conditions, the school’s theme. Years later, as I learned Changing Society and The Resegregation of Suburban Schools: A interpersonal contact is Hidden Crisis in American Education. She is also a senior research about Gordon Allport’s intergroup contact one of the most effective associate at the Initiative on School Integration at the Civil Rights theory, I saw it reflected in my middle ways to reduce prejudice Project at UCLA. school experiences. between people. In high school, I enrolled in the oldest, formerly all-white high school that by the mid-1990s had even shares of black and white students — but also contained incredible segregation within the school. My international baccalaureate classes had few students of color, nor were there many teachers of color in these advanced classes. My most diverse class was the marching band, which drew an array of students from across the school. My senior year, the judge declared the district to be unitary, meaning that it had eradicated all vestiges of the prior dual system of schools. This was hard for me to fathom given the inequality within and between high schools that I saw — a high school 1.5 miles away was almost entirely black and had few of the advanced class options that were available at my school, for example. The richness of my educaReading lesson in a tional experiences and the segregated Washington, D.C., knowledge that they were not elementary school, 1942. available to all students in my 26
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/MARJORIE COLLINS
I
erica
philip lee ASSISTANT LAW PROFESSOR, UDC
NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
F
or good reason, most educators are familiar with the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. After 246 years of slavery and 58 years of separate but equal with the U.S. Supreme Court’s imprimatur, Brown was the first time that the highest court in the land recognized the ways in which white supremacy harmed African American children. The court observed, “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The court ruled that racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. This was a radical shift from prior law. Fifty-eight years before Brown, in 1896, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson held that segregation was constitutional, noting that African Americans were fabricating the injuries that the Brown court later found inherent in separate but equal. The Brown court overruled Plessy and recognized that the harm of segregation was real. It also implicated white racism as the cause of the harm. Brown, thus, promised to create the foundation for a fairer, integrated society starting with our public schools. Despite this promise, racially segregated, unequal schools are still commonplace in American society. How did The U.S. Supreme Court this happen? in 1973 ruled that the While most educators know about Brown, school district’s financing not many have even heard of Milliken v. system, based on property taxes, was not a violation Bradley or 1973’s San Antonio Independent of the 14th Amendment School District v. Rodriguez. Yet these two and that education was U.S. Supreme Court cases severely eroded not a fundamental right Brown, just 20 years after it was decided. under the Constitution. First, in Milliken, the court struck down a trial court’s multidistrict remedy to desegregate Detroit’s predominantly African American public schools. The remedy encompassed a three-county metropolitan area, busing white students from the surrounding suburbs to inner-city Detroit. The court held that busing students from predominantly white suburban districts was not permissible because there was no evidence that these districts engaged in discriminatory acts that led to the segregation of Detroit public schools. This ruling left Detroit, and many cities like it, without a viable alternative to implement Brown — because of white flight, there were too few white students remaining in Detroit to achieve substantial desegregation. Further, it created an incentive for more white flight. Any family that wanted to avoid desegregation orders simply had to move to the suburbs to be shielded from the court’s reach. Second, in Rodriguez, the court held that a public school financing system in Texas that was based on local property taxes was
The St. Louis NAACP organized a protest march, 1963.
not a violation of equal protection. Similar to many other property tax-based school financing systems across the country, this system often meant that poor minority areas had little to spend on education while rich white areas had much more. The Mexican American plaintiffs in this case, who resided in a poor area with relatively low levels of school funding, argued that the financing system denied their children the fundamental right to an education and it also constituted impermissible discrimination against poor people. In upholding the system by applying the lowest level of judicial scrutiny, the court ruled that education is not a fundamental right and poor people are not a suspect class. When a legal Both Milliken and Rodriguez remain good law. decision is still valid. Taken together, these cases created a legal structure that allowed segregated, unequal schools to continue. They betrayed the promise of Brown. Philip Lee, Ed.M.’12, Ed.D.’13, is an assistant professor of law at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law. While at the Ed School, Lee taught Race, Law, and Educational Access. 27
BETTMANN/CORBIS /AP IMAGES
The first day of integration at Fort Meyer Elementary in Va., September 8, 1954.
d rinda carter
andrews AUTHOR, LEGACIES OF BROWN
ne of the arguments made by NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall in favor of ending racial segregation in U.S. schools in the Brown v. Board of Education case was that segregated schools had a tendency to make black children feel inferior to white children. While this may have been the case, in many all-black schools pre-Brown, black children were educated by black adults. The systematic displacement of black educators post-Brown threatened the social, emotional, and academic success of black children. Pre-Brown, black educators served as cultural brokers — other mothers and other fathers — for black children. They provided a type of socialization that nurtured the development of positive racial identities in these youth, whose racial identity was intimately connected to their academic identities; in essence, being black and being an achiever were synonymous. While an expectation might have existed that such socialization would continue through school desegregation efforts, the development and maintenance of such identities for black children were threatened by racial integration in schools. The law might have forced schools to desegregate, but they could not force them to integrate. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. suggested, integration was an “unenforceable” demand. The government put black and white children together in the same learning spaces but did very little to provide tools to educators and students to ensure their success in forming mutually trusting and 28
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
respectful relationships and developing intergroup and interpersonal skills for positive living with one another. An educational system operating under white supremacy in 1954 did not allow for black children to maintain their cultural brokers or to be respected by their white peers and educators. Integrating into a racist power system in which blacks were positioned as inferior provided little opportunity for equality and equity to occur in schools. With the removal of black teachers and administrators from black schools, and their inability to teach in predominantly white schools, black youth were left to their own devices to define themselves as black achievers in racially hostile learning environments. While many youth developed skills to resist and overcome the oppression they experienced, a plethora of research — including my own — indicates the psychological costs involved in the process: situational self-doubt, rejection of a black identity, or an overall sense of intellectual inferiority. Poorly planned efforts at integration still plague black children and communities today. The racism manifests itself in overt and subtle ways through educational policies and practices related to curriculum, discipline, funding, and the like. I remain hopeful that the intent of Brown can be realized during my children’s lifetime and that the recognition of the “equal” part of separate but equal as unconstitutional is actualized. I am not optimistic about this without the destruction of a racist system that at its core is rotten and needs to be completely overhauled. Dorinda Carter Andrews, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’05, is an associate professor in the College of Education at Michigan State University. She has authored and edited many books, including Contesting the Myth of a “Post Racial” Era: The Continued Significance of Race in U.S. Education and Legacies of Brown: Multiracial Equity in American Education. She received the Alumni Achievement Award at the 2014 Alumni of Color Conference.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/LOUIS WICKES HINE
A Rosenwald School: the Colored School at Anthoston in Ky., 1916.
david PRESIDENT, MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
I
was born in 1954 — the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal public educational facilities were unconstitutional. This ruling should have had a direct impact on the educational experiences that I should have had over the next 18 years in rural Alabama, but the sad reality is that nothing really changed for black students. The educational facilities across my home state of Alabama remained separate for whites and blacks, and they were not even close to being of comparable quality. Being born into a sharecropping family, where Alabama laws at the time favored black child labor over schooling, I was literally kept out of school full time until I was in the seventh grade. On the days I did attend elementary school, I went through first and second grades at an all-Negro school in nearby Uniontown, Ala. The Negro School, as it was called back then, had some really dedicated teachers, but the facilities left a lot to be desired. Also, we never got new textbooks. They went to the white schools, and we got their used ones. The all-white elementary school in the same town was More than 5,000 most impressive — with spiffy facilities and Rosenwald schools were a great library filled with books. My school built across the South just had the bare basics. From third through for black children in the fifth grade, I attended a Rosenwald School, a early 20th century, prior to one-room building erected on a local church desegregation. The idea for ground. All classes, one through five, were the schools started with Booker T. Washington. held in a one-room building with a pot-bellied stove in the center. The teacher would roughly spend one hour each day with each grade.
From there, I went to an all-black middle and high school. I spent my entire school life never having a white student in any of my classes, so literally nothing changed for me in the two decades following the Brown decision. Even though I don’t live in Alabama, I visit my home state quite often. And I am amazed that very little has changed in the 60-year aftermath of Brown in a swath of 12 counties known as the Alabama Blackbelt, which was the root of plantation life in the state. There is virtually no integration of the schools. They are still separate and still unequal. The same schools that were all black when I grew up there are still all black today, and the vast majority of the schools that were all white are either out of existence or are still all white. Many of the school buildings where blacks go to school are still quite shabby and in need of repair. And I hear stories from teachers of the lack of resources to enable them to meet the needs of the students they serve. Interestingly enough, the same pattern I see in parts of Alabama are also in existence in my adopted home of Baltimore. While the state of Maryland has boasted of having the number one state public schools in the nation for five straight years, the public schools in Baltimore have lagged far behind. Thanks to effective leadership of [Professor] Andrés Alonso, Ed.M.’99, Ed.D.’06, major improvements were made during the time he served as superintendent and CEO. But, by and large, the Baltimore City Public Schools are quite segregated, and new school buildings are nonexistent. The public schools are almost all black, and the private schools, which are numerous, are virtually all white. As we celebrate the 60th anniversary of Brown, I must say that progress has been slow and uneven. Some pockets of public education in our nation are as segregated today as they were in 1954. We have a lot of work before us. David Wilson, Ed.M.’84, Ed.D.’87, is president of Morgan State University in Baltimore. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
29
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/THOMAS O’HALLORAN
natasha kumar
In 1956, Clinton High School in Clinton, Tenn., was set to become one of the first integrated high schools in the state after Brown. The 12 black students who attended became known as the Clinton 12. Riots and dynamite explosions followed.
warik
AUTHOR, BALANCING ACTS: YOUTH CULTURE IN THE GLOBAL CITY
R
ecently I reread Doug McAdam’s classic study Freedom Summer, which tells the story of young Americans volunteering to participate in Southern literacy campaigns and voter registration drives in the South in the summer of 1964, 10 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. These young Americans — a majority of whom came from elite universities — demonstrated a strong moral commitment to promoting racial justice. While they were not perfect, I admire their commitment to justice. And I worry that today many young Americans attending elite universities do not feel the same moral outrage over racial inequality in the United States that is so important for dramatic social change. Optimistically, I see an important role that higher education — especially elite higher education — can play by providing students with a vision for moving closer to racial justice in the next 60 years. What does higher education teach our young elites about diversity and their role in promoting racial justice? My research suggests very little, I’m afraid. On affirmative action, for example, most students in my study at elite college campuses expressed ambivalence, lauding its positive impact on their own education while simultaneously expressing fears that it can easily turn into “reverse discrimination.” Serena, a white Ivy League student, told my research team that she believed university admissions should consider race “because the different viewpoints that students from different backgrounds can bring is very valuable to the larger purpose of education.” Yet later Serena also told us, “If I hadn’t gotten into Harvard, I would have felt that I’d been discriminated against if someone else that I knew, and who was equally qualified and a minority, had gotten in above me.” While Serena faced unprecedented competition in admissions, perhaps driving her fear — Ivy League universities routinely reject more than 90 percent of their applicants today — her words nevertheless demonstrate a lack of a broad understanding of racial disadvantage and privilege in the United States.
30
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
Very few students understood affirmative action as a policy to promote racial equality, given the racial segregation of a generation ago and the symbolic importance of diversity in leadership for a nation with a scarred racial history. Yet I hesitate to blame them; their universities often promote this perspective by only discussing affirmative action as useful for creating a diverse campus where students teach others in classrooms and dorms. While interracial dialogue is important, I find the sole focus on it worrisome, given that in order to address the continued effects of racial segregation, we must acknowledge how that history is built into our institutions. A minority of students in my study who were active in specific kinds of minority-focused campus programming took a more radical view, expressing an understanding of how racial inequality is built into our educational institutions, and with a vision for how those institutions can change. These students give me hope that there is a way beyond our contemporary denial of the power of race in American society. Overall, students at elite universities — our new elites, whether from families of privilege or the first in their families to attend college — will shape the policies and practices of tomorrow. In our universities, we should teach them about our past and provide a vision for the future that includes them as actors in a world moving closer to racial justice. I hope that in the next 60 years, we move as far away from ignoring the social meaning of race as we moved from racial segregation and beliefs about racial inferiority in the last 60. Young people have great capacity to respond to new ideas and complexity in the world. With the support of universities and leaders who dare to take a social justice approach to race, our next generation will be in good hands. Natasha Kumar Warikoo, Ed.M.’97, is an assistant professor at the Ed School and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. In 2011, she wrote Balancing Acts: Youth Culture in the Global City.
martha
min w
AUTHOR, IN BROWN’S WAKE; HLS DEAN
racial identity figures in their school assignment. Remote is real integration, joining residents from different backgrounds and colors in communities committed to the success of all. One exception is U.S. Department of Defense schools. About 40 percent of these students in schools located abroad or stateside belong to racial minority groups; many come from families with low levels of parental education, occupational prestige, and income. These schools yield a much smaller racial gap in achievement scores than the national average. Without unusually high resources, these schools do have high involvement by teachers and parents who themselves work in racially integrated settings with common purposes. And, like military training in general, the Department of Defense schools are oriented to ensure mastery using multiple methods and high expectations. Perhaps another anniversary can celebrate the spread of these successes. Martha Minow, Ed.M.’76, is dean of Harvard Law School, where she has been teaching since 1981. Her books include In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark. She served as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall at the U.S. Supreme Court.
CONG RY O F L IB R A
RY O F
CONG
RESS
RESS
The Russell Daily News, serving the city and county of Russell, Kan., announced the Brown decision with a banner headline and two frontpage stories.
L IB R A
nly a decade after the Supreme Court declared Passage of the Civil racially segregated Rights Act of 1964 schools unconstitutional established the Equal did actual enforcement Employment Opportunity Commission and begin. The passage of the Civil Rights outlawed discrimination Act of 1964 under Democratic president based on race, color, Lyndon Johnson reflected his skills and religion, gender, or a social movement. Republican presinational origin. dent Richard Nixon worked to enforce the law with its new enforcement tools. In 1970, Nixon’s team organized Southern leaders of different races to plan for peaceful and orderly desegregation. Justices appointed by Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court approved desegregation plans that altered attendance zones and bused students in order to end racially separate public schools. High school graduation rates for black students surged, the racial gap in standardized tests shrunk, and graduation rates and test performances of white students increased between 1964 and 1980. But then, in 1974, the Supreme Court seemed, in the words of dissenting Justice Thurgood Marshall, to reflect “a perceived public mood that we have gone far enough in enforcing the Constitution’s guarantees of equal justice.” It ruled in Milliken v. Bradley that constitutionally objectionable racial segregation in the Detroit public schools did not support a remedy reaching beyond the city’s lines; violations within the district support only a remedy within the district. The court reached this conclusion despite findings that a cross-district remedy would more effectively desegregate the Detroit schools and save money and hassle. The court ignored the fact that Detroit’s schools fall within a single statewide system of education operated by the state of Michigan. Milliken marked the beginning of the end of serious efforts to desegregate America’s public schools. Movement of white families from urban areas accelerated; 90 percent of the residents in America’s suburbs and towns are white; urban districts, in contrast, with 70 to 100 percent students who are African American and Hispanic, face higher levels of violence, disruption, and lower test scores than suburban schools. Treated as de facto rather than official segregation, the racial patterns dividing residential areas and district school lines make it nearly impossible to create racially integrated schools or schools welcoming students across income levels. Desegregation has come to mean just ending official segregation of schools. The Supreme Court more recently has forbidden even voluntary desegregation if students’
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
31
D
ge rge r
umell jr. & kristi b wman
uring the 1970s, while the Milliken v. Bradley case was being litigated, ATTORNEY, MILLIKEN V. BRADLEY a major demographic change was taking place in Detroit. With the shift of the auto industry, Detroit, once a city of 1.9 million people, was beginning to lose population — to the point that now, 40 years AUTHOR, EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND THE LAW later, the city has a population of about 700,000 with the vast majority being African American. At the same time, the school district that boasted even though the 14th Amendment is addressed to the state and more than 220,000 students was losing students, and a majority even though the state denies equal protection of the laws when its white school district was becoming a majority African American public agencies, acting in its behalf, invidiously discriminate.” school district. Thus, the case was remanded back to the district court to In 1971, after it was determined that both the Detroit Board develop a Detroit-only remedy. By 1975, the district was primarily of Education and the state of Michigan had unconstitutionally an African American school district, resulting in a challenge to segregated the Detroit school system, attention turned to the creativity to develop a remedy to root out the effects of segregation. remedial issues and one of your authors (Roumell) served as the There was some busing in the Detroit-only plan, but because little lead counsel for the board during the remedy stage. racial integration could result from busing, the remedy focused Initially, counsel for the NAACP was urging busing within the more on improving the quality and variety of educational opportunidistrict. At the recommendation of board counsel, the emphasis ties within the district. shifted to a metropolitan remedy providing for cross-district busing First, the remedy required the state to fund a series of educabased on two realistic factors. First, a majority of the board’s funds tional components, including funding enhancing programs focusing came from state aid. Depending on the suburb, a substantial on reading, counseling, and teacher training. The teacher-training funding of suburban education came from state aid along with program was designed to eliminate teachers’ negative expectations local taxation. Second, white students were leaving for the suburbs of African American students. along with some middle-class African Americans. When a case is heard Second, the remedy developed magnet schools designed to The district judge approved a metropolitan plan before all the judges of attract students regardless of attendance areas based upon (cross-district busing), which the Sixth Circuit en a court, meaning before educational programs. A typical impetus to such an approach was banc approved. the entire bench. the testimony of one white parent who put his child on two buses The issue of remedy went before the U.S. to go to Cass Technical High School so that his child, a tuba player, Supreme Court in 1974 in Milliken v. Bradley would be exposed to the best tuba teacher in metropolitan Detroit. and was decided 5–4 in favor of, with Chief Justice Warren Berger Cass was a majority African American school. writing for the court and Justice Byron White writing for the disThird, with the aid of John Porter, the then-Michigan superintensenting justices. The majority concluded that there was insufficient dent of public instruction, and the district court, all federal funds for state involvement to include the suburbs in the remedy, stating: vocational education coming to Michigan were funneled to Detroit “[A]n interdistrict remedy might be in order where the racially to build four vocational high schools designed to attract students. discriminatory acts of one or more school districts caused racial One of the high schools is famous for its culinary arts; another for segregation in an adjacent district, or where district lines have been deliberately drawn on the basis of race. … The record before healthcare-related subjects; the third for aviation-related subjects. These schools still exist. Unfortunately, these schools have not us… contains evidence of de jure segregated drawn students from the suburbs despite their excellent curriculum conditions only in the Detroit schools. … To After Southern states and educational opportunities. approve the remedy ordered by the court would requested an exemption from Brown, the U.S. Today, of the students enrolled in the district, roughly 90 percent impose on the outlying districts, not shown to Supreme Court ruled are African American, and about 80 percent are eligible for free have committed any constitutional violation, that desegregation is or reduced price lunch. During 2013–2014, the district enrolled a wholly impermissible remedy based on a to proceed with “all roughly 50,000 students and is projected to have fewer than standard not hinted at in Brown I and II or any deliberate speed,” 40,000 students by 2016 — its smallest enrollment in a century. holding of this court.” meaning each local school district could set The growth of charter schools in Detroit has had a profound affect. In response, Justice White wrote, “An interdisits own timetable for In 2012–2013, charter schools in the district enrolled more trict remedy for the infringements that occurred implementing Brown. than 51,000 students — more than half the school-age children in this case is well within the confines and powin the district. The number of charter schools and enrollment in ers of the state, which is the governmental entity those schools has been growing steadily, and as students leave ultimately responsible for desegregating its schools. … The court traditional public schools for charter schools, the per-pupil state draws the remedial line at the Detroit school district boundary, 32
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
aid follows them. This drop is despite innovative programs and new, modern renovations to school facilities. The concept of magnet schools, educational components, and the unique approach to vocational education represented creativity 40 years ago. It was an approach that was affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court in Milliken v. Bradley II. However, to root out the effects of segregation and prevent resegregation, more creativity was required. One example of another approach comes from Kalamazoo, Mich., a city of approximately 80,000. The Kalamazoo Promise guarantees full tuition for four years at one of Michigan’s 15 state universities to high school students who remain in the district and graduate with a certain grade point average. This program has had positive recruitment and retention effects, inspiring students of all races and economic backgrounds to achieve because there is hope for their educational future.
M
It is ideal for the state of Michigan, which has so many state universities offering wide-range of educational opportunities. The Kalamazoo Promise has been funded by private donations. At least two other school districts in Michigan are now in the process of duplicating the program. Roumell regrets that he did not have the clairvoyance 40 years ago to develop the Kalamazoo Promise in some form for Detroit. It could have made a difference. It may have been more effective in preventing resegregation in the Detroit metropolitan area. Yet perhaps it is never too late to make this promise to our children. George Roumell Jr. represented the Detroit Board of Education, arguing the Milliken case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974. He is currently an adjunct professor of law at Michigan State University. Kristi Bowman is a professor of law at Michigan State University. In 2012, she wrote Educational Policy and the Law.
patricia albjerg
graham
y teaching began in 1955 in Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp at Deep FORMER HGSE DEAN; AUTHOR, SCHOOLING AMERICA Creek High School, where I taught American history and English. It was an all-white segregated school with a 75 percent dropout rate. College was an Creek when I taught there, became principal and served more than 20 years. As I studied these class portraits and speculated unusual experience for the students or their families. As one about the changes at Deep Creek, I heard in the background the of my ninth-grade homeroom students expressed it, “My father high school orchestra performing classical music in the cafeteria, went all the way.” She meant he had graduated from high school. an unimaginable occurrence in 1955. One trophy occupied the large trophy case in the central hall, What brought about these changes? First was the response to 1927 third place for track, as I recall. At the end of the school Brown v. Board of Education, actions that were not welcomed in year after one of my classes had won first place in the district broad sections of the white community. Second were the federal one-act play contest and second place at the state competition funds flowing through the Elementary and Secondary Education in Charlottesville and thus added two trophies to the case, I was Act of 1965, principally through Title I programs designated for terminated because I was pregnant and thus would be an inapconcentrations of children from low-income homes. Third were propriate role model for my students. Three girls in my homeroom had preceded me in pregnancy, though none was married as I was. the additional special programs principally funded or required by the federal government for the handicapped, the gifted, and The experience at Deep Creek has kept me in teaching. the non-English speakers. Fourth and most important was the Thirty-six years later, I returned to Deep Creek at the invitation of recognition that schools require strong and consistent leadership the county school superintendent, who had completed a summer and effectiveness of both administrators and teachers to help program at the Ed School, where I was dean. He was approprichildren acquire the academic skills and character that participaately proud to take me to my old high school. The first thing I noticed was the crammed trophy case, attesting to the academic, tion in a democratic society requires. The last has been by far the most difficult, and as a nation we still have a long way to go to athletic, musical, and theatrical abilities of the students and of accomplish this. the teachers who guided them. The second was that the enrollment was nearly equally divided between blacks and whites. The Patricia Albjerg Graham was dean of the Ed School from 1982 third was that the pictures of senior classes and the principal to 1991 and is currently a professor emeritas. She describes in the main hallway revealed a high turnover of principals in the her experiences at Deep Creek High School in her 2007 book, years that the senior class began to include significant numbers of black students. In 1972, Nathan Hardee, a sophomore at Deep Schooling America.
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
33
M
ichelle Obama has reminded us to remember this: “Movements for real and lasting change are sustained by the relationships we build with one or others.” The idea suggests that real success is based on a mutually collective relationship or a community. The quotation from our first lady reminds me of a statement made by former Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays, who told me and the other undergraduates, including Martin Luther King Jr., in the class of 1948 that “No [one] is wise enough or strong enough to go it alone.” Brown v. Board of Education of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave us the help we needed to stay on the right road to a nation-state of the people by the people and for the people that was created to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and promote general welfare. Also, our Declaration of Independence adopted in 1776 declared that “all are created equal.” We know that the United States has not always lived up to the democratic principles of community life. However, it is never too late to do the right thing. Sixty years after the Supreme Court Brown opinion and 50 years after the United States Congress law that required justice for all in public institutions is a good time to assess the effects of these historical events. We know that it is right and our bound duty to give thanks for the good that we have experienced with others in public or private relations in public or private spaces. Many scholars have recognized that Brown was in part based upon the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which declares that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges … of citizens … nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.” My guess is that sooner or later, this amendment is going to be used against people who kill people in the theaters and streets and elsewhere simply because they do not like how one looks or where one may be going. The Brown v. Board of Education decision was in part based upon this amendment. It has been said that the 14th Amendment strengthened the Supreme Court opinion in Brown. And it could be used against many other contentious issues with reference to race and gender. In our technology society today, the words of the Brown opinion ring again: “Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.” Brown declared that education “is the very foundation of good citizenship,” and I would add so is diversity. Diversity is in the air. Diversity is everywhere because no one is strong enough to go it alone, especially in education and public service. We know that the United States has not always lived up to the democratic principles of community life, including the value of diversity. A very important reason for examining closely the Brown v. Board of Education case is that it quickly addresses the question of whether racially segregated schools are inherently unequal. Law professor Norman Vieira, in his 1978 book, Civil Rights in a Nutshell, wrote, “In its historical context, state enforced racial separation would almost certainly [have been] by whites who were
34
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
charles
willie
PROFESSOR EMERITUS, HGSE
politically and economically dominant.” A famous historian, John Hope Franklin, wrote in his book From Slavery to Freedom, “No public question in the United States in the twentieth century arouses more interest at home and abroad than the debate about the constitutionality of segregated public schools.” Franklin further said, “The decision of the court in Brown v. Board of Education, May 17, 1954, was unequivocal in outlawing segregated public schools.” Another famous historian, Richard Kluger, also agreed with John Hope Franklin. In 1977, Kluger said, “Scholars have assigned the case known as Brown v. Board of Education … a highpoint in America’s willingness to face the consequence of centuries of racial discrimination.” I will close this part of the Brown v. Board of Education story by sharing with you how one country, the Republic of South Africa, has reacted to the Brown case. I will share with you my observations while visiting South Africa to participate as one of the speakers in the conference on Equal Educational Opportunities Comparative Perspective in Education Law: Brown v. Board of Education at 50 years and Education Law at 10 years. Please note that the conference name included the United States and South Africa. Conference leaders said, “The year 2004 marked two momentous occasions: The 50th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and the first 10 years of democratic government in South Africa.” The conference planners further said, “In Brown, the American Supreme Court struck down the notion of separate but equal education, and the dawn of democracy in South Africa was accompanied by legislation guaranteeing equality and the right to equal educational opportunities.” Judge Albie Sachs of the Constitutional Court of South Africa — similar to the U.S. Supreme Court — gave the first public speech on equal educational opportunities and the Constitutional Court. He began his speech with these words: “I, speaking now as a judge, have no hesitation in saying that as far as I am concerned, the greatest legal decision of the 20th century in the world was Brown. It set a marker in terms of creativity, in terms of resonance, in terms of integrity — philosophical and legal integrity — for the whole world. It also included what judges could do. The role and scope of a judiciary in a society that proclaimed itself as one based on fundamental value was demonstrated in it. The justices were saying that there are certain forms of conduct that are just not sustainable, that just cannot be tolerated in a society with pretentions to justice.” The whole conference burst into a very loud and long clapping of hands. I, of course, was very happy to hear those remarks from a member of the Constitutional Court in South Africa. Personally, I realized that what we do in the United States is watched carefully elsewhere. I know this to be true because my wife and I visited the Constitutional Court after the conference that
I addressed; we were presented a small book of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa prepared in 1996 that is similar in some ways to the Constitution of the United States.
j yce
baugh
AUTHOR, THE DETROIT SCHOOL BUSING CASE
F
BENTLEY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Charles Willie is a professor emeritus at the Ed School. He served as a consultant, expert witness, and court-appointed master in major school desegregation cases in cities such as Boston, Hartford, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Little Rock, Milwaukee, San Jose, Seattle, and St. Louis. Willie is the author or editor of 30 books, including The Education of African Americans and Controlled Choice: A New Approach to Desegregated Education and School Improvement.
orty years ago in Milliken v. Bradley, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a cross-district remedy aimed at desegregating the Detroit public school system. At the trial court, the plaintiffs had painstakingly demonstrated that racial segregation in the city’s schools resulted not only from discriminatory decisions by the Detroit school board and state officials, but also from widespread and entrenched housing segregation across the metropolitan area — both city and suburbs. Despite massive evidence that these segregation patterns were due to policies in both the private and public sectors, the high court refused to permit suburban school districts to be included in the plan. The majority emphasized that the plaintiffs had not shown that suburban officials had passed specific policies to segregate their schools. As I indicated in The Detroit School Busing Case, however, this argument was misguided and somewhat disingenuous. Because of the rigid residential segregation in suburbia, there were few black students. Thus policies segregating suburban schools were unnecessary. Because suburban schools were excluded, the remedy became an extremely limited Detroit-only busing program (with only 27,524 of the city’s 247,774 students included and central city schools excluded) and some funding to implement various educational reforms. This educational compensation plan proved insufficient because Detroit’s school system already was experiencing financial crises. The city’s deteriorating tax base and A tax rate on inadequate state aid had left the system in dire property, expressed straits, and the inability to pass millage and bond in mills per dollar of proposals made things worse. value of the property.
Anti-busing demonstration in Detroit, 1976.
By limiting the tools available to desegregate large metropolitan districts, the Milliken decision made it impossible to fulfill the promise of Brown v. Board of Education. Subsequently, some civil rights activists, educators, and public officials turned to school choice and private school voucher programs, charter schools, single-sex education, and other measures to provide equal educational opportunity. These efforts, however, have been only partly successful — and for a limited number of students. It has become fashionable in some circles to criticize the cross-district desegregation remedy and argue that the primary goal should have been to secure additional financial resources for urban schools. But this would have required massive amounts of funding on a long-term basis, something unlikely to occur. In Detroit, for example, white voters consistently rejected millage and bond proposals once the schools became majority black. While there is no guarantee that a different decision in Milliken would have made a positive difference to schools in Detroit or elsewhere, it is reasonable to think that white citizens and policymakers might have been willing to invest more in urban education if their own children attended those schools. Finally, given the continuing racialization of space in American cities and suburbs, Milliken eliminated a potentially useful tool for desegregating education and moving the United States toward a more just and equal society. Joyce Baugh is a professor in the College of Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences at Central Michigan University. She is the author of the 2011 book, The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over Desegregation. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
35
B
reddick
rown v. Board of Education has impacted my life fairly significantly: I was born on May 17, 1972, exactly 18 years after the decision. Early, AUTHOR, LEGACIES OF BROWN I learned the story of how Charles Hamilton Houston and A prominent NAACP lawyer, Thurgood Marshall fashknown as “the man who ioned arguments making it killed Jim Crow,” Houston bused there in the 1980s chose to stay after the consent order, possible for black children mentored and trained creating a multicultural mix of Latino, black, white, and Asian across the nation to attend integrated Thurgood Marshall, who later students. Many of the administrators and teachers were Latino, and schools. I had not experienced these served as the NAACP’s lead counsel for Brown. they actively fought to dispel stereotypes about achievement for effects firsthand; I attended Department students of color. We had white teachers also instilling confidence of Defense Dependent Schools in England until ninth grade. We then moved to the east side of Austin, Texas. in us — inviting César Chávez to bring the reality of the Chicano civil rights struggle to the student body, for example. (One of my Unbeknownst to our family, with the Milliken v. Bradley case eroding mechanisms to integrate public schools, Austin spent the proudest moments was shaking Chávez’s hand and marching with him, protesting the treatment of migrant farmworkers.) Sadly, the 1970s in litigation. By 1979, the Fifth Circuit approved a triethnic efforts to create truly diverse cultural spaces ended in the 1990s desegregation plan featuring affirmative action hiring, bilingual and 2000s. The end of busing led to concentrations of poverty and education, and busing. With the court issuing this consent order, resegregation, and in 2008, Johnston High School was the first the Fifth Circuit declared the district unitary (coinciding with our school in Texas closed for low performance. arrival in 1986). My formative experiences — first learning about the promise I immediately realized something was awry in East Austin of Brown, then experiencing resistance to busing, and benefiting schools compared to schools in West Austin. There were also from integrated schooling — shaped my interests in educational deep-seated beliefs about the academic inferiority of students inequity. They led me to pursue a career in education, as a teacher, of color. When we competed with other schools, my classmates graduate researcher, and professor here in Austin. The 60/40 anand I noticed the resources available that we didn’t have. It was a niversary invites us to reflect upon the aspiration of truly integrated sobering orientation to the struggle to integrate schools in a city public schools — and how far we have moved from this ideal. that had created a plan in 1928 to move industry, Latinos, and blacks to the east and had enforced racially restrictive covenants Richard Reddick, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D.’07, is an assistant professor well into the 1950s. at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the coauthor of many I attended and graduated from Johnston High School. Located books, including Legacies of Brown: Multiracial Equity in American in the barrio of East Austin, it had a proud legacy of educating Education and A New Look at Black Families. leaders in the Latino and Austin community. Many white students
richard
36
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
AP IMAGES
Linda Brown Smith, one of the plaintiffs in Brown, was a third-grader when her father started a class action suit in 1951.
genevieve
siegel-hawley RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, THE INITIATIVE ON SCHOOL INTEGRATION AT THE CIVIL RIGHTS PROJECT
key lessons thus emerged from my K–12 trajectory: 1) Regional cooperation could be both feasible and desirable, and 2) having students of different races go to school under the same roof was only a first step in a much broader process of fostering real integration. All of these experiences helped mold the research topics I focus on today. Evidence from my dissertation study, among others, shows that metropolitan collaborations centered on educational issues can help promote lower levels of both school and housing segregation. Indeed, despite the limitations of Milliken, a number of communities have continued to strive to make good on the promises of Brown. Through various means, places like Louisville–Jefferson County, Ky.; Hartford, Conn.; and Omaha, Neb., have sought to blur or erase the city–suburban barriers that Milliken erected. Given the increasingly diverse and stratified nature of U.S. society, understanding, improving upon, and replicating the successes of these metropolitan areas must become a key element of educational reform for the 21st century. Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Ed.M.’05, is an assistant professor in the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is also a research associate at the Initiative on School Integration at the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES, OPERATION ARKANSAS
M
y life has been profoundly shaped by both the Brown v. Board of Education and Milliken v. Bradley decisions — and the great progress and regress that the two, respectively, represent. In Richmond, Va., where I grew up, After a busing program was access to equal educational created for the city of Richmond, opportunity continues to be white residents flocked to the suburbs or enrolled in private influenced by the outcome schools. A federal judge extended of the Bradley v. School Board of busing to the suburbs. The Richmond case, an immediate predecision was overturned by an cursor to Milliken. Like with Milliken, appeals court and upheld in the district court judge in Bradley 1974 by the U.S. Supreme Court. ruled in favor of a metrowide school system after reviewing evidence showing that meaningful desegregation would not be possible without combining the predominately black city district with the heavily white suburban ones surrounding it. Like Milliken, in 1974 the district court ruling in Bradley was ultimately overturned. By the time I walked into my prekindergarten classroom in Richmond City a decade later, the white enrollment in Richmond Public Schools hovered around 10 percent, even as white students made up a considerably larger share of the classrooms and schools that I, along with other whites, experienced. My preK classroom, for example, was about 40 percent white. Though the disproportionate concentration of white students undermined more widespread contact between races, settings that were diverse promoted rich classroom discussions, critical thinking skills, and a willingness to work across color lines in both the short and long term. While I benefited enormously from the many well-documented educational and social advantages linked to racially diverse learning environments — advantages that helped underpin the Brown decision — Milliken meant that far too many students throughout the country were barred from experiencing them. Instead, the Milliken-sanctioned fences between city and suburban school districts locked in stark patterns of segregation and inequality for generations of schoolchildren. I became increasingly aware of those fences in a specialized high school that drew students from 11 different school divisions to the top floor of a historic city school. Serious, racialized inequities between the specialized and regular programs were present, even as the regional nature of the wildly popular specialized school highlighted the power and possibility of metropolitan collaboration. Two Soldiers escorted students to Central High School in Little Rock in September 1957, after the governor of Arkansas tried to enforce segregation. President Eisenhower intervened.
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
37
ted
landsmark PRESIDENT, BOSTON ARCHITECTURAL COLLEGE
S
hortly after the Brown v. Board of Education decision was announced on May 17, 1954, the New York City Board of Education decided to test the premise that exposing young African American elementary school students to other aspirational cultures might lift the ambition levels of the black children. My Harlem elementary school was chosen to identify fourth-grade students who might have the maturity and flexibility to be bused on public transportation, 45 minutes each way, to primarily white public schools. There, the black students would attend the fifth through ninth grades in a largely Jewish community. My cousin Jill and I were two of the four black students selected for this experiment. The rest is history: I was placed in an accelerated seventh- to ninth-grade program, passed the rigorous examination to attend New York City’s elite Stuyvesant High School, spent a postgraduate prep school year at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, and earned degrees at Yale College (political science), Yale Law School, Yale Architecture School, and finally a doctorate at Boston University. While in college I was active in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. I studied higher education administration at the Ed School. I married interracially, a fairly rare act for that time. I became an architectural lawyer, a Harvard administrator, an MIT adjunct faculty member, a MassArt dean, a city of Boston senior administrator under two mayors, and president of the Boston Architectural College. A Boston busing protest photograph of me won a Pulitzer Prize, and I have served on numerous art and architecture boards. Being bused to test Brown’s cultural diversity assumptions transformed my life: Many of my elementary school peers likely succumbed to the vagaries of Harlem’s poverty, drugs, broken homes, and quashed ambitions. While I would always be a polio-affected son of a single parent living in public housing, my ability to achieve greater aspirations was clearly enhanced by my exposure to New York City students and communities where such achievement was taken for granted. At Yale I got to know classmates Gary Trudeau, George W. Bush, Hillary Rodham, and Bill Clinton; I have worked subsequently in Boston with Massachusetts governors Mike Dukakis and Bill Weld, U.S. federal judge Reginald Lindsay, and Boston mayors Ray Flynn and Tom Menino. I would hope now that such exposure has enabled me to positively mentor and affect the lives of those with similar impoverished backgrounds who’ve participated in programs and schools I’ve overseen. But there were downsides too. Once transported out of Harlem, I began to lose touch with my black comrades, and I could never
38
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
really bond socially with new white friends in their neighborhood, due to the simple logistics of living in one community and being schooled in another. I could never entirely be “one of the guys” in either setting. Members of each of these communities perceived me as an “outsider,” based on varied views of either (or both) my race and class. I had to learn resilience and a tough impenetrability in widely divergent social situations. Like young women I later met who had participated in Boston’s voluntary busing METCO program, I found it difficult for years to find a date or an adhering social environment. Fortunately, experiences have changed dramatically for diverse students in multiracial communities, although class distinctions may have been The term originated from an exacerbated by America’s Atlantic Monthly article by increased economic inequalities. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Strivings of the As a poor young person of color Negro People.” Du Bois wrote, bused from Harlem into a primarily white “It is a peculiar sensation, this working class community, I developed an double-consciousness, this acute DuBoisian double-consciousness sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of cultural differences, and it took years of measuring one’s soul by the for me to form a distinctive identity that tape of a world that looks on could transcend the survival needs of in amused contempt and pity. being a social chameleon. Even today, One ever feels his two-ness, an neither white nor black communities American, a Negro.” seem to understand entirely who I am as a person deeply interested in the arts, design, and cultural transformation, beyond the metaphors of socially constructed racial and class characterizations. I don’t meet the generally portrayed stereotypic expectations of either community. Being “distinctive” as a social being provides both autonomous independence and certain isolation from other people’s social realities. Brown transformed the world for many Americans, and particularly for me. What could be learned from my experience, at least in part, is that every educational step forward is imbued with unintended social consequences that should also be anticipated and planned for along with the hoped-for positive learning outcomes. Ted Landsmark is president and CEO of the Boston Architectural College. He once served as director of Boston’s Office of Community Partnerships and as a dean at the Massachusetts College of Art. In 2006, he won the Whitney M. Young Jr. Award for his social activism.
concentrated in the city, not by choice but by restrictive covenants and real estate practices. “Government actions and inactions at all levels,” wrote Federal District Court Judge Stephen Roth, combined with those of loaning institutions and real estate firms “to establish and to maintain a pattern of residential segregation through the Detroit metropolitan area.” He concluded that a desegregation plan limited to the city of Detroit simply would not work. Integration solely within the city would lead to more white flight and ever-greater concentrations of minority and poor pupils. This is exactly what happened over the next 40 years in cities across the North while desegregation in the South resulted in significant gains for black and poor children. Roth approved a plan that divided the metropolitan AUTHOR, HOPE AND DESPAIR IN THE AMERICAN CITY: area into 17 school districts, each containing a strong WHY THERE ARE NO BAD SCHOOLS IN RALEIGH majority of suburban white students and a slice of the increasingly black central city. His decision was contested but sustained through the highest appeals courts in Michigan. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in egal scholars cite the 1857 Before the Milliken case reached the Supreme Court, 1857 that blacks had no legal Dred Scott v. Sanford decision President Richard Nixon had appointed four judges to rights under the U.S. Constitution. that black slaves were property the court who met his hidden criterion: that they would The U.S. Supreme Court forced and the 1944 Korematsu v. vote against the busing required under the Milliken Japanese Americans into United States ruling that plan. Nixon had taped his private conversations with internment camps during World confined Americans of Japanese ancestry in his aides. He predicted that his plan to pack the court War II, regardless of citizenship. detention camps as two of the U.S. Supreme would work: “Whatever happens in the [1972] election, Court’s most shameful blunders. Horrible as they we will have changed the court. I will have named four, were, the court’s 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, which struck and Potter Stewart becomes the swingman. He’s a goddamn weak down a metropolitan plan to desegregate the schools of Detroit reed, I must say. But if we can get him on board, we’ll have the may have been the most dreadful. court.” Later in the same conversation, he went on to say: “I don’t The Dred Scott decision was reversed, and the Korematsu ruling care if he is a Democrat or a Republican. … Within the definition affected only 110,000 Japanese. But Milliken, which effectively of a conservative he must be against busing. … Beyond that, he reversed the Brown v. Board of Education decision outside the can do what he pleases.” Old South, still stands and has affected millions of children with Nixon got his court. It reversed the Milliken decision 5–4, crushdevastating effects on most of urban America. And Milliken was ing what could have been a transformation of the urban North. dreadful not only in its effects, but also in the debased political process that laid the groundwork for the decision. Gerald Grant, Ed.M.’61, Ed.D.’72, is the author of the 2009 book, Like most cities in the North, metropolitan Detroit was racially Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad segregated. While a few blacks lived in the suburbs, most were Schools in Raleigh.
gerald
grant
L
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
39
charles
glenn
AN AUTHOR OF BOSTON’S 1974 DESEGREGATION PLAN
T
he 1870s was one of the uglier periods in American history. As the North lost interest in protecting freed slaves and their children, the white South extended the system of racial injustice that, in the case of schooling, only began to be dismantled by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. The evils of Jim Crow are now a familiar story, as they should be; not so well known is how the dominant Northern Republicans found a new issue to replace Reconstruction as a basis for electoral victory: the supposed threat of Catholic schooling. Immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Quebec, the Netherlands, or England were accustomed to publicly funded Catholic and Protestant schools and quite naturally expected the same accommodations in their new communities. In some immigrant-heavy cities in the Northeast, indeed, Catholic schools received public funding. But only for a few years; President Ulysses Grant and congressional Republicans, plagued by accusations of corruption, seized upon the alleged threat of Catholic teaching to American society to mobilize voters across the North. The timing was right. Aggressions against the Catholic Church by French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Belgian governments had been met by assertion of papal infallibility and condemnation of key liberal principles. Echoes of these struggles resonated in the United States. Immigrants were welcomed by the fast-growing economy, but communities did not welcome the beliefs and loyalties that Catholic schools might perpetuate. State after state adopted constitutional provisions to prevent public funding for such schools — seeking to strangle them in the cradle. Thus developed a second injustice, less nakedly oppressive than on the basis of race, but in its own way a denial of the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” — discrimination on the basis of religion, what the U.S. Supreme Court has referred to as “viewpoint discrimination.” Contrary to popular assumptions today, it was not on the basis of the First Amendment (seldom mentioned at the time), nor to exclude religion from public schools, since these continued prayer and Bible-reading for another 75 years. No, it was quite simply determination that one category of parents — Catholics — would not be allowed public support for the schools they sought for their children. A brief filed by Attorney General James McGranery in 1952, in relation to the Brown cases, quoted Secretary of State Dean Acheson that the “segregation of school children on a racial basis is one of the practices in the United States which has been singled out for hostile foreign comment in the United Nations and elsewhere. Other peoples cannot understand how such a practice can exist in a country which professes to be a strong supporter
40
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
of freedom, justice, and democracy.” The same could be said of our practice of publicly funding charter schools with every sort of philosophical orientation, so long as not religious, and allowing parents to choose schools with any sort of motivation except those based in their deepest convictions. As I show in Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education, with my coeditors, the great majority of Western democracies — even secular France — provide public funding for religious schools selected by parents. The United States is almost alone in discriminating on the basis of religion. It is time for a new Brown-type ruling to correct this injustice to millions of families. Charles Glenn, Ed.D.’72, is a professor at Boston University. He was director of urban education and equity efforts for the Massachusetts Department of Education, where he cowrote the initial school desegregation plan for Boston. In 2012, he coedited Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education.
eat n
AUTHOR, THE OTHER BOSTON BUSING STORY
I
n 1973, the general counsel for Hartford, Conn., Alexander Goldfarb, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley. Like many urban officials at the time, Goldfarb had hoped the high court would affirm Detroit’s proposal to include its suburbs in a plan to remedy racial segregation in the public schools. “The decision here will have an enduring and critical effect upon metropolitan areas. … It will shape and structure the future relationships between city and suburb, between black and white, between poverty and wealth,” Goldfarb wrote. “State school officials have not merely acted to sanction and passively
condone interdistrict segregation. … State boards have fostered, promoted, and actively participated in the establishment of racially dual systems of public schools within the metropolitan areas of this nation.” All true, of course. Alas, the high court’s 5–4 decision would declare the suburbs sovereign. And so began the legal and practical evisceration of our universally revered but impotent Brown v. Board of Education. Middle class, mostly white families fled ever faster to prospering suburbs, securing easy loans and affordable insurance. As Goldfarb would likely have predicted, Greater Hartford and its public schools would, by the late 1970s, be the poster child for post-Milliken segregation. All-white schools, funded in large part by the state government, went up in expanding suburban white neighborhoods. A few miles away, nearly all-black or all-Latino schools opened in Hartford’s neighborhoods. But this is not where the story ends. Hartford would also become the place where Brown would be revived and live on. This year marks anniversaries for Brown and for Milliken. It also is the 25th anniversary of the filing of Brown’s direct descendant, Sheff v. O’Neill. On behalf of 19 families from the cities and the suburbs, civil rights lawyers in 1989 filed the case in Connecticut’s state courts. They argued that the racial, ethnic, and class segregation that characterized the region’s schools violated the state’s guarantee of an equal educational opportunity. By attacking segregation in state courts as opposed to federal court, lawyers made an artful end run around Milliken. They also won the case. And while the Sheff remedy did not end segregation, it does provide thousands of schoolchildren the opportunity to attend high-quality, diverse schools. Because of Sheff, there are now about three dozen magnet schools that bring together some 15,000 children from across the region for learning in integrated schools supported by a mix of local, state, and philanthropic dollars. “I always keep in mind that segregation was created by people,” says Elizabeth Horton Sheff, the case’s lead plaintiff. “And that doesn’t make me depressed. It reminds me that it can be undone by people.” Susan Eaton, Ed.D.’99, author of The Other Boston Busing Story: What’s Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line and The Children in Room E4, is the current assistant director of the One Nation Indivisible project at Harvard Law School.
BOSTON GLOBE
susan
Police in riot gear waited to escort black students who had been bused into white neighborhoods in Boston, 1974. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
41
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
hilary .
shelt n
BUREAU DIRECTOR, NAACP, WASHINGTON, D.C.
T
his May, scholars across the country commemorated the 60th anniversary of the legal milestone that determined separate educational facilities for black and white students were inherently unequal. Undoubtedly, they debated the gains made by students of color since the 1954 Supreme Court decision and pondered what the future of education looks like for African American students and others moving forward. Brown v. Board anniversaries often conjure up thoughts of a little black girl in Topeka, Kan., who traveled a seemingly insurmountable distance to attend a segregated elementary school in the 1950s, traipsing past a segregated white public school on her way. Or we think of those nine courageous African American students who integrated Little Rock High in the face of a rock-throwing, venom-spewing mob. Rarely do our minds travel to those pioneering college students who were the first to desegregate the nation’s postsecondary institutions. In the years leading up to 1954, Jim Crow presented an insurmountable barrier to college access for students of color. Today it seems that college costs are the unyielding impediment standing between students of color and a college education.
42
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
Attorneys George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP, and James Nabrit Jr., celebrate their victory in the Brown case on May 17, 1954.
A college education can seem unaffordable to a low-income family still reeling from the recession. In 2011, the Pew Research Center found that the economic collapse of 2008 decreased the wealth of white Americans by 16 percent, blacks by 50 percent, and Hispanics by two-thirds after comparing household income and asset data between 2005 and 2009. Parents in states such as Arizona, Georgia, or Washington, where college tuition and fees have rose upwards of 70 percent, have to make some tough decisions about their children’s collegiate futures and their everyday expenditures. We know that college is a must in today’s society. We know that there is a $1 million difference in high school graduates’ earnings compared with those whose highest education is a bachelor’s degree. On average, a bachelor’s degree recipient can expect to earn $2.4 million over their lifetime. Earl Warren, the Supreme Court justice who delivered the ruling for Brown v. Board, wrote, “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.” Hilary O. Shelton is Washington bureau director of the NAACP and senior vice president for advocacy. He has played an important role in ushering through major civil rights legislation, including crafting the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
jennifer AUTHOR, BOTH SIDES NOW: THE STORY OF DESEGREGATION’S GRADUATES
F
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/THOMAS O’HALLORAN
orty years later, signs of the Milliken v. Bradley decision are everywhere — evident in the crises of academic failure, near-bankruptcy, and enrollment loss in Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and many other urban cores. Policy efforts to address these trends have focused on solving these problems through privatization, choice, and accountability — “get tough” policies that blame the districts themselves for the troubles that plague them. There is little acknowledgment, however, of the core issue that the Milliken case laid bare: that the boundaries between school districts, and the competition that boundaries engender, are a key driver of educational inequality. The existence of multiple, competing school districts within metropolitan areas creates an environment in which some districts are able to attract (and “protect”) more affluent families, leaving other districts with both high needs and low tax bases. Today, school district boundaries are largely taken for granted, viewed as a natural and immutable — and inculpable — part of the educational landscape. Policymakers ignore them, choosing to take a myopic view of educational failure: Urban schools are blamed for their own problems, and the boundaries that have allowed suburbs to pull out middle class families, jobs, and wealth are viewed as largely irrelevant.
The Milliken decision shed light on these processes. As Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in his dissent, school district boundaries artificially divide up interconnected metropolitan economies into separate and unequal fiefdoms. School district lines, Marshall observed, become “fences to separate the races” and increasingly, as Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff’s work on economic segregation shows, social classes. Many herald the resurrection of cities — the rise in gentrification — with the integration of previously extremely isolated urban cores. This trend has, however, pushed many low-income families into suburbs and, in many cases, into suburbs that are poorer and more segregated than the cities that they left. The crisis facing the Riverview Gardens and Normandy school districts in suburban St. Louis highlights the challenges of such segregated suburbs: Both of these high-poverty, low-wealth, and predominately African American districts lost academic accreditation in recent years. According to the “get tough” Missouri accountability law, the African American students in these districts were given the right to transfer out of their districts into higher-performing and predominately white suburban districts, in much the way the Milliken decision would have allowed. Yet because those low-performing suburban districts shoulder the “blame” for their failures, the districts are also footing the bill and are now on the verge of going bankrupt. The solutions to these boundary problems are complex and difficult. Policy remedies must recognize, at the very least, how educational failure is related to regional inequalities within metropolitan areas and that educational reforms are, by themselves, insufficient. Jennifer Jellison Holme, Ed.M.’95, is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2009, she published Both Sides Now: The Story of Desegregation’s Graduates.
Post Brown, the Barnard Elementary School in Washington, D.C., quickly integrated in 1955. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
43
Nneamaka Enechi, Ed.M.’11, currently teaches at Brooke Charter School in Boston. She is founder of Edvigor, a nonprofit teacher-training program launching this summer in her home country, Nigeria. JILL ANDERSON
noteable Nneamaka Enechi It’s a familiar story: A child of educators aims for a different career from her parents only to realize that her path is leading her exactly where she thought it never would. “I was positive I didn’t want to be a teacher,” says Nneamaka Enechi, Ed.M.’11. Still, after college, she found herself teaching elementary English in Lagos, Nigeria, as part of the National Youth Service Corps, a compulsory year-long program for new graduates in Nigeria. “You wouldn’t believe my surprise when I caught myself actually enjoying teaching!” she says. And it grew far beyond that. “I developed a deep sense of responsibility not only toward my students but towards the greater education system in my country,” she says, noting her belief that many social issues plaguing Nigeria can be addressed through education reform. Enechi came to the Ed School to refine her understanding of teaching and learning, and to learn about what makes a successful school system, all with an eye toward bringing her knowledge back to Nigeria and building her own school. But one school, she came to realize, wouldn’t accomplish the larger goal of improving Nigeria’s education system as a whole. “The key [to reform], in my opinion, lies in the right type of teacher training and in ongoing teacher professional development,” she says. So she founded Edvigor, a nonprofit that aims to provide Nigerian teachers with the mentoring and professional support they are lacking. The idea — professional development summits organized in different parts of Nigeria and taught by experienced teachers from around the world — stemmed from Enechi’s own experience as a new teacher at 44
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
PROGRAM: Learning and Teaching
Brooke Charter School in the Mattapan section of Boston, MISSION: where new teachers prepare To quietly empower teachers for their own classrooms by by deepening their content and spending one year learning pedagogical knowledge-base from experienced educators. through targeted, hands-on “I took part in this program professional development. and cannot overstate how beneficial it was for me,” says Enechi, who currently teaches second grade at Brooke. This summer, Edvigor will launch with seminars led by a group of visiting master teachers — including Enechi — in two states in Nigeria. The theme will be “Teaching Literacy in Lower Elementary” and will aim to enhance the participants’ understanding of fundamental literacy concepts and also to give them strategies that will improve their teaching of literacy in their classrooms. “These teachers, who have no professional support whatsoever, are motivated by a remarkable commitment to improve the lots of their students,” says Enechi. “My goal is to provide these unsung heroes with the professional backing they need to improve their teaching.” If successful, Enechi’s long-term plan is to create a network of lab schools with immersion programs in which aspiring teachers learn through working closely with experienced teachers within the schools, similar to the program she participated in at Brooke. “Good teaching is the key to a child’s success,” she says. “And the truth is that, with the right training, good teaching can be replicated; great teachers can be made.” — Marin Jorgensen
alumni ne ws and notes 1968
1962
Vaughn Nelson, Ed.M., recently published the second edition of his book, Wind Energ y. He retired in 2003.
1967
Jack Miller, M.A.T., is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and has written and edited 20 books. He just released his most recent book, The Contemplative Practitioner: Meditation in Education and the Workplace.
1968
Dorothy Bambach, M.A.T., was recently presented with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Regional Director’s Honor Award for Volunteer Service in the Southeast Region. She has been volunteering for the National Wildlife Refuge System since 2000 and has logged more than 4,000 volunteer hours. David Martin, Ed.M.’61, C.A.S., recently coauthored the book The Thinking Academy, which explains in detail how an entire school’s curriculum may be infused with cognitive strategies across all subject areas.
1969
Hara Ann Bouganim, Ed.M., spent 2013 managing the process to successfully put her I.M. Pei-designed condo in southwest D.C. on the National Register of Historic Places.
1971
Fred Stokley, Ed.D., is a retired superintendent of Ridgewood, N.J., schools and now is board chair of the National
Dorothy Baumbach (right) with Cindy Dohner, Southeast regional director for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
Principals Leadership Institute in New York City. He conducted leadership training sessions for school administrators in Kuwait this spring.
1972
William Coperthwaite, Ed.D., an educator and scholar of disappearing cultures who was known for once constructing a yurt on the Ed School campus (“In the Round,” winter 2012), died in a motor vehicle accident in November 2013.
1974
Marcia Glanz, Ed.M., passed away in January after a long battle with uterine cancer. She celebrated her final weeks with a “monthlong farewell party” with family and friends, which was covered in the The New York Times (cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2014/01/13/one-womans-dyingwish-a-monthlong-farewell-party).
1975
Darrell Kipp, Ed.M., an educator who developed native language immersion schools on Blackfeet reservations in Montana (“Kipp’s Trip,” fall 2008) passed away in November 2013.
1976
Jim Hamerstone, Ed.M., worked for many years in industry but became a professor at Gettysburg College seven years ago. He was asked to create and teach a course called Women in Organizations, which then led to the book A Woman’s Framework for a Successful Career and Life.
1979
Ron Kronish, Ed.D., spoke at a special seminar at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany, in November 2013, about his work in Israel. The seminar brought together researchers and practitioners from Israel, Palestine, Yemen, Iran, Germany, the UK, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States. Also in November, Kronish gave a lecture at the ninth World Assembly of Religions for Peace and participated in the global forum on “The Image of the Other in Interreligious and Intercultural Education,” both in Vienna, Austria.
1980
Patrick McInerney, Ed.M., was recently elected as the 19th head of school at Kents Hill, a college preparatory school for grades 9 to 12 in Maine, by the school’s board of trustees. He had been serving as interim head of school since July 2013. Anne Sweeney, Ed.M., is the cochair of Disney Media Networks and president of Disney/ ABC Television Group. She will be exiting the company in January 2015 to pursue a career in television directing.
1981
George Perry Jr., Ed.M., is senior education policy adviser to the mayor of Boston, Martin Walsh. He served as education adviser to Walsh and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio during their mayoral campaigns. He is executive director emeritus of Perry and Associates, Inc., a consulting firm that assists school and district leaders in improving academic achievement of all students, and former senior consultant for the Panasonic Foundation.
1982
John Snarey, Ed.M.’81, Ed.D., was recently named the Franklin Parker Professor of Human Development and Ethics at Emory University and the Candler School of Theology. He resides in Atlanta with his wife, Carol Dunn Snarey.
1985
Patrick Barclay, Ed.M., is president of Emerging Media Information Technologies, Inc. The company recently launched the family resource The Divorce Channel Network (www.thedivorcechannelnetwork.com).
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
45
Stephen Brand, Ed.M., was recently appointed collaboratory fellow and adjunct associate professor of entrepreneurship at Olin College of Engineering.
1986
Sara Hoagland Hunter, Ed.M., has published her 10th children’s book, Every Turtle Counts, based on the annual rescue of rare sea turtles on the Cape Cod coast. It tells the story of a child on the autism spectrum, determined to save a turtle, and has been praised by autism activist Temple Grandin.
1991
Joseph Cambone, Ed.D., was named dean of the school of education at Salem State University in Massachusetts. He most recently served as senior associate dean for strategy and innovation and associate professor in Lesley University’s Graduate School of Education.
Edgar (Gary) Taylor, Ed.M., married Karen Shipley Taylor after graduating from HGSE. They have three wonderful kids: Charlie (17), Wendy (14), and Theo (11). He worked for 20 years as a prep school teacher and administrator in Maryland and Connecticut, until 2008 when he answered “the call” and went to seminary in Virginia. In 2012 he was ordained an Epsicopal priest and has served as a school chaplain in Delaware since then. Recently he was named the head of school at Trinity Episcopal School in New Orleans to begin July 1, 2014. Shari Tishman, Ed.D.’91, has stepped down after five years as director of Project Zero. Tishman, a lecturer at the Ed School, will continue to focus on her Project Zero research projects and teaching. She will also remain on the Project Zero steering committee.
1995
Phyllis Gimbel, Ed.M., recently published a book on school leadership, with coauthor Lenesa Leana, titled
Healthy Schools: The Hidden Component of Teaching and Learning. She is an associate professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.
Jay Gabler, Ed.M., works as a digital producer at 89.3 The Current, a Minnesota Public Radio station.
2000
1996
Joni Jay, Ed.M., has announced that she will retire as principal of Nixon Elementary School in Sudbury, Mass., at the end of the current school year. Alexander Parker, Ed.M., is founder of the New Book Press, which recently released WordPlay Shakespeare, an enhanced eBook series for tablets that places the complete text of the plays alongside filmed performances with professional Shakespearean actors (thenewbookpress.com).
1997
1998
Jason Wingard, Ed.M., was recently named chief learning officer of Goldman Sachs in New York. Previously, he served as vice dean of executive education at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Timothy Lannon, Ed.M.’96, Ed.D., recently announced that he will retire from the presidency of Creighton University at the end of the 2014–15 academic year.
2002
Parth Sarwate, Ed.M., recently founded UrbanThink, offering consulting, capacity building, and organizational change services in four domains: education reform, people development, architecture and interiors, and urban solutions.
2005
Louie Rodríguez, Ed.M.’99, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D., recently released the book The Time Is Now: Understanding and Responding to the Black and Latina/o Dropout Crisis in the U.S. (see page 21).
inmemor y Albert Ullman, Ed.M.’41 William Brink, M.A.T.’42 William Clement Kvaraceus, Ed.M.’36, Ed.D.’43 Paul Hennessey, Ed.M.’51 Albert Knaus Jr., M.A.T.’52 Otto John Mertz, M.A.T.’52 Thomas Hilton, GSE’53 Earl Koile, Ed.M.’47, Ed.D.’53 Jane McCammon, M.A.T.’53 Anne Valsing, Ed.M.’53 Doris Billings Van Vactor, M.A.T.’54 Elizabeth Manson Whitney, Ed.M.’55 John Deady, Ed.D.’56 Joan Holmstrom Devney, M.A.T.’56
Frank Perkins Jr., M.A.T.’56 Lois Wien, M.A.T.’56 Lorraine Marie Sullivan, Ed.D.’57 Richard Otis Ulin, M.A.T.’42, Ed.M.’49, Ed.D.’58 John Richards II, M.A.T.’59 Rosemary O’Connell, Ed.M.’53, C.A.S.’61 Mark Weston, M.A.T.’63 Peter Benelli, Ed.M.’64 Mary Pillsbury Brown, Ed.M.’64 Rose Halligan, Ed.M.’64 G. Ernest Anderson Jr., M.A.T.’55, Ed.D.’65 Gertrude Hirsch, GSE’65 Niilo Emil Koponen, Ed.D.’66 Darrel McOmber, Ed.M.’66
James Lawson, Ed.M.’67 Catherine Barry Thoburn, Ed.M.’52, C.A.S.’67 Joseph Mascetta, C.A.S.’70 John Sullivan Jr., M.A.T.’62, C.A.S.’66, Ed.D.’70 William Coperthwaite, Ed.D.’72 Marcia Glanz, Ed.M.’74 Phyllis Markowitz, Ed.M.’74 Darrell Kipp, Ed.M.’75 Jacob Thompson, Ed.M.’81 Francis Edgar Walker Jr., Ed.M.’83 Frances Williamson, Ed.M.’87 Christopher Hollern, Ed.M.’91 Eileen Dunne, GSE’00 Jean Monroe Farrell, Ed.M.’06
2010
2006
Moria Cappio, Ed.M., was appointed vice president for early childhood programs at the Children’s Aid Society, a nonprofit in New York City which provides educational and social services to children and families in New York City’s neediest neighborhoods.
2007
Masum Momaya, Ed.M.’02, Ed.D., is currently living and working in Washington, D.C., as a curator at the Smithsonian. Her first exhibition, Beyond Bollywood, is about how Indian immigrants and Indian Americans have shaped American history. It’s showing at the National Museum of Natural History through August 15, 2015. She hopes some of her fellow HGSE alums in the D.C., area and around the country will come see it! Camille Aragon, Ed.M., has recently accepted an appointment as the literacy specialist for the United States Peace Corps. Her duties include developing resources and training packages, and providing support and guidance to posts worldwide where volunteers are serving as literacy educators. She is also dedicated to sharing mindfulness practices and teaches yoga at several studios in Washington, D.C. She has also taught yoga at the White House Athletic Center, Peace Corps, and the Secret Service. Eyenga Bokamba, Ed.M., was recently appointed as the new director of Sprockets, St. Paul, Minnesota’s citywide out-of-school time network by Mayor Chris Coleman. “Sprockets is a vibrant example of the community coming together to improve the lives of young people, and I’m thrilled to be a part of that,” she writes.
“I look forward to working with the broad range of stakeholders who are invested in Sprockets to build on our past successes to create an even stronger future for Saint Paul’s youth.”
Dylan Bellino, son of Lindsay Bellino
2008
Nick Applebaum, Ed.M., was appointed the board of trustees of the Ross Institute. Lizzy Kim, Ed.M., published her first children’s book, A Day with Sandy the Fiddler Crab, in English and Korean, along with an activity book for the 2013 Suncheon Bay Garden Expo Korea, which was distributed internationally through the public library network. She is founder, storybook developer, and character designer at Imagine Pops. Daniel Wilson, Ed.M.’94, Ed.D., is the new director of Project Zero, replacing Lecturer Shari Tishman, Ed.D.’91. Wilson, a lecturer at the Ed School, is a principal investigator at Project Zero and the educational chair at Harvard’s Learning Environments for Tomorrow.
2010
Lindsay Bellino, Ed.M., welcomed her first son, Dylan Anthony Talley Bellino, on January 26. Michael Holt, Ed.M., took advantage of Federal WorkStudy grants to hire 12 bilingual math and ELL tutors to support his faculty at Albert Einstein Middle School in Sacramento, Calif., where he is the vice principal. He also hired four essay graders to support writing instruction and tripled the counseling staff through interns. The school is also flying 12 teachers to New York for the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking.
Kenneth Offricht, Ed.M., recently released his first book, Overcoming Your Parents, a self-help memoir in which he shares the tools he has used coaching clients and his results.
2012
2013
LaToya Harrison, Ed.M.’08, Ed.M.’09, Ed.D., has founded Soar Education, Inc., a nonprofit which provides free tutoring programs, social supports, and academic enrichment to students in disadvantaged schools.
Susan Cecilia Merenda, Ed.M., got married in August 2013 to Alex Taussig, a Harvard College and Harvard Business School alum. Fabiane Noronha, Ed.M.’12, Sarah Sprague, Ed.M.’12, and Jackie Coleman, Ed.M.’11, were bridesmaids.
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
47
r eces s
Covered How did the school’s magazine cover desegregation over the years? In the 1962 issue (then called the Bulletin), there was a small piece about how two graduates, Ruth Turner, M.A.T.’62, and Jean Bennett, M.A.T.’62, spent the summer holding classes in a converted church for black children in Prince Edward County, Va. The public schools in Prince Edward had been closed since 1959 because of “massive resistance” to desegregation, as Leslie “Skip” Griffin Jr., Ed.M.’74, writes about in his essay for this issue (see page 24). Two years later, the winter 1964–1965 issue was devoted to “education and race relations” and included essays on social psychology and racial balance and another look at Prince Edward County, this time by Neil Sullivan, Ed.D.’57, a New York superintendent who took a leave of absence in 1963 to become superintendent — at the request of then-attorney general Robert Kennedy — of a privately funded Prince Edward Free School. The experience was challenging, starting with the fact that he had to hire 100 professional staff members in just 10 days. At times, even life threatening. As a 2005 Washington Post obituary for Sullivan said of that time, “Sullivan’s home was shot at, the roof of his white Buick convertible was slashed, and he fielded threatening phone calls at all hours. ‘It was a living hell,’ he later said.” 48
ED.
• SUMMER 2014 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED
A decade later, the Ed School again tackled desegregation, this time with a case study of Boston, which had, since June 1974, become a public and legal battleground over busing. This included four pieces written by alumni, including an interview with Gregory Anrig, M.A.T.’56, Ed.D.’63, the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education who had succeeded Neil Sullivan, who served in the commonwealth from 1969 to 1972. Again, in 2000, the Bulletin revisited busing in Boston and talked about the prominent role Ed School alumni activists and faculty members like Professor emeritus Chuck Willie and former dean Francis Keppel played in the trying to make progress in the city at the time. Finally, in 2006, the magazine, by then renamed Ed., took a critical look at school resegregation, more than 50 years after Brown v. Board. As then-Dean Kathleen McCartney wrote in her introduction to the issue, “Across the nation, districts — often due to court orders — are removing racial considerations as they populate schools. Some argue that desegregation is no longer necessary in today’s society, while others fear a return to the days of separate and decidedly unequal education.” — Lory Hough
in v es ti n g Venturing Out
JILL ANDERSON
When Ruth Moorman and Sheldon Simon decided to host a dinner for a dean from Stanford Graduate School of Education, they never expected to make a Harvard connection. But when the couple met thenDean Kathleen McCartney at the dinner, their interest in the Ed School was piqued. McCartney spoke about the school’s Doctorate of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) Program, which at the time was accepting applications for its inaugural cohort. “We saw the Ed.L.D. as a game-changer,” Moorman says. The program “was serious about practice in a way that doesn’t often happen at education schools.” Simon and Moorman are longtime supporters of education programs at Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania. “We had developed a belief that our commitment to education could be best served by investing in schools of education,” he says. After meeting McCartney and hearing about the Ed.L.D.’s unique combination of interdisciplinary courses and practical experience, the couple sponsored a student in the program’s first cohort. “We should support educational leaders the way we support business leaders,” Moorman explains. “The Ed.L.D. Program has already produced some unique educational leaders.” With the program in its fourth year and thriving, Moorman and Simon began to look for other ways to invest in the Ed School. As the Ed School prepares to launch its capital campaign this fall, Dean James Ryan is raising seed money for the Dean’s Venture Fund, which allows him to provide faculty members with the resources to launch new collaborative projects. Moorman and Simon are committed to supporting the Dean’s Venture Fund and following the progress of the initiatives it will underwrite. “Being a dean often means putting some of your own research aside,” Moorman says. “Jim wants to pursue the
projects he’s excited about, but he also wants to bring everyone together. He invites everyone to participate.” Simon agrees. “This isn’t about commercial applications, the way a start-up venture fund might be. This is about the Ed School leading the charge, being innovative in an academic way, and then applying those changes to the education system. We can’t keep relying on the old models to improve education.” The couple hopes that the Ed School will become a laboratory for innovative ideas, which will be tested in Cambridge and then spread to urban areas and school districts, starting in Boston and eventually expanding across the country and the world. “The education school is really that intersection of people, practice, and policy,” Moorman says. “It’s where everyone should meet.” “The new Harvard is very inclusive,” Simon adds. “Alumni and non-alumni, people from across the campus — everyone has a place at the table. Jim is building a community of learners and researchers. It’s about community and collaboration.” — Katie Gibson HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
49
Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 13 Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02138
Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Holliston, MA Permit No. 20
Where’s Ed.? Tom Menino may have hidden behind his copy of Ed. magazine in January, but the former Boston mayor was anything but shy when he visited Lecturer Rick Weissbourd’s J-term class this past winter to talk candidly to students about his 20 years as mayor, how he wishes he had done additional things for city schools, and why we need to start thinking more about kids and families, and less about numbers.
To read Ed. online, go to gse.harvard.edu/ed
JILL ANDERSON
Using Instagram? Post your pics reading Ed. using the #wheresED hashtag. Using email? Send them to classnotes@gse.harvard.edu.