Ed. Magazine, Winter 2012

Ed.

InsiderJokerhealer Protectorstatesman mediaMogulMindRea derwordsmithstorm the seerstorytellerthe unexpecteds insiderunexpecteds jokerhealerprotec torstatesmanmedia mogulmindreaderw ordsmithstormseer storytellerinsider jokerhealerprotec the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education winter 2012

schools and data | homework dilemma | a Tintin fan

the big picture

the appian way

December 2011 This Ed School space looks familiar, yet it doesn’t. A working fireplace? Fancy couches? Is this really the first floor of Gutman Library?

The answers would be yes, yes, and seriously yes. For the past few months, the school’s library space has been under renovation. Most of what was on the first floor, including the circulation desk, was moved to the redesigned second floor, along with many of the offices, books, and magazines. The new first floor, as seen in this artist’s rendering, is slated to become a much-needed community center with lounges, flexible meeting spaces, comfy couches, fireplaces, a cafe with a pizza oven, and an outdoor terrace. The space is scheduled to be ready by the end of February.

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Harvard Graduate School of Education

Baker design group, inc.

Check out additional images.

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28 Statistical Significance

features

Data has been playing a bigger and bigger role in the U.S. education system. Some schools have figured out how to use these numbers to make important changes. Others, however, are left inundated and paralyzed by the overwhelming amount of information now available.

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Not What You Expected?

Principals, superintendents, teachers, education entrepreneurs, policymakers. The Ed School has produced thousands of graduates who go on to great careers in education fields. But a comedian?

An NPR talk show host? A meteorologist? Yup, we have those, too.

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Are You Down With or Done With Homework?

Assigning homework to students is a given in most American public schools. But is too much homework, especially for younger kids, leaving students overloaded, underplayed, and missing out on valuable family time?

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a click away

stories and links found only online www.gse.harvard.edu

16 departments

If you want to know when and how students use support systems offered by schools and in the community, why not ask students themselves to do the research? This is what doctoral student Gretchen Brion-Meisels, Ed.M.’11, did last summer as part of her dissertation fieldwork. In a story about her project, she talks about giving young people a voice.

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Pushback The Appian Way Alumni News and Notes Recess Investing

48 senior writer/editor Lory Hough lory_hough@harvard.edu production manager/editor Marin Jorgensen marin_jorgensen@harvard.edu designer Paula Telch Cooney paula_telch@harvard.edu Director of Communications Michael Rodman michael_rodman@harvard.edu Communications intern Rachael Apfel

contributing writers Jill Anderson Rachael Apfel Kevin Boehm, Ed.M.’07 David McKay Wilson Mark Robertson, Ed.M.’08 Mary Tamer Amy Magin Wong

He’s been on CNN, The Early Show, and Charlie Rose. And, in October, Sal Khan was on the Harvard EdCast talking about his popular website that provides easy-tounderstand video lessons, primarily in math and science subjects. Asked about his relaxed style and now-recognizable voice, Khan said, “I try to talk in a voice that wouldn’t annoy me if I were a student.”

events www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/events twitter www.twitter.com/hgse facebook www.facebook.com/harvardeducation youtube www.youtube.com/harvardeducation flickr www.flickr.com/photos/harvardeducation issuu www.issuu.com/harvardeducation foursquare www.foursquare.com/hgse

illustrators Jessica Esch Otto Steininger Daniel Vasconcellos

copyeditor Abigail Mieko Vargus

© 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Ed. magazine is published three times a year. Third-class postage paid at Holliston, Mass. and additional offices.

photographers Jill Anderson Kathleen Dooher Elena Gormley Michael Rodman Martha Stewart

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 44R Brattle Street Cambridge, MA 02138

To read Ed. online, go to www.gse.harvard.edu/ed.

As a fellow graduate who has made a similar journey from the backwoods of southeast Arkansas (“The Road Taken,” fall 2011), I am deeply encouraged by David Wilson’s dazzling insight and yeoman’s vision for the next generation of millennium pioneers.

— M.A. Fitchue, Ed.M.’74

Inspiring Others David Wilson, Ed.M.’84, Ed.D.’87, the Morgan family appreciates your hard work and dedication to excellence. Your life story reflects the very best in the African American slavery-to-freedom tradition.

— Roderick Ford I am so delighted to read the story of David Wilson. This story is, of course, similar to my father’s story. I am proud of the struggle they had; that is why it became so much easier for our generation.

— Shiva Ram Neupane It is incredible that God choose David for this mission and a miracle David is still hungry and humble enough to continue on the mission! He set the bar so high in our family that many of us just want to make him feel proud of us because we are so proud of him.

— Terry Walker President Wilson, it was very interesting to read about your experiences in Alabama. I would have never guessed that you had experienced such an interesting yet humble beginning. God truly had his hands on you to bring you this far. Your parents are smiling at the 4

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baby from heaven. I especially liked the part about your father giving you five dollars. What a wonderful man. I know he’s very proud of you. Thank you for being open. I enjoyed seeing how down to earth you are when I saw [the photograph of] you with your shoes in your hand.

— Yvette Brown

Good Smarty Stuff Well said (“Truce Be Told,” fall 2011)!

I think the improved understanding of Wikipedia’s potential role in the research process among educators has come about because educators have developed a more informed understand-

ing of what it is and is not. An increase in the accuracy of its articles should not play a role; the fact remains, as Jimmy Wales said, that no one should fully rely on it, ever. As Chris Kyle said, if you don’t know who wrote something, you cannot properly evaluate it.

— Mark Moran Love this! As I blogged last year, Wikipedia is not wicked, and with truthiness and the belief in the power of crowdsourcing, we get more: more information, more resources, more good smarty stuffs. What librarian (or teacher, or student, or informed human) doesn’t like that?

— Gwyneth Jones

pushback

Space Constraints

Son Shine

The article “No Dragons Behind the Moat” (fall 2011) deals with only part of the interior space problem created by the design of Larsen Hall. The idea of movable inner walls vanished quickly — if anyone ever believed in it.

The guiding concept was one proposed

by John Whiting, a social anthropologist and director of the Human Development Program. Whiting ran one of the most intellectually lively programs, built around daily brown bag lunches at which faculty, students, and visiting speakers discussed their work.

He called these gatherings the “water hole” — anthropological jargon for a central place where community talk is exchanged. He further thought that this idea should be built into the design of Larsen Hall, with each program having its own water hole. But … the effect was to construct a building that turned each program in on itself and walled off from the others. The building simply reinforced the separation of programs that had previously existed in the separate locations of the small dwellings.

— Robert Dreeben, M.A.T.’54

Chris, you continue to make us proud to say that you are our son (“A to B Chris Buttimer Found That Greed Isn’t Good,” fall 2011)! We know how hard you are working to make a difference to improve public education for all future students. Keep up your good works!

— Mom and Dad Buttimer Daniel Vasconcellos

Sound Structure This (alumni profile, Rena Upitis, Ed.D.’85, fall 2011) is so inspiring!

It’s really important to consider the structure of school buildings. Space is needed to provide good teaching services to students. If it’s time to reconstruct and renovate, then it should be done right away.

— Wilmer Geraci

Submitting Letters Humorist Josh Billings once said, “There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.” So be powerful — tell us what you think about something you’ve read in Ed. — but also humor us and keep it under 150 words. letters@gse.harvard.edu Harvard Graduate School of Education

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briget ganske

elena gormley

elena brigetgormley ganske

the appian way

lecturehall Assistant Professor Felipe Barrera-Osorio

F

elipe Barrera-Osorio says his upbringing in Colombia wasn’t typical. His father graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. in engineering, and his college-educated mother helped spark in her children a long-lasting love for learning.

Through them, Barrera-Osorio also learned about public service and the importance of investing talent and energy for the greater good, as his father had done by returning to Colombia after Cambridge to help the country tackle various problems. In September, Barrera-Osorio spoke to Ed. about I try to apply how his parents influenced his thinking, his recent move from the World Bank in Washington, economic D.C., and his love for a comic book character with a dog named Snowy.

You’re an economist. Why education?

I try to apply economic tools to analyze education problems. I believe education is one of the most powerful institutions to level the field for so many people.

Your research in places like Pakistan is, in some ways, your public service.

For the last four years, I have been doing research on the effects of a program in Punjab, Pakistan. The government is creating a partnership with the private sector to provide good, quality education to low-income individuals.

The government provides financial resources for each kid enrolled in the private partner school, but schools have to show continuous student performance improvements, measured by a standardized test. There are also bonuses for teachers and schools.

What is your research looking at?

Three fundamental questions: First, can this program increase the enrollment rate, especially for low-income individuals? Second, are the schools in the program delivering higher performance, measured by individual test results, vis-à-vis similar schools that do not belong to the program? Third, when there are financial incentives attached to performance, do we see certain actions in the schools, such as teaching to the test or selecting only the best students? Our results, so far, have been quite impressive. These schools are receiving more students than similar schools, and there is evidence of real gains in student test performance.

What drives better test scores?

This is the new area of my research.

Results show that schools at risk of losing benefits react in a fast and quite effective way, improving performance from one academic period to the next.

In other words, “stick” incentives work.

However, it is unclear what type of actions the schools are taking to improve.

They haven’t changed the composition or type of teachers, increased inputs, or selected better students. It seems that, with the same resources, they are able to increase efficiency.

You have another project in Uganda?

Uganda is facing another type of problem. Thanks to the free education policy, classrooms in public schools are overcrowded and the quality of education is low. The government is exploring several policy options, including the creation of double shifts. The double shift is a polemic measure. On one hand, on average, systems with longer school hours have higher test scores on international tests like PISA. On the other hand, very large class sizes are correlated with low performance. I am working on a randomized experiment to assess what happens when schools go from one to two shifts.

You’ve had your own shift. How is life at Harvard different than the World Bank?

Managing my time. Last week was my first week here and I said to myself, “I need to be a lot more disciplined.”

Here there is a lot of freedom. You decide how to use your time.

“

tools to

Your dad was a big influence, but analyze your mom also education shaped you. How? Two months after problems.” my father died, when I was nine, my mother received her college degree in psychology at the age of 36. While working full time, she raised her three sons, alone, yet she was also very present in our lives. And she made the ordinary special. She’d cook our favorite meals. She made sure she ate with us every day. She didn’t do “extraordinary” deeds, but these everyday actions made very extraordinary statements. I am a father of two, in a household with two adults, and I barely can cope. My mother built a household that teemed with security. Nowadays, when I think about her, I think about being secure. About being loved.

Your Facebook profile picture is from Tintin. You’re a fan?

When my mother entered the university, I was in kindergarten. She would pick me up at daycare at noon. We came home, ate lunch, and then read.

All sorts of books. Among my favorites was Tintin. We read it over and over.

And my father used to read to us articles from the Britannica, probably way above my understanding. Now that I have my two sons, three and five, I read even more diverse books with them: Verne, Rowling, Tolkien, Feynman, you name it. And, of course, Tintin.

— Lory Hough Harvard Graduate School of Education

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the appian way

The Ball Is in Their Court

Ben Collier

Richard Polsky, M.A.T.’56, has long known that keeping the attention of kids isn’t always easy. He first saw it as a middle school teacher in Long Island, just after he graduated from the Ed School, then again as a staff member at the Children’s Television Workshop, where he used a machine called the Distracter to monitor whether preschoolers watching test versions of what would become Sesame Street were focused. These days, he sees it with the students he tutors twice a week at the Harlem-based nonprofit that his son, George, started a dozen years ago.

StreetSquash high school But this time, Polsky students take a break at the SL Green StreetSquash has something on his side: Community Center. squash. Not the vegetable, but the high-speed racquet game played with a hollow rubber ball. His son’s nonprofit, StreetSquash, not only helps students with schoolwork, but it also teaches them a game that allows them to channel all of their teenage energy. And it’s intense. The students join the program in the sixth grade and commit for the entire academic year, for three days a week after school (academic tutoring and squash practice) and for a few hours every Saturday (more squash or community service and tutoring, if needed). Most of the 160 students stay with the program until they graduate seven years later.

StreetSquash also helps students get into college, starting with paid tutors and volunteers like Polsky, who help students with homework every week. Volunteers are also assigned a 12th-grader to closely mentor for the year.

“I tell him or her, ‘If I’m working with you, we’re going to be successful,’” says Polsky of his mentee. “You have to let them know what excellence is. At StreetSquash, every kid who wants to go to college goes.” So far, every student who has completed the program has graduated from high school and has gone on to college.

Starting in ninth grade, students also get help figuring out which colleges are the best fit, and then learn how to apply, meet deadlines, and write the all-important essay. They practice for the PSAT and SAT. By senior year, in addition to being assigned a mentor, students get targeted college help from the staff.

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“We help them go on interviews, prepare for open houses, and fill out financial aid paperwork. Everything from start to finish,” says Sareen Pearl, Ed.M.’07, director of StreetSquash’s College Prep Program. And “finish” doesn’t mean help ends after the students graduate from the program.

“Staff from our Alumni Outreach Program make regular calls to students once they’re in college, visit them on campus, help them find jobs at school, and help them navigate the school’s resources,” says Pearl. “Early on, we found that so many students were underprepared and struggled once they got to college. We asked, ‘Why are we doing all of this — helping them get to college — if they’re not able to complete their education?’” To date, about 85 percent of StreetSquash alumni are still in college or have graduated.

And it’s this education that really matters, says George Polsky, who modeled StreetSquash on SquashBusters, a similar program started a few years earlier in Boston by another Harvard alum, Gregory Zaff, whom he met in 1997 when the two were involved with the U.S. squash team at the Maccabiah Games.

“Whether or not a student can hit a great forehand isn’t important. Whether or not a kid ends up being a great squash player doesn’t really matter,” he says. “What matters is getting a great education.”

— Lory Hough

atob

Kevin Boehm Is Back

When I was younger, my dream was to be a professional baseball player, either for my hometown Red Sox, or the team that my parents had grown up loving, the New York Mets. Unfortunately, at the age of 14, I was cut from my high school baseball team and realized I might have to consider an alternate career plan. But what?

My mother was, and still is, an elementary school teacher. Every day, she would come home from work with stories about fun activities, curious questions, and adorable observations the kids had made. One of my favorites was a student mispronouncing our last name, referring to her as “Mrs. Bones.”

I began to consider becoming an elementary teacher so that I could one day come home with stories of my own. As I applied to colleges, I looked for those that had reputable teaching programs. I began at Hofstra University in the fall of 2001 as a dual major in mathematics and elementary education. After a semester of early morning classes where we discussed things such as imaginary numbers, I decided that math was not actually the route for me. I made a similar decision about elementary education after my first elementary ed class; we were asked to pretend that we were inside a cave where the lights flickered on for just a few moments, and then to use the crayons, markers, and colored pencils that were strewn about the tables to draw what we had seen in those few moments.

This was not what I was looking for.

I started thinking about the time I worked at a local summer camp and how much I enjoyed being with upper middle school students. They were at the perfect age where they understood what it meant to follow rules, but also had a bit of fun while doing so. I signed on to become a secondary education major. My senior year of college, I was placed into a seventh-grade classroom to do my student teaching.

The kids were great, but I had a major problem: I found some of their “bad behaviors” to be funny! I easily pictured myself sitting at their desks 10 years earlier doing the exact same things. Now I was supposed to be the person saying, “Don’t shout out answers in the middle of class,” or “don’t try to make your friend laugh when he is reading something aloud,” or “no, you may not go to the bathroom — again.” I struggled with the need to discipline and was unsure that this was the path I wanted to go down.

I graduated as a 22-year-old with a degree and no idea where to go.

I decided to return to the metalworking factory not far from where I grew up, where I had been employed during

daniel vasconcellos

summers in college. Resizing bolts, bending metal safety shields, and drilling holes into pieces of metal that would be put together to create hoists was how I spent my weekdays from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.

And then something happened. While working there, many of my coworkers told me that they had ended up in the factory because they had dropped out of school. This really began to open my eyes to the power of education. I decided to go back to school and see where I could make a difference. I entered the master’s program at the Ed School.

During the spring semester, I participated in an internship in the Office of Student Affairs. Through this work I was able to discover my true passion: working with college and graduate students and assisting them in becoming wellrounded individuals with a wide range of experiences, both in and out of the classroom.

I may not be in a classroom myself, but working at the Ed School, I am interacting with a broad range of people to hopefully make their educational experience here positive, knowing that these people are graduating and going out to shape education on many different levels. Now that I am fully immersed in the world of education, I cannot picture myself being anywhere else.

— Kevin Boehm, Ed.M.’07, is the assistant director of the Ed School’s Office of Student Affairs. Going back to school had an added bonus for him: He met his wife, Laura Potenski, Ed.M.’07, when she was also getting her master’s. She is an eighth-grade special education teacher. And collection Mrs. Bones is happyPart her ofsonJewell-Sherman’s is once again working with students.

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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the appian way

The American Teacher

american teacher

A new documentary looks at pervasive views on teacher pay and perception

American Teacher

A new documentary looks at teacher pay and perception For teacher Rhena Jasey, having a starring role in a nationally released documentary is one thing, but having actor Matt Damon say your name is completely another.

“It’s been really exciting,” says Jasey, one of the educators profiled in Nínive Calegari’s new documentary, American Teacher, which premiered in New York City on September 25.

“Matt Damon said my name twice in the film. My aunt said maybe I could make that the greeting on my phone.”

But for Jasey, this film is about much more than excitement: It’s about validation.

“It’s rewarding that someone is recognizing all of the hard work it takes to be a teacher, and it was fun to go to my Harvard reunion and say, ‘I’m going to be in a movie. I’m not married and I don’t have any babies, but I’m going to be in a movie,’” she says. “It’s also great to see my doctor and lawyer friends excited, finally, about me being a teacher.”

Why did that excitement, mostly from Jasey’s Harvard College peers, take so long? It is one of the questions that former teacher Calegari, Ed.M.’95, tried to address as coproducer of the film.

“We really want to change American culture,” Calegari says. More specifically, she wants to change the perception, prestige, and pay scale of teachers, which is not an easy task in a post–Waiting for “Superman” world.

Narrated by Damon, directed by Academy Award– winning director Vanessa Roth, and produced by Calegari and author Dave Eggers, American Teacher delves significantly deeper into some of the questions raised, but not answered, in last year’s Superman. Among them? How the United States 10

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will address the retirement of more than half the nation’s teaching force in the next decade and attract new talent to a field that pays far below the private sector. (Jasey, for example, earned about $50,000 annually after six years teaching in the South Orange/Maplewood School District in New Jersey, which is in accord with the national average.)

Based on the book Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers by Calegari, Eggers, and Daniel Moulthrop, the film is one part of the Teacher Salary Project, which aims to shine a light on the undervaluation of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers. To illustrate this point, four educators, including Jasey, share their universal stories of success, challenge, and, in two instances, departures from jobs they love.

“When I was teaching, I thought no one was happier than me. I could not believe how rewarding it was, but I felt the outside community didn’t realize how sophisticated the job was,” says Calegari, who taught for nearly a decade before cofounding 826 Valencia, a nonprofit organization that supports both teachers and students in writing skills.

“I felt the burn of America’s ambivalent feelings about it.

Some people had a sense it was important work, while others didn’t. Meanwhile, I married someone who graduated from an M.B.A. program right at the start of the dotcom boom, and he and his peers were all being offered these six-figure salaries. I love innovation and I think technology is important, but the fact that I couldn’t even go to a friend’s wedding because I couldn’t afford it on my teacher’s salary …

Something seemed very wrong to me.”

Calegari was not alone in her pursuit of this project, and found support among fellow Ed School graduates including board members Louise Grotenhuis, Ed.M.’95, and Ellen Gordon Reeves, Ed.M.’86; Mark Kushner, Ed.M.’95, who helped Calegari find one of the teachers profiled; and 2005 National Teacher of the Year Jason Kamras, Ed.M.’00, who holds the distinction of appearing in both American Teacher and Superman.

Kamras, who currently serves as the chief of human capital for the District of Columbia Public Schools, has a varied perspective echoed today by many inside and outside education: While great teachers may be underpaid, new evaluation criteria are critical to determine appropriate salary levels.

“Sometimes folks in education do ourselves damage when we say everyone should be getting more money regardless of what is happening in the classroom,” says Kamras. As for the perception problem? “The reality is the top third of college graduates do not go into teaching, it is usually the bottom third,” he says. “It is still not perceived as professional or as respected or as important as going into medicine or law or science … so it is not, on average, attracting the top. But the caveat is there are great people going into the profession every day and doing great things for kids. Rhena shows us that.

“Going forward, one of the ways to address this and to change the perception is to be honest about the profession and to be concrete,” says Kamras. “We have to be able to stand up and say, ‘Those who are not doing a great job have got to go.’ What attracts great people is other great people.

The way we can create that cycle in schools is to make sure we have the best and not tolerate anything less. If we do that, I’ll be at the front of the line saying we have to pay people more. That is what we have tried to do here in D.C. Not only do we give out annual bonuses of up to $25,000, but we also move people up the salary scale — their base salaries — in some cases by more than $20,000. When you attach the dollars and it shows what you value, it does show prestige, and it goes hand-in-hand with saying, ‘We are not going to tolerate mediocrity.’”

As for Jasey, who left her public school job in New Jersey for a $125,000-per-year teaching post at a charter school in New York, she is hopeful that American Teacher will promote dialogue and impart “a new appreciation for how complicated and how difficult the job is, as well as the broad range of talent required to do it well.

“I’m lucky because I use so many of my strengths throughout the day and I want people to come away with that understanding that this is more than babysitting.

Someone is showing the world what we do and the impact we have,” says Jasey, who holds two master’s degrees.

“Teaching is a real profession that requires an intense amount of expertise.”

— Mary Tamer is a Boston-based freelance writer and a frequent contributor to Ed. — Go to www.theteachersalaryproject.org to watch a clip of this film.

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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the appian way

studybreak Maung Ting Nyeu, Ed.M. candidate Program:

Human Develop ment and Psychology Tool for Cha n

the poor

ge: A

school for

Hometown:

Indigenous com munities of Hill Tracts, B angladesh

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martha stewart

H

e remembers waking up on a hillside in the remote mountainous area of Bangladesh known as the Chittagong Hill Tracts with mosquitos buzzing in his ear and wondering what was going to happen to him and his family. The day before, they had heard gunshots followed by the village headman, as he was known, yelling for everyone to run. So Maung Ting Nyeu ran into the jungle with his mother, brother, and baby sister. When darkness fell, they moved to the hillside. The next morning, they saw smoke rising. Their village and a nearby temple had been burned. He was six years old. By the time he was a teenager, the violence that marred that area of the country had increased, leaving his mother no choice but to give this advice: Get out. “My mother said to me, if you want to survive, you need to get out of this hell,” Nyeu says. But as the son of a poor tribal farming family, he didn’t know how. His dad told him to study hard. “So I put my heart into learning,” Nyeu says. “In the end, education didn’t change my life. It saved my life.” And he got out. But his heart is still in Bangladesh, so now he’s trying to save the lives of other indigenous tribal children with the Padamu Residential Education Centre, a primary school that he opened with a local monk on the grounds of a Buddhist temple.

Against all odds, you got a master’s in engineer-

Number of televisions in your entire village: 1

ing and an M.B.A., both in the United States. Why

How television is powered: Batteries

return home to a difficult life?

In the Hill Tracts, the percentage of people who have a primary education — just up to grade five — is 28 percent, and that is based on whether or not you can sign your name. I realized that the next generation of kids, particularly those who had been living in refugee camps in India and returned home with one or no parents, had not gone to school. Many had lost their homes and had no way to survive since my people live off of the land. I had seen the world, but so many [back home] had nothing. I had a responsibility to help these kids get at least a basic education to have a glimpse of what was possible.

Your school is near a small town because …

Why don’t children go to school?

How will you get by without Internet access?

r3Few schools

Using my computer background to build a server with Wi-Fi. Once a month, we will go to the nearest town with an Internet cafe, download new material on a disc, and upload it to our server. When an XO computer is in the proximity of the server, it will download that information. It’s possible.

3 Huge distances between schools and villages r 3 r Parents need help at home r3 Severely limited resources Initially, you earned a full scholarship as a teen-

In remote areas, there is no electricity. In Bardanban, there is a limited supply of electricity.

Plus we have access to a compounder — a medical assistant. In remote areas, it can take half a day to get medical help.

The XO computers from One Laptop Per Child you are trying to get for each student are:

3 Rugged r3Low-cost r 3 Battery and solar powered r r Free

ager to a boarding school far from home. You went alone. How did you get there?

Walking, a boat, two buses, a taxi, and a rickshaw.

The Golden Hour. Why? In medicine, if someone gets injured, there’s a window of time, maybe a few minutes to two hours, where if the person can get to the ER, the chances of survival increases. For our children, their golden hour is between the ages of 4 or 5 and 12. If we don’t get them in school during this time, we won’t get them at all.

Your nonprofit is called

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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the appian way

Cambridge to Jo’burg During his time as a student at the Ed School, Al Witten, Ed.M.’02, Ed.M.’03, Ed.D.’10, always dreamed of taking something back to South Africa that would be bigger than himself and the degree he obtained. He dreamed of returning with something that held larger implications for his country, something with the potential to create change. In the end, that “something” was a piece of the Ed School itself.

The project, which started in 2010, is called the Education Leadership Initiative. Inspired by Witten’s vision, it is a joint collaboration between the Ed School and the faculty of education at the University of Johannesburg that aims to improve the quality of schooling and raise the standards of South African school leaders through ongoing support and training. While the project consists of three tiers, the Ed School is primarily involved within the leadership development component, which trains principals and district officials from the Johannesburg Central School District.

Learning under faculty members from both universities, participants engage in large-group “interventions,” small group discussions, and case study analysis. The four large group interventions are spread out over the course of the three-year initiative. In between these interventions, small group discussions are held every four to six weeks, in which participants identify emerging challenges and develop plans for improvement.

Discussion topics include issues they often struggle with around budgeting, financial management/planning, and human resource management.

The idea for the project emerged after Witten took a trip home, while still in the doctoral program, to explore the possibilities for collaboration within the country. Accompanying him were two Ed School faculty members — Professors Robert Peterkin and Jerome Murphy, Ed.D.’73 — as well as Charles Deutsch, from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Murphy recalls the impact of the trip.

“What we saw was a combination of schools with a tremendous lack of resources and yet examples of principals who were doing extraordinary things under difficult situations,” he says. “It really opened my eyes, not only to the incredible problems, but also to the incredible opportunities that existed throughout the country. We wanted to figure out how we could help these people do more.”

Similarly inspired by the trip, Witten immediately began driving the project forward, taking a leading role in the conceptualization, design, and implementation. Now, one year in, Witten is still involved, although the program is currently run by a team of leadership practitioners and scholars from both universities, including Senior Lecturer Deborah Jewell-Sherman, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’95, who heads up the program.

“This project has captured national attention in the country in terms of the kinds of leadership training and support that are required to improve the core teaching and learning functions of schools,” Witten says. “It will have implications for how systemic interventions as well as leadership development programs are designed and implemented in other parts of South Africa.”

briefly This past autumn, President Barack Obama nominated two additional Ed School faculty members to the prestigious 15-member National Board of Education Sciences: Professor Judith Singer and Professor Hiro Yoshikawa, who also serves as the school’s academic dean. Singer and Yoshikawa join Professor Bridget Terry Long, who was appointed in 2010 and now serves as the panel’s chair.

In November, Heather Hill was promoted to full professor. She joined the Ed School in 2007 as an associate professor.

In response to research that shows that young people often lack guidance when it comes to their online lives, Professor Howard Gardner and his GoodPlay Project released a casebook of teaching materials that can be downloaded for free. The casebook is called Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World.

AWARDS Associate Professor Tina Grotzer won a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to young professionals beginning their independent research careers.

Visiting Professor Helen Haste received the Kuhmerker Career Award from the Association for Moral Education. Last year, the award was given to another Ed School faculty member, Professor Robert Selman.

Professor Chris Dede was honored by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology with their annual Distinguished Development Award. The award recognizes achievements toward improving instruction

— Rachael Apfel 14

Ed.

• winter 2012

through technology.

onmybookshelf Professor Paul Harris Currently reading: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark.

First impressions: Very positive. On the first few pages she deftly introduces the various pupils who have fallen under Miss Brodie’s spell. I want to know more.

jill anderson

Last great read: The Genius and the Goddess by Aldous Huxley.

He is an unusual novelist because he is comfortable exploring the world of science, but, like his friend D.H. Lawrence, he had misgivings about the long-term impact of scientific and technological developments on human relationships.

Book you’ve read over and over: I remember passionately rereading a story by Enid Blyton, Mr. Galliano’s Circus, as a boy. Sadly, the book is out of print. It offers a wonderful insider’s view of circus life. I say that I reread it, but that’s not absolutely true. At one point in the book, there is a storm and Jumbo the elephant, terror-stricken, breaks free and disappears. I used to find the idea of Jumbo being lost and separated from the circus so disturbing that I regularly skipped the chapter.

Noneducation genre of choice: I enjoy biography. My most recent favorite was a biography of William James by Robert Richardson. Not only is it a vivid portrait of William James, who must have been enormously likeable and approachable, it also gave me a much greater awareness of the intellectual spirits that preside over Cambridge, Mass.

Next up: David Lodge, whose comic writing about academic life is great fun, has written a quasi-biography of H.G. Wells.

It will be available any day now in the United States, and I might just treat myself.

— Marin Jorgensen Harvard Graduate School of Education

15

the appian way

Whither Opportunity?

Boomerang Kids

By Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane

By Carl Pickhardt

W

their caps to the other, they assume a more autonomous status

A

and accept a heightened responsibility. But are they ready?

three decades, so too has the educational performance of their

In his latest book, Boomerang Kids, Carl Pickhardt, Ed.M.’66,

children, bringing into question the nation’s reputation for equal

argues that a single ceremony is hardly all it takes to complete

opportunity for all.

ithin modern society, high school graduation has come to symbolize the passage into adulthood.

As graduates’ tassles are shifted from one side of

a transition to adulthood and fully develop the skills needed for

is enough to turn rags into riches, and a better life is just around the corner. However, as the gap between the

incomes of wealthy and poor families has increased over the past

How exactly does income inequality affect the educational

independent living. He claims that young adults aged 18 to 23

achievements of children? In an effort to answer this overarching

are actually in a final stage of adolescence, which he calls “trial

question, in Whither Opportunity?, Professor Richard Murnane

independence.” However, because this delicate stage is often

and Greg Duncan bring together contributions from a diverse

overlooked, Pickhardt asserts that adolescents face a prema-

group of economists, sociologists, and experts in social services

ture thrust into adulthood, which has consequently led to a rise

and education.

in “boomerang kids” — graduates who falter on their own and

Approaching the problem from a variety of angles, the volume

return home to rely on their parents’ support while they regain

explores a diverse range of causes that have led to the rise in

their footing.

educational inequality. Over the course of 25 chapters, it first

In an attempt to help parents understand this increasing phe-

summarizes existing research, then presents readers with a

nomenon, Pickhardt approaches the problem from two angles,

wide array of new findings. Not only does it illuminate the ef-

analyzing frequent causes as well as potential solutions. After

fects of social and economic factors — such as unequal family

a brief introduction to trial independence, Pickhardt carefully

resources — but it also reveals the profound impact of envi-

guides readers and parents through 11 specific challenges —

ronmental factors such as disadvantaged neighborhoods and

including broken relationships, roommate problems, substance

insecure labor markets. The volume then supplements these

use, and stress — that will potentially cause a child to boomer-

findings by offering advice to policymakers, touching on issues

ang home for recovery. Each chapter is devoted to a specific

such as funding distribution, child development strategies, and

challenge and concludes with a “parenting prescription,” or a

even calling for a national policy debate.

brief outline summarizing specific actions to take and topics to discuss with adolescents when particular situations arise.

In this book, Pickhardt sheds new light on adolescent develop-

Arising at a time when the disparity of test scores, college attendance, and graduation rates between wealthy and poor students is reaching an unprecedented level, this volume urges that the

ment and the importance of cultivating a corresponding parent-

problem of educational inequality be addressed and that changes

ing style. Drawing on his experiences counseling both parents

be made within the educational system. With extensive analysis,

and children, he is able to provide thorough, effective, and

this collection not only provides readers with a clearer understand-

realistic solutions to common problems, allowing parents to gain

ing of the problems surrounding educational inequality, but also

a new understanding of how to properly support their children

offers guidance to policymakers in addressing these problems.

while still respecting their developing freedom. By addressing

16

merica is called the land of opportunity, where hard work

“For generations of Americans, education was the springboard

both causes and solutions for the boomerang phenomenon,

to upward mobility,” writes Murnane and Duncan. “Only if our

Pickhardt provides insight with a dual purpose, making Boo-

country faces the consequences of growing income inequality will

merang Kids not only a guideline for intervention, but also a

it be able to maintain its rich heritage of upward social mobility

prescription for prevention.

through educational opportunity.”

Ed.

• winter 2012

College Success Guaranteed: 5 Rules to Make It Happen

By Malcolm Gauld

C

onsider this number: 168. Look familiar? Have any significance? No? What if it was said that this number was the key to success in college — guaranteed?

In College Success Guaranteed: 5 Rules to Make It Happen, Malcolm Gauld, Ed.M.’83, has created a guide to assist collegebound students in setting themselves up for success, arguing

Harvard education press Getting It Done: Leading Academic Success in Unexpected Schools Karin Chenoweth and Christina Theokas, foreword by Senior Lecturer Ronald Ferguson; 2011 Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions Dan Rothstein, Ed.M.’81, Ed.D.’85, and Luz Santana; 2011

Schooling in the Workplace Adjunct Lecturer Nancy Hoffman; 2011 The Strategic Management of Charter Schools: Frameworks and Tools for Educational Entrepreneurs Peter Frumkin, Bruno Manno, and Nell Edgington, foreword by Frederick Hess, Ed.M.’90; 2011

that 168 — the number of hours in a week — will make or break a student’s college experience.

As young adults make the transition from high school to college, Gauld claims that the biggest challenge they face is learning not to “drown” in free time. Without the structured environment of home and high school, college freshmen become accountable for their actions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Therefore, in an attempt to provide freshmen with some sort of structural foundation for managing this overwhelming amount of time, Gauld offers five simple rules: go to class, study 15 hours a week, get involved in something, get a mentor, and avoid procrastination. While acknowledging that many students will eventually modify some of the rules to adapt to their learning styles or lifestyle preferences, Gauld claims, “I have never encountered anyone who went wrong fol-

other books African American Children and Mental Health Professor Nancy Hill, Tammy Mann, and Hiram Fitzgerald; 2011 Children’s Understanding of Death: From Biological to Religious Conceptions Victoria Talwar, Professor Paul Harris, and Michael Schleifer; 2011 Collaborate or Perish! Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World Zachary Tumin, Ed.M.’77, and William Bratton; 2012

lowing these five rules as they are presented in this book.”

Directed largely toward high school seniors and young adults, the book presents readers with insightful advice in a format that is concise, practical, and easy to digest. Relevant and applicable — no matter a student’s field of study, interests, activities, or background — the book serves as a guide for not only surviving, but enjoying the college experience. Using a variety of anecdotes, stories, and ideas that he collected through interviews with current students and recent grads, Gauld sprinkles the pages with strategies and tactics found useful by actual students.

College Success Guaranteed is intended to set forth a blue-

Creative Adventures in Social Studies: Engaging Activities & Essential Questions to Inspire Students Dan Peppercorn, Ed.M.’02; 2011 Every Child, Every Classroom, Every Day: School Leaders Who Are Making Equality a Reality Professor Robert Peterkin; Senior Lecturer Deborah Jewell-Sherman, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’95; and doctoral candidates Laura Kelley, Ed.M.’04, and Leslie Boozer, Ed.M.’07; 2011

print of things to do, instead of lecturing readers with a list of don’ts. For incoming freshmen, one “might do well to have a plan of attack,” Gauld writes. “That’s what this simple book is about.”

—Briefs written by Rachael Apfel

The Influence of Teachers John Merrow, Ed.D.’73; 2011 New Directions for Youth Development Doctoral candidate Helen Janc Malone; 2011 Public Value: Theory and Practice John Benington and Professor Mark Moore; 2011 Round and Round Together: Taking a Merry-Go-Round Ride into the Civil Rights Movement Amy Nathan, M.A.T.’68; 2011 Steady Gains and Stalled Progress: Inequality and the Black-White Test Score Gap Jane Waldfogel, Ed.M.’79; 2011 Think, Care, Act: Teaching for a Peaceful Future Susan Gelber Cannon, Ed.M.’84; 2011 Transcendental Learning: The Educational Legacy of Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, Peabody and Thoreau John Miller, M.A.T.’67; 2011

Hearts on Fire: Twelve Stories of Today’s Visionaries Igniting Idealism into Action Peter Cookson, C.A.S.’91, and Jill Iscol; 2011 Harvard Graduate School of Education

17

not what you

expected?

The Introduction

Not everyone from the Ed School becomes a teacher or a principal. Most, however, do end up in careers in the education world or are connected to education in some way. We have superintendents, Teach For America managers, chief academic officers, curriculum writers, curriculum evaluators, professors, lecturers, tutors, daycare directors, reading specialists, literacy coaches, education policymakers, education nonprofit directors, deans, department chairs, financial aid advisors, family coordinators, alumni office directors, admissions officers, admissions consultants, afterschool coordinators, academic auditors, education researchers, education entrepreneurs, professional development specialists, headmasters, teacher union administrators, special education advocates, education journalists, college presidents, children’s book authors, children’s book illustrators, guidance counselors, school founders, children’s television producers, librarians, online instructors, and registrars, to name just a few.

And then there are the others, those whose careers took unexpected turns after graduating from the Ed School, or, in some cases, complete 180s.

Some even came here fully intending never to work in education. But not surprisingly, considering the Ed School is grounded in “learning,” most of these graduates now say that what they took from their time at the Ed School still has real meaning when they’re treating patients or dealing with constituents or making an audience crack up. This feature story looks at a few of those graduates.

18

Ed.

• winter 2012

Michael rodman

Ed.M.’03

The Protector: Julia Guenther By the time Julia Guenther graduated from the University of California-Berkeley, she was pretty sure she would end up working in the education policy world. She had, after all, majored in political science and minored in education, and had spent a summer interning at the U.S. Department of Education. She was even surer during her year at the Ed School, when she wrote a professional development plan on a new teacher induction program for the city of Cambridge, Mass., that was compliant with No Child Left Behind.

And then Hurricane Katrina hit, forever changing not only the Gulf Coast, but also Guenther’s career. In the days following the disaster, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recruited long-term volunteers from other federal agencies. Guenther, back working at the U.S. Department of Education, ended up spending two months in Mississippi helping at a recovery center. There she saw firsthand how policy decisions made in Washington trickle down to those in the field. She wanted to make the process better, so she left the education world but stayed with policy and, for the next four years, with FEMA. And then last summer, she

made another move — to the Food and Drug Administration, where she now works on policy in another area: food defense.

“It’s a completely new field for me,” she says, and also fairly new for the federal government, stemming from 9/11 and the subsequent Bioterrorism Act of 2002. Still, Guenther was confident she could handle it, partly because of Harvard.

“At the Ed School I learned not to let people’s titles or age intimidate me,” she says. “That’s really helped me as I’ve switched fields from education to emergency management to food defense.”

Now, as part of the Food Defense Oversight Team, Guenther develops and implements procedures to prevent or respond to the intentional contamination of food in the United States. Luckily, she says, these kinds of attacks don’t happen often, partly because most companies take good precautions, plus using food as a weapon isn’t very appealing.

“A car bomb says, ‘Look, we did this,’” she says, “but if people get sick from what they are eating, they might think it’s just salmonella rather than a non-natural agent. We have that to our benefit.” — Lory Hough Harvard Graduate School of Education

19

Ed.M.’74

The Joker: Jane Condon

annie watson

Did you hear the one about the Ed School alumna who made a career out of making fun of herself ?

Dubbed “the upper-crust Roseanne” by the Associated Press, Jane Condon’s standup comedy career began unexpectedly.

After teaching, writing for Fortune and Life, and living in Japan for five years in the ’80s, Condon wrote a book about Japanese women. While on the book tour, she found that audiences often laughed out loud at her readings. So she decided to try stand-up.

Since then, Condon has performed regularly at New York’s top comedy clubs and appeared on shows like The View and Last Comic Standing. In 2010, she debuted her one-woman off-Broadway show Janie Condon: Raw & Unchained. Her material is typically personal, poking fun at her husband and two sons and her experiences living in Greenwich, Conn., after growing up in blue-collar Brockton, Mass.

According to Condon, studying at the Ed School honed her ability to tell stories.

“Teaching and comedy are both about storytelling,” Condon says. “My year at Harvard focused on the story, from children’s television to the history of education to Shakespeare, and that has been the major thread of my career.”

Last year, Condon experienced “an honor of a lifetime” when Wellesley College’s seniors chose her as their commencement speaker. When asked, she joked that her first thought was, “Is Norah Ephron dead?” But the advice she gave was simple and sincere: “Give back, don’t give up, and love.”

— Mark Robertson, Ed.M.’08

Ed.M.’73

The Storyteller: Bill Littlefield For Bill Littlefield, sports isn’t Only a Game, as the name of his weekly National Public Radio talk show suggests — it’s also a way to tell stories. Like the one he tells about the time he was supposed to interview Roger Clemens in the dugout at Fenway Park one night when Clemens was still a hotshot pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. It was a few hours before the game and the park was empty. Littlefield waited. And waited.

And while he waited, he noticed that one of the players from the other team had walked out of his dugout, dressed and ready for the game.

“Except,” says Littlefield, “he was wearing slippers, not cleats.” Intrigued, Littlefield watched as the player went up into the empty stands and quietly looked out at the field.

Littlefield went over and introduced himself. “I told him fans 20

Ed.

• winter 2012

would pay hundreds of dollars to sit in the dugout, so why would he want to sit in the stands?” The player said it was something he often did when the team traveled, his way to stay grounded and remind himself how lucky he was. “I sat there and thought, ‘Here’s my story.’ I was lucky that Clemens never showed up.”

And so it has been for Littlefield during his 18 years with Only a Game, which is produced at WBUR in Boston, just around the corner from the dugout where he missed Clemens but found his real story. Luck, and his ability to find the story in anything, has worked well for Littlefield — a former high school teacher who honed his writing skills at the Ed School — and the show, which is about sports, but not about sports.

(As the show’s website says, the show is “radio for the serious

sports fan and the steadfast sports avoider.”) Only a Game has covered everything from the 2011 NBA lockout to a blind high school football announcer to competitions involving belt sanders and skillet tossing.

And of course there have been stories about his sports idol, Willie Mays, otherwise known as the Say Hey Kid, the one he grew up thinking would move into the vacant house next to his in Montclair, N.J. There’s the piece about a Mays biography that Littlefield reviewed, which includes a mention of Littlefield dressed as Mays one Halloween as a kid. Or the time Littlefield’s basement was flooded and someone from the cleanup crew, a former minor league baseball player, noticed his extensive Mays’ collection. Or the dozens of other

stories Littlefield has done over the years that mention Mays and his achievements in some way.

But for all the talk about sports heroes and athletic competitions, one thing Littlefield isn’t likely to include on his show is who he thinks will win the Stanley Cup or the World Series or the next Super Bowl.

“I’m not good at predictions and I’m not really an insider when it comes to sports,” he says. “I’m not a beat guy. People assume I know a great deal more than I actually do about sports. That’s the attraction for me. I don’t have to chase a bunch of 19-year-olds who don’t have time to talk. No one is standing over my shoulder saying so-and-so just did something big so go talk to her. I just tell stories.” — Lory Hough kathleen dooher

Harvard Graduate School of Education

21

Ed.M.’75

Elena Seibert

The Wordsmith: Sue Miller

Blame Charles Dickens. The seemingly endless cycles of self-promotion that writers must go through every time a new work is published might be traced back to him, says novelist Sue Miller. And she doesn’t much care for it.

“I used to have a lot of difficulty, actually, with promotion,” Miller says of the “job” side of being a writer — the publicity, the interviews, the photo shoots. “Of feeling a kind of false self taking over, repeating the same thing over and over with an air of fresh discovery.”

Despite this, Miller feels truly fortunate to have this career, which has seen two of her 10 acclaimed novels (The Good Mother and Inventing the Abbotts) made into films. Although always a writer, she didn’t publish until after graduating from the Ed School. In fact, while pursuing her studies in early childhood education, Miller was a working, single mom, trying to make ends meet by renting out rooms in her newly bought house, and had little time for writing fiction. Still, she credits a child development course with teaching her the art of observation, a vital skill for a writer.

Another course was one in “imagining future scenarios.”

The future scenario Miller didn’t imagine?

“I never imagined writing would support me,” she says. And, now that it does, she savors the time — before the publicity grind begins — that this career affords her. “I take care of my life and those of the people around me,” she says. “Then I write.” — Marin Jorgensen

Ed.M.’11

Demian Szyld never thought that 20 years after he met Anne, he’d still be working with a bunch of dummies. But he is. And he loves it. As the associate medical director of the just-opened New York Simulation Center for the Health Sciences at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan, Szyld helps run a $20.8 million dollar center that uses dummies — mannequins — to train healthcare workers, medical students, and emergency personnel for disasters, natural or otherwise. However, the sophisticated mannequins are a far cry from Anne, the motionless rubber dummy that Szyld used in high school to practice CPR as a way to fulfill a physical education requirement.

More robot-like than doll-like, the simulation center mannequins can cost up to $250,000. They cry, cough, sweat, and vomit. And, along with actors who also serve as patients, the mannequins allow trainees to continuously practice procedures and even make mistakes. Szyld says he was able to jump into his role overseeing these mannequins and the new center more easily because of his year at Harvard, which may surprise some, but not him.

“My time at the Ed School let me think about how people learn and what it means to be a leader — all critical skills that I needed to go to the next level in my field,” he says. “Someone teaching would need the same skills to on to his or her next level. So in that way, my having gone to the Ed School wasn’t that unexpected.” — Lory Hough 22

Ed.

• winter 2012

Paul Taggart

the Healer: Demian Szyld

michael rodman

Ed.M.’99

the Insider: Sophia Lafargue Sophia Lafargue’s proudest moment on Capitol Hill? Easy.

June 19, 2002. She was sitting on the floor of the U.S. House chamber next to her boss, Representative Shirley Jackson Lee (D-TX). Lee was offering an amendment that Lafargue, Ed.M.’99, had drafted to the National Sea Grant College Program Act. The legislation, she explains, was designed to ensure equal access for minority and disadvantaged students to a marine policy fellowship program. It passed with bipartisan support.

This would be a heady moment for any Congressional staffer, but it had particular resonance to Lafargue, coming only two years after she had become a U.S. citizen.

“There I was, putting into practice my strong belief that if this country could help me overcome the disadvantages that I inherited, then surely it could do more for the many others who had similar hurdles to jump,” says Lafargue, who moved to New York from Jamaica as a child. “Humbling.

Awesome. Inspiring. And it still is.”

That day marked the beginning of a whirlwind journey from legislative assistant, to interim chief of staff, to

permanent chief of staff in Lee’s office — all within just four short months.

Now, as chief of staff to Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Lafargue finds herself in the thick of the action on Capitol Hill, overseeing the eight-term congressman’s policy objectives and strategies and managing an office of 18 full-time and two part-time staff members, all while maintaining a policy portfolio that includes foreign affairs and international trade.

Lafargue acknowledges that this is not a typical career path for an Ed School graduate. However, she credits the Ed School with both helping her land in Washington (through the Career Services Office’s D.C. Days program) and also being effective at it.

“You’d be surprised the degree to which my Ed School experience is an integral part of my working life now,” says Lafargue, citing the critical thinking skills she gained, as well as the lessons from psychology classes that have provided insight into how people behave and how Washington can help. “I draw on it every single day.” — Michael Rodman Harvard Graduate School of Education

23

boston herald /john wilcox

University, she picked animal science as a major. But then, in what she calls a moment of divine intervention — counting the seconds between thunder and lightning while eating lunch a couple weeks before starting college — she decided to change her major to science meteorology.

By 23, she landed a coveted job in the highly competitive Boston news market.

And then, after many years of working successfully as a meteorologist, Michaels decided to go back for a graduate degree. She looked no further than the Ed School.

“While working as a broadcaster, you are called upon to be an educator all the time, like when doing the forecast,” she says. “I enjoyed taking [the forecast] beyond what was happening to why. To me that’s the essence of the work. As a meteorologist, you need to be able to communicate what you know.”

Additionally, her job as a meteorologist regularly called upon her to speak to children at schools.

She enrolled in the Technology, Innovation, and Education Program, which she credits with being a game changer in her career.

Ed.M.’95 “I became a much better writer and it really added depth to my oral presentation,” Michaels says, noting it also inspired her to help launch a publication called The Weather Almanac and take on an adjunct lecturer position at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. “Reframing what I know was born out of my work at the Ed School.”

Though Michaels left her position as a television meteorologist in 2009 to focus on raising her now-5-year-old daughter, she continues to funnel her enthusiasm for weather and education. As part of a new business venture, she launched a children’s clothing line called Natural Cloud Cover. The 100 percent organic t-shirts and onesies are themed around — what else? — the weather. Michaels says she was always giving weather-related gifts to friends and had the idea of weather-themed t-shirts for some time. An artist and watercolorist, Michaels designs the t-shirts, which

The storm seer: Mish Michaels For many New Englanders and weather junkies, Mish Michaels is a familiar face. A meteorologist with nearly 20 years of forecasting under her belt, she has been on a tornado chase in Oklahoma, on a flight into Hurricane Isabel, and to the 6,288-foot summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington in mid-winter. While Michaels has spent the bulk of her career on Boston TV stations like WBZ and WHDH, she has also been on the nationally syndicated Weather Channel show, Atmospheres.

“I always was fascinated by weather,” Michaels says.

Some of her earliest memories involve the weather, like watching a tornado unfold in Maryland as a young girl, to obsessively watching weather forecasts on television.

However, when she decided to apply to college at Cornell 24

Ed.

• winter 2012

As far as what the future holds for Michaels and a potential return to television, she says it remains to be seen.

“I miss the excitement and the intensity, but most of all the learning,” Michaels says. “Every time I forecast a storm, I’m always learning and I always want to know more.” — Jill Anderson

GUILLAUME BONN

feature phrases like “Official Snow Taster” and “Rainy Day Puddle Jumper.” At the heart of the venture is her desire to get kids talking about the weather and perhaps spark another child’s passion for science. Five percent of sales go to the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, a Massachusettsbased science center geared toward education.

Ed.M.’03

The Statesman: Joseph Lekuton When Joseph Lekuton had the chance to go to a private high school in Kenya, his nomadic Masaai family made an almost unheard of sacrifice to pay the school’s fees: they sold four of their cows. “You better make it,” his brother told him after the sale. “This is a big sacrifice.” The sacrifice paid off. Lekuton made it big, both in his country and in America, getting a bachelor’s degree (on full scholarship) and two master’s in the United States before being elected in 2006 to the Kenyan Parliament, where he has focused on getting new schools built and mediating between ethnic groups clashing over livestock grazing rights. He has made up for his family’s sacrifice, initially giving his mother 50

cows and sending money home. And for his village, located in the northern part of the country and struggling with drought, he has raised funds for water purification projects and a new dormitory where nomadic children can live and go to school while their families are moving with the herds.

Lekuton also helped get computers shipped from the United States to local schools and donated some of his salary to the poor. This commitment to his people, especially in school children, is something Lekuton honed at the Ed School and is critical to his country. As he explained in an interview with The New York Times, “Without education, you can’t have democracy.” — Lory Hough Harvard Graduate School of Education

25

Associated press

Ed.M.’80

The Media Mogul: Anne Sweeney Everyone’s a critic. Including the children of Anne Sweeney, cochair of Disney Media Networks and president of DisneyABC Television Group.

“My critics are at the kitchen table!” Sweeney laughs, remembering the time her then-middle-school-aged daughter informed her that the scheduling of Disney’s Lizzie McGuire “doesn’t work for me!” “Kids are honest,” says Sweeney. “Mine never hesitated to tell me when they didn’t like something.”

And the audience — family or not — is the most important thing to Sweeney when programming the networks she oversees, including ABC, Disney Channel, and ABC Family.

“You have to keep in mind the needs of different audiences,” she says. “For ABC Family, the millennial generation is defined by the lives they lead using different devices. They don’t want stories that are relevant and predictable.”

Sweeney calls her company “story-centric.” From children’s fare on Disney to adult programming on ABC, she says, “It all begins and ends with story. Success depends on the depth of characters and your ability to tell the stories.”

Her Ed School mentor Gerald Lesser would understand this. Himself one of the minds behind Sesame Street, Lesser 26

Ed.

• winter 2012

welcomed Sweeney when, as an undergraduate who hadn’t yet even applied to the Ed School, she arrived at his office door unannounced.

“He invited me right in, and we talked for an hour about his experience on Sesame Street and at the Ed School,” Sweeney says. “He explained the meaning of having an education background when working in children’s television.

It helps you understand and approach your audience in a different way.”

Lesser would become Sweeney’s advisor, and unintentional matchmaker, when she met her husband, Phillip Miller, Ed.M.’80, in his Children’s Television class. (Miller, a former teacher and producer at Massachusetts Educational Television, now works in a similarly unexpected job: intellectual property attorney.)

Grounded by her family — even the critics — Sweeney is unfazed by lists naming her among the most powerful women in entertainment and is more inclined to measure success on the wide reach of her shows.

“What we’re doing is culturally significant. Last year, television was the most discussed topic on Twitter,” she says.

“Television is social currency.” — Marin Jorgensen

Ed.M.’87

The Mind Reader: Bill Haddad Bill Haddad’s office is not characteristic of your typical psychologist: Housed in a windowless building that is highly secure and routinely debugged, the only objects in the room are a computer and a couple of pictures. But then again, Bill Haddad is not your typical psychologist. As an employee for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was founded by Robert McNamara in 1961 as a way to integrate all of the military intelligence for the Department of Defense, Haddad is actually part of a rare group — fewer than 20 psychologists around the world are employed by an intelligence agency in similar positions.

Working in something called a sensitive compartmented information facility, Haddad is largely responsible for screening and evaluating potential intelligence agents to determine their suitability for high-stress positions, such as operating in a war zone, and to delegate who can be trusted with topsecret clearance.

“This component is definitely the most important aspect of my job because, ultimately, I am hand-selecting the people that will help protect national security,” he says.

Occasionally, Haddad also creates psychological profiles of foreign leaders, which are passed on to military and political leaders when making policy decisions. From time to time, he’s also involved in activities that are more covert.

“Say someone in another country wanted to turn on Osama Bin Laden and reveal his location to the authorities,” Haddad says. “He would be brought to a safe house where we would psychoanalyze him, make sure he is not a double agent or a nut, and determine what is really motivating him.”

It’s clear that after graduating from what was then the school’s Counseling and Consulting Psychology Program, Haddad’s career has taken a big turn from the education world.

Nevertheless, he says his time at Harvard helped him shift away from the engineering field, where he worked for 12 years.

“The Ed School was a complete awakening for me because people actually interacted in class,” he says. “This interaction fostered skills that, when combined with the critical thinking mindset I gained in engineering, have allowed me to make deeper connections with people and really look inside their heads and see what makes them tick.” — Rachael Apfel Ed. istockphoto.com

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Statistical Significance

By David McKay Wilson

Illustrations by Otto Steininger

School districts around the country have more data available to them than ever before, but figuring out what to do with all that information isn’t always easy.

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T

he P.S. 175 Data Wall commands a central place in Principal Cheryl McClendon’s office at the Henry Highland Garnet School for Success in Harlem, N.Y. It’s color-coded, with green and blue signifying proficiency in state math and English language arts exams. Yellow and red indicate failure to meet benchmarks.

McClendon acknowledges there is far too much yellow on the English scores, but she remains optimistic. The school’s schedule now includes back-to-back reading and writing periods, providing more time for literacy training. And according to the sophisticated metric in New York City schools that includes student progress as well as qualitative measures on the school environment, P.S. 175 was rated B — a score better than 51 percent of city schools.

“We progressed from a C to a high B,” says McClendon.

“It was really, really hard work.”

The preeminence of the display on McClendon’s wall reflects the burgeoning role that statistical data plays in the U.S. educational system. Over the past 20 years, the accountability movement’s reliance on data to quantify student learning has transformed pedagogical practice and opened up educational practice to show the public how well students are achieving — or not achieving — in their public schools.

Statewide standardized tests, mandated by the federal government under No Child Left Behind, have provided mounds of data for educators to analyze. Yet these piles of numbers have left many educators paralyzed and unable to figure out how to use them. Meanwhile, initiatives across the country, sparked by the federal Race to the Top competition, which link teacher evaluations in part to student achievement, have pushed our data-driven system into new frontiers.

Sarah Glover, executive director of the Strategic Data Project, under the Ed School’s Center for Education Policy Research, says districts are hungry for strategies to make use of the data stacking up at district headquarters.

“We want to take advantage of the mounds of data that are accumulating and apply analytic methods to be more predictive, and help understand how we can keep things moving forward,” she says. “If we want kids to graduate from high school on time, what are the markers they need to hit in the K–12 career to do so, and what are the practices that will get them there?”

The project, which now includes 10 school districts, a charter management group, and two state education departments, is the latest example of data’s primacy in 21st-century education and of the growing influence of economists in education policy. It wasn’t always that way.

Back in the 19th century, clergy held sway in education

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circles. By the early 20th century, psychologists had burst on the scene as they began to measure learning. Then came the sociologists and lawyers of the 1960s and 1970s, who were concerned with equal opportunity and equity in the schools.

Economists, meanwhile, began to investigate education in the 1950s, with University of Chicago free-market proponent Milton Friedman asserting that schools would run more efficiently if governments separated school finance from school operations. His work led to the development of school voucher programs.

Labor economists used longitudinal models that had been developed to determine the impact of social programs on worker income to analyze student performance on standardized tests. The economists substituted test scores for wages to see progress — or the lack thereof.

Other economists used their analytical tools in lawsuits arguing that states failed to provide adequate education for all students, while others developed models to show that spending public money on dropout-prevention programs would actually save taxpayer money if the dropouts were later incarcerated.

Proponents for public investment in early childhood education have relied on the work of Nobel Laureate James Heckman, whose studies have shown the positive results of early childhood investments, based on higher earnings, less crime, and lower unemployment among adults who had been enrolled in high-quality preschool programs as children.

Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Harvard, in 2010 published a study that estimates that having an above-average kindergarten teacher in a classroom of 20 will generate about $320,000 more in total lifetime earnings for each of his or her students, compared to the same class with a below-average teacher. Chetty analyzed data from randomized experiments involving 11,500 students conducted in 79 Tennessee elementary schools from 1985 to 1989. Chetty’s team tracked down 95 percent of those tested to see if students who scored well on kindergarten tests were earning more than their classmates by the time they reached their mid-20s.

He found that high kindergarten scores predicted a wide variety of outcomes for the students: They were more likely to attend college, have retirement savings, be homeowners, and live in better neighborhoods.

“Economists have a huge tool kit through econometrics,” says Chetty. “And we are now applying those tools to education. With today’s focus on test scores and achievement, there’s a tremendous amount of good data.”

The reliance on student data to justify certain public investments and drive instruction in the classroom has attracted scores of economists to the field. Ed School Professor Richard Murnane, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) who helped start the school’s Data Wise Project (see sidebar, page 32), recalls that in the 1980s, there were a handful of economists at the bureau involved in K–12 educational research. Today, Murnane says the bureau has about 120 NBER economists focused on education.

“The data is there, and the economists are finding support to carry out their experiments,” says Murnane, coauthor of the 2011 book, Methods Matter: Improving Causal Inference in Education and Social Science Research. “There are lots of policy levers, and we are able to look at the consequences of these policies.”

While economists are not the only ones using — or creating — data, critics decry the omnipresence of statistics.

They say the overreliance on data has harmed education by

narrowing curricula and focusing on test preparation to ensure that students pass mandated tests in math and English language arts. The recent scandals surrounding cheating by test administrators in cities like Atlanta and New York have also called into question the validity of test results.

“This test mania has gotten completely out of control,” says Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University and author of the 2010 book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. “Education is so much more than data about reading and math, and some of the data today is utterly untrustworthy.”

That data, however, can’t be ignored, says J.D. LaRock, Ed.M.’04, a senior analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, who served as senior education advisor to Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) from 2006 to 2008, and policy director for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Education from 2008 to 2010. LaRock, working toward his doctorate in the Ed School’s program in administration, planning, and social policy, says those jobs on Beacon Hill and in Washington, D.C., trained him to use data as the centerpiece for improving schools.

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The Data Wise Project There’s no lack of data in the San Antonio Independent School District. Middle school principal Yesenia Cordova has data from Texas’ statewide accountability tests, the district’s own system, and the weekly common assessments that are benchmarked to the state tests, as well as marks given by classroom teachers on homework and quizzes.

But with all those numbers, she couldn’t figure out how they could inform this dilemma: The math scores at Edgar Allan Poe Middle School had stagnated at 72 percent proficiency for three years. She was determined to make progress among the one in four middleschoolers who wasn’t making the grade in a school whose population is 90 percent Hispanic and 94 percent economically disadvantaged.

In June 2010, Cordova came to the Harvard Graduate School of Education with an assistant principal and math teacher from Poe Middle School to participate in a weeklong Data Wise workshop, in which educators learn an eight-step process that includes collaboration, data analysis, and an action plan. It’s a project that began in 2001, when Professor Richard Murnane spent a year with the Boston Public Schools to improve the district’s methods for understanding assessment data. This past summer, the San Antonio group joined educator teams from Farmington, Conn.; Denver; Cambridge, Mass.; Chile; and Australia at the weeklong session.

Through the process, Cordova realized that the school’s eighthgrade teachers planned together, but the sixth- and seventh-grade teachers did not.

“It allowed us to be reflective about the data and to look at it without being judgmental,” says Cordova. “It allowed us to dig deep and find the root cause of our problem. We needed to know if it was truly a learner problem or if it was a problem with our practice, in how we were delivering the lessons.”

To increase collaboration, Cordova brought together math teachers for all three levels. They agreed to plan together, teach the same material, and have common assessments each week to determine student progress. Teachers modeled instruction for each other and tweaked the curriculum to address problem areas. By year’s end, 80 percent of Poe’s students were proficient in math.

“We changed our school culture into one that focused on teacher collaboration and looking at the right data,” says Cordova. “We weren’t just looking at the numbers. We were also looking at our teaching practice, and it paid off.”

Lecturer Kathryn Boudett, director of the Data Wise Project, says the eight-step process provides a roadmap for educators looking to make meaningful change, based on what the data shows. The project has added four online classes so the groups can share what they’ve found since returning to their schools.

“We give homework about digging into the data,” she says. “With this work, you just can’t learn it in one setting. You have to learn it by doing it.”

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When he ran successfully for school board in the Boston suburb of Melrose in 2009, he made academic achievement, and the use of data to promote it, the top issue in his campaign.

“I think when people understand what the numbers mean, it can light a fire under them,” says LaRock. “It wasn’t so sophisticated what we did. But the simple act of ensuring that the committee looked closely at performance data on a regular basis gave life to new conversations that weren’t taking place before.”

The analysis led to a more well-defined plan to narrow the achievement gaps, with specific goals, and a deeper articulation of the strategy to reach those goals, LaRock says.

“Essentially, you can’t argue with the facts,” he says. “It put academic achievement front and center in what we do.”

Having the facts, though, isn’t enough as educators wrestle with reams of data and spreadsheets that extend out far beyond their computer screens. The Strategic Data Project helps districts decipher the data in ways that can improve instruction.

Nathan Kuder, a fellow with the project working in Boston’s Office of Accountability, has helped the district make sense of its data concerning the delivery of services to English language learners. His charge: to help the department understand where these students were enrolled, what services they were receiving, and where the district needed to train teachers to serve those students.

Problems arose because teacher data was kept by the district’s human resources department while student data was kept in a separate system. Kuder’s initial report had 27 different categories of service delivery.

“The first reports were overwhelming,” recalls Kuder. “There was too much information. So we simplified it, made a school-by-school report for each of our 125 schools.”

That report, now circulated monthly, has guided the district to more effectively assign teachers certified to teach English language learners. By the end of the 2010–11 school year, Boston saw a 35 percent increase in students receiving complete services.

Now Kuder is working with Boston educators on designing a metric to help drive instruction

that uses data in addition to results from the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, known as the MCAS, which has tests taken in March, with results not available until six months later in September.

“We’d like to get beyond MCAS,” says Kuder. “We’re trying to identify a new metric, so we are looking out the front window, instead of always looking behind us with old information.”

While Kuder has developed a system to better allocate teaching resources in Boston, Ed School doctoral student Tom Tomberlin, Ed.M.’06, another Strategic Data Project fellow working with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, is developing a teacher evaluation system.

That system, like many under development around the country, will be based in part on how a teacher’s students perform on statewide standardized tests.

That project began with an exploration of merit pay, using a value-added model, to measure student progress during their time with individual teachers. Tomberlin says opposition arose because additional measures of teacher effectiveness in the schools — in addition to test scores — had yet to be developed.

Now Tomberlin is working with teachers on several areas that could be included in the evaluation system: content pedagogy, participation in professional learning communities, student surveys, teacher work product, teacher observation, student learning objectives, and value-added measures to determine if students have achieved a year’s work in their subject.

First, Tomberlin’s group is doing a literature review to determine if research supports the importance of these factors in instruction. Then they will move on to determine how these factors get measured, through a standardized method of observation and measurement. That will generate unique data — a crucial element of America’s data-driven education world.

“We’ve gone back to the drawing board to develop our multiple measures of effectiveness before we start talking again about compensation,” says Tomberlin. “So we’re engaging with our faculty to hash it out.”

— David McKay Wilson is a New York–based freelance writer whose last piece in Ed. focused on President Obama’s overhaul of the student financial aid system. Ed.

The Data Wise Process Prepare

Inquire

Act

1. Organize for Collaborative Work: Schools develop a

3. Create a Data Overview: Educators

6. Develop an Action Plan: The

create a concise summary of student achieve-

team decides to address a certain

data team to gather data from

ment results that inspires rather than over-

area and designs a professional

many sources and then set up

whelms. The summary is intended to show

development program to support

schedules to allow school per-

what students are learning and reveal gaps in

educators who will put that plan

sonnel to collaborate in their

that understanding.

into action.

examination of the data.

4. Dig into Data: Now that the data is avail-

7. Plan to Assess Progress:

2. Build Assessment Literacy: Educators learn the basics

able, educators look at a broader range of

Educators set goals — both short-

student work, such as projects, classwork, and

term and long-term — and develop

of assessment terminology and

homework, to provide more clarity on what the

a plan that will determine if those

learn how to both analyze and

data has shown. Through this step, educators

goals have been met.

talk about the data.

discover gaps in certain areas that are common to large numbers of students.

8. Act and Assess: Educators monitor how the plan is working,

5. Examine Instruction: Educators look at

and then make adjustments to

how classroom instruction has affected poor

make improvements. The process

student performance in areas revealed by

then returns to Step 3, in which

digging into the data. They identify an area that

data is gathered for analysis, and

they want to tackle through collaboration.

a new cycle of review begins.

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The debate over how much schoolwork students should be doing at home has flared again, with one side saying it’s too much, the other side saying in our competitive world, it’s just not enough.

I

t was a move that doesn’t happen very often in American public schools: The principal got rid of homework.

This past September, Stephanie Brant, principal of Gaithersburg Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., decided that instead of teachers sending kids home with math worksheets and spelling flash cards, students would instead go home and read. Every day for 30 minutes, more if they had time or the inclination, with parents or on their own.

“I knew this would be a big shift for my community,” she says. But she also strongly believed it was a necessary one.

Twenty-first-century learners, especially those in elementary school, need to think critically and understand their own learning — not spend night after night doing rote homework drills.

Brant’s move may not be common, but she isn’t alone in her questioning. The value of doing schoolwork at home has gone in and out of fashion in the United States among educators, policymakers, the media, and, more recently, parents.

As far back as the late 1800s, with the rise of the Progressive Era, doctors such as Joseph Mayer Rice began pushing for a limit on what he called “mechanical homework,” saying it caused childhood nervous conditions and eyestrain. Around that time, the then-influential Ladies Home Journal began publishing a series of anti-homework articles, stating that five hours of brain work a day was “the most we should ask of our children,” and that homework was an intrusion on family life. In response, states like California passed laws abolishing homework for students under a certain age.

But, as is often the case with education, the tide eventually turned. After the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, a space race emerged, and, writes Brian Gill in the journal Theory Into Practice, “The homework problem was reconceived as part of a national crisis; the U.S. was losing the Cold War because Russian children were smarter.” Many earlier laws limiting homework were abolished, and the longterm trend toward less homework came to an end.

The debate re-emerged a decade later when parents of the late ’60s and ’70s argued that children should be free to play and explore — similar anti-homework wellness arguments echoed nearly a century earlier. By the early-1980s,

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By Lory Hough Illustrations by Jessica Esch however, the pendulum swung again with the publication of A Nation at Risk, which blamed poor education for a “rising tide of mediocrity.” Students needed to work harder, the report said, and one way to do this was more homework.

For the most part, this pro-homework sentiment is still going strong today, in part because of mandatory testing and continued economic concerns about the nation’s competitiveness. Many believe that today’s students are falling behind their peers in places like Korea and Finland and are paying more attention to Angry Birds than to ancient Babylonia.

But there are also a growing number of Stephanie Brants out there, educators and parents who believe that students are stressed and missing out on valuable family time. Students, they say, particularly younger students who have seen a rise in the amount of take-home work and already put in a six- to nine-hour “work” day, need less, not more homework.

Who is right? Are students not working hard enough or is homework not working for them? Here’s where the story gets a little tricky: It depends on whom you ask and what research you’re looking at. As Cathy Vatterott, the author of Rethinking Homework, points out, “Homework has generated enough research so that a study can be found to support almost any position, as long as conflicting studies are ignored.” Alfie Kohn, author of The Myth of Homework and a strong believer in eliminating all homework, writes that, “The fact that there isn’t anything close to unanimity among experts belies the widespread assumption that homework helps.” At best, he says, homework shows only an association, not a causal relationship, with academic achievement. In other words, it’s hard to tease out how homework is really affecting test scores and grades. Did one teacher give better homework than another? Was one teacher more effective in the classroom?

Do certain students test better or just try harder?

“It is difficult to separate where the effect of classroom teaching ends,” Vatterott writes, “and the effect of homework begins.”

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Putting research aside, however, much of the current debate over homework is focused less on how homework affects academic achievement and more on time. Parents in particular have been saying that the amount of time children spend in school, especially with afterschool programs, combined with the amount of homework given — as early as kindergarten — is leaving students with little time to run around, eat dinner with their families, or even get enough sleep.

Certainly, for some parents, homework is a way to stay connected to their children’s learning. But for others, homework creates a tug-of-war between parents and children, says Liz Goodenough, M.A.T.’71, creator of a documentary called Where Do the Children Play?

“Ideally homework should be about taking something home, spending a few curious and interesting moments in which children might engage with parents, and then getting that project back to school — an organizational triumph,” she says. “A nag-free activity could engage family time: Ask a parent about his or her own childhood. Interview siblings.”

Instead, as the authors of The Case Against Homework write, “Homework overload is turning many of us into the types of parents we never wanted to be: nags, bribers, and taskmasters.”

Leslie Butchko saw it happen a few years ago when her son started sixth grade in the Santa Monica-Malibu (Calif.)

United School District. She remembers him getting two to four hours of homework a night, plus weekend and vacation projects. He was overwhelmed and struggled to finish assignments, especially on nights when he also had an extracurricular activity.

“Ultimately, we felt compelled to have Bobby quit karate — he’s a black belt — to allow more time for homework,” she says. And then, with all of their attention focused on Bobby’s homework, she and her husband started sending their youngest to his room so that Bobby could focus. “One day, my younger son gave us 15-minute coupons as a present for us to use to send him to play in the back room. … It was then that we realized there had to be something wrong with the amount of homework we were facing.”

Butchko joined forces with another mother who was having similar struggles and ultimately helped get the homework policy in her district changed, limiting homework on weekends and holidays, setting time guidelines for daily homework, and broadening the definition of homework to include projects and studying for tests. As she told the school board at one meeting when the policy was first being discussed, “In closing, I just want to say that I had more free time at Harvard Law School than my son has in middle school, and that is not in the best interests of our children.”

One barrier that Butchko had to overcome initially was convincing many teachers and parents that more homework doesn’t necessarily equal rigor.

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“Most of the parents that were against the homework policy felt that students need a large quantity of homework to prepare them for the rigorous AP classes in high school and to get them into Harvard,” she says.

Stephanie Conklin, Ed.M.’06, sees this at Another Course to College, the Boston pilot school where she teaches math.

“When a student is not completing [his or her] homework, parents usually are frustrated by this and agree with me that homework is an important part of their child’s learning,” she says.

As Timothy Jarman, Ed.M.’10, a ninth-grade English teacher at Eugene Ashley High School in Wilmington, N.C., says, “Parents think it is strange when their children are not assigned a substantial amount of homework.”

That’s because, writes Vatterott, in her chapter, “The Cult(ure) of Homework,” the concept of homework “has become so engrained in U.S. culture that the word homework is part of the common vernacular.”

These days, nightly homework is a given in American schools, writes Kohn.

“Homework isn’t limited to those occasions when it seems appropriate and important. Most teachers and administrators aren’t saying, ‘It may be useful to do this particular project at home,’” he writes. “Rather, the point of departure seems to be, ‘We’ve decided ahead of time that children will have to do something every night (or several times a week). …

This commitment to the idea of homework in the abstract is accepted by the overwhelming majority of schools — public and private, elementary and secondary.”

Brant had to confront this when she cut homework at Gaithersburg Elementary.

“A lot of my parents have this idea that homework is part of life. This is what I had to do when I was young,” she says, and so, too, will our kids. “So I had to shift their thinking.”

She did this slowly, first by asking her teachers last year to really think about what they were sending home. And this year, in addition to forming a parent advisory group around the issue, she also holds events to answer questions.

Still, not everyone is convinced that homework as a given is a bad thing. “Any pursuit of excellence, be it in sports,

the arts, or academics, requires hard work. That our culture finds it okay for kids to spend hours a day in a sport but not equal time on academics is part of the problem,” wrote one pro-homework parent on the blog for the documentary Race to Nowhere, which looks at the stress American students are under. “Homework has always been an issue for parents and children. It is now and it was 20 years ago. I think when people decide to have children that it is their responsibility to educate them,” wrote another.

And part of educating them, some believe, is helping them develop skills they will eventually need in adulthood.

“Homework can help students develop study skills that will be of value even after they leave school,” reads a publication on the U.S. Department of Education website called Homework Tips for Parents. “It can teach them that learning takes place anywhere, not just in the classroom. … It can foster positive character traits such as independence and responsibility. Homework can teach children how to manage time.”

Annie Brown, Ed.M.’01, feels this is particularly critical at less affluent schools like the ones she has worked at in Boston, Cambridge, Mass., and Los Angeles as a literacy coach.

“It feels important that my students do homework because they will ultimately be competing for college placement and jobs with students who have done homework and have developed a work ethic,” she says. “Also it will get them ready for independently taking responsibility for their learning, which will need to happen for them to go to college.”

The problem with this thinking, writes Vatterott, is that homework becomes a way to practice being a worker.

“Which begs the question,” she writes. “Is our job as educators to produce learners or workers?”

Slate magazine editor Emily Bazelon, in a piece about homework, says this makes no sense for younger kids.

“Why should we think that practicing homework in first grade will make you better at doing it in middle school?” she writes. “Doesn’t the opposite seem equally plausible: that it’s counterproductive to ask children to sit down and work at night before they’re developmentally ready because you’ll just make them tired and cross?”

Kohn writes in the American School Board Journal that this “premature exposure” to practices like homework (and sit-and-listen lessons and tests) “are clearly a bad match for younger children and of questionable value at any age.” He calls it BGUTI: Better Get Used to It. “The logic here is that we have to prepare you for the bad things that are going to be done to you later … by doing them to you now.”

According to a recent University of Michigan study, daily homework for six- to eight-year-olds increased on average from about 8 minutes in 1981 to 22 minutes in 2003. A review of research by Duke University Professor Harris Cooper found that for elementary school students, “the

average correlation between time spent on homework and achievement … hovered around zero.”

So should homework be eliminated? Of course not, say many Ed School graduates who are teaching. Not only would students not have time for essays and long projects, but also teachers would not be able to get all students to grade level or to cover critical material, says Brett Pangburn, Ed.M.’06, a sixth-grade English teacher at Excel Academy Charter School in Boston. Still, he says, homework has to be relevant.

“Kids need to practice the skills being taught in class, especially where, like the kids I teach at Excel, they are behind and need to catch up,” he says. “Our results at Excel have demonstrated that kids can catch up and view themselves as in control of their academic futures, but this requires hard work, and homework is a part of it.”

Ed School Professor Howard Gardner basically agrees.

“America and Americans lurch between too little homework in many of our schools to an excess of homework in our most competitive environments — Li’l Abner vs. Tiger Mother,” he says. “Neither approach makes sense. Homework should build on what happens in class, consolidating skills and helping students to answer new questions.”

So how can schools come to a happy medium, a way that allows teachers to cover everything they need while not overwhelming students? Conklin says she often gives online math assignments that act as labs and students have two or three days to complete them, including some in-class time. Students at Pangburn’s school have a 50-minute silent period during regular school hours where homework can be started, and where teachers pull individual or small groups of students aside for tutoring, often on that night’s homework.

Afterschool homework clubs can help.

Some schools and districts have adapted time limits rather than nix homework completely, with the 10-minute per grade rule being the standard — 10 minutes a night for first-graders, 30 minutes for third-graders, and so on. (This remedy, however, is often met with mixed results since not all students work at the same pace.) Other schools offer an extended day that allows teachers to cover more material in school, in turn requiring fewer take-home assignments. And for others, like Stephanie Brant’s elementary school in Maryland, more reading with a few targeted project assignments has been the answer.

“The routine of reading is so much more important than the routine of homework,” she says. “Let’s have kids reflect.

You can still have the routine and you can still have your workspace, but now it’s for reading. I often say to parents, if we can put a man on the moon, we can put a man or woman on Mars and that person is now a second-grader. We don’t know what skills that person will need. At the end of the day, we have to feel confident that we’re giving them something they can use on Mars.” Ed. Harvard Graduate School of Education

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oneonone William Fitzsimmons

A

jill anderson

lthough most teachers would be thrilled to write a recommendation letter for a bright student interested in an Ivy League college like Harvard, the first two nuns William Fitzsimmons, Ed.M.’69, Ed.D.’71, asked at Archbishop Williams High School in Braintree, Mass., flat out said no. At a place like Harvard, full of communists, atheists, and rich kids, the young Fitzsimmons, son of a gas station and convenience store owner, would surely lose his soul.

Fitzsimmons kept trying and eventually found a few nuns who agreed to write letters, landing him a spot in the Harvard College class of 1967. Now, as dean of admissions at the college, Fitzsimmons makes Harvard possible for other young people, including thousands from workingclass backgrounds similar to his. As former Harvard president Derek Bok once said of Fitz, as he’s known, “Bill is changing people’s perceptions of what it takes to come here. There’s such an impression that Harvard is a really elite school full of nerdy people from wealthy families who went to prep schools.

The great triumph is when you find someone in an unlikely place who, against all odds, achieved something.”

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How are you changing perceptions?

Since 2007 alone, Harvard’s annual investment in financial aid has climbed more than 70 percent from $96.6 million to $166 million, significantly out-pacing increases in tuition. More than 60 percent of Harvard students now receive financial aid; the average grant is $40,000.

But personally you’ve also changed stereotypes by telling your story. Why has this helped?

People really relate to individual stories.

It’s refreshing for them to know that Harvard isn’t something you’re born to.

It’s something available to everyone.

Is the family gas station still open?

The gas station is inactive now, but the store is going strong in Weymouth. We had a fantastic experience and met many great people.

get to know a real cross section of the American population. We had lecture night at the store, which was one of those old-fashioned places where you really got to know people in almost any profession you could think of. It was also a way to learn about social class and the fabric of America.

How did this affect you at Harvard?

This experience was incredibly useful going to Harvard, where I got to see more broadly what I saw at the granular level at the store. It also really showed me the importance of education, especially when people gave me advice about missed opportunities.

But it also convinced me that in our credential-oriented world, we often miss the fact that there are many people out there who didn’t get to go to college who are educated in so many other ways. It’s still very much alive in my mind.

Do you remember any of them?

There was Big Sabe from rural Maine, right on the Canadian border. He came down to work on the railroads.

We sometimes called him Baltimore Sabe because he liked the Baltimore Colts. We had a guy named Squid who had spent a lot of time as a sailor. We had a deep sea diver and a guy named Pete who drove a highly combustible gas tank. Jerry trained horses at the fairgrounds next door. There were firefighters and police officers, politicians, and a number of people who worked at the local shipyard.

Did you really decide to apply to Harvard after reading about the college in an encyclopedia when you were in middle school?

My parents’ World Book Encyclopedia had a picture of Harvard and a description of it that made it sound very enticing, mostly for its vast resources and its national and international faculty and students. Although Harvard was only 20 miles away, I never visited until my senior year in high school, in part because Harvard seemed so exclusive. Visiting this parallel universe quickly dispelled my misconceptions — as is the case today for our first-time visitors.

What did you learn from these regulars?

It was an incredible education for a kid — for anyone, really. I was able to

True or false: You discovered the Ed School after finding a catalog in an office you were cleaning when

you were an undergraduate.

This is absolutely true. I came across the catalog in the Thayer Hall dorm crew office I cleaned.

At that time, I was interested in various possibilities — teaching, research, college guidance counseling, public school administration, and international opportunities. Taking courses at the Ed School while a Harvard undergraduate kept me interested in all of the above.

istockphoto.com

istockphoto.com

alumni news and notes

You’ve been in Harvard’s admissions office since 1972. What one piece of advice would you give to readers thinking of going into the admissions field?

By all means, do it! George Goethals [his undergraduate mentor] encouraged me by his warning: “It’s such a captivating profession. You’ll come to know the world and human nature in a unique way by visiting schools and communities in your recruiting; talking with educators, parents, and policymakers; hearing thousands of life stories each year as you read applications and take part in admission committee deliberations, and then following the students you admitted throughout their college years and beyond. You can make a difference in students’ lives and help ensure that good people have access to the resources of a great university in a way that benefits the world. The only problem is that it’s so captivating that you may blink and wake up 30 years later wondering where the time went so quickly.”

Was he right?

He was wrong — it will be 40 years this coming July.

— Lory Hough Harvard Graduate School of Education

39

alumni news and notes

book, they provide a playbook for the collaboration of technology, politics, and platforms to help all achieve together what few can alone.

courtesy of Alison church hyde

1979

1962 The staff at Alison Church Hyde’s Crossroads Springs Institute

the condition of affected children and interviews with these children.

1962

1977 Zachary Tumin

1958 Charles Dey, M.A.T., delivered the keynote address at the 50 Years of Peace Corps Partnership event at Dartmouth College in November 2011.

1960 Susanna Whitney Grannis, Ed.M., recently published Hope Amidst Despair: HIV/AIDS Affected Children in Sub-Saharan Africa, presenting research on

40

Ed.

• winter 2012

Alison Church Hyde, Ed.M., with her husband Arthur Hyde and subchief Meshack Isiaho, cofounded Crossroads Springs Institute, a care center and school for orphans of AIDS in Hamisi, Kenya.

Beginning with 40 children in 2004, there are now 320 children in early childhood education through Standard 8. She is now president of the incorporated Crossroads Springs Africa.

1965 Jean Marzollo, M.A.T., was awarded the 2011 Oppenheim Portfolio Best Book Award Gold Seal for I Spy Spectacular, the 20th anniversary celebration of her popular I Spy children’s book series. It was also a Parents’ Choice Recommended Seal Winner for 2011.

1967 James (Terry) Cowan, Ed.M., is a ghostwriter who, with his wife Lois, penned Deer in the Crosshairs: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs by Levi Johnston. The book was published on September 27, 2011.

John (Jack) Miller, M.A.T., recently published Transcendental Learning: The Educational Legacy of Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, Peabody and Thoreau. He has authored or edited 17 books and has an author’s page on Amazon under John P. Miller.

1977 Carolyn Newberger, Ed.M.’72, Ed.D., was honored in October 2011, along with her husband, Eli, with the Family Legacy Award by Family Service of Greater Boston.

Zachary Tumin, Ed.M., will publish Collaborate or Perish!

Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World with former NYPD and LAPD chief and Boston police commissioner William Bratton, on January 17. In the

Neal Baer, Ed.M., published his debut novel, Kill Switch, in December 2011. His latest television production, A Gifted Man, currently airs on CBS. Mark Nerio, Ed.M., is vice president of community development for Citibank covering Austin, San Antonio, and South Texas. In addition, he was named chair-elect of the board of directors of the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Antonio.

1985 Julius Wayne Dudley, Ed.M., was appointed to the United States Commission on Civil Rights on September 14, 2011 under its new charter. Working with the commission under its previous charter, Dudley contributed to and helped edit reports on school desegregation in Georgia and on school discipline.

Renee Hobbs, Ed.D., was appointed founding director of the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island, to begin January 1. Her newest book, Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture to Classroom, was recently published.

1986 Sara Hoagland Hunter, Ed.M., recently wrote her eighth children’s book, The Lighthouse Santa. She had a reading in December at the Boston Athenaeum.

Dare to Dream: William Trueheart

S

oon after William Trueheart, Ed.D.’79, finished his undergraduate degree, he had dreams of being a businessman.

But when he met a high school teacher who asked him to

mentor some low-income students of color in Connecticut, his

future aspirations changed.

During the mentorship, Trueheart watched the students’ attitudes and grades improve, and he encouraged them to apply to four-year universities. In the end, the students were each rejected, opening Trueheart’s eyes to the reality of higher education in America.

about learning, only to experience that deep sense of rejection, especially after they had worked so hard,” Trueheart says. “Unfortunately, more often than not, there are things happening [in] students’ [lives] that institutions don’t fully recognize.”

As a result of that experience, Trueheart has dedicated much

courtesy of william trueheart

“I was touched by this experience and inspired by these students, who turned their lives around and [had become] excited

of his 45-year career to education in roles ranging from president of Bryant University to associate secretary of Harvard University

areas build support resources for students. Trueheart explains

in its Office of Governing Boards to president and chief executive

that the goal is to determine ways to help low-income students

officer of Reading Is Fundamental, Inc. The latest incarnation is

of color succeed in college and earn certificates or degrees of

as president and chief executive officer for Achieving the Dream,

some kind, by directing private dollars to these institutions. For

Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that helps community

example, by sending out leadership and data coaches to com-

college students, particularly students of color and low-income

munity college campuses, Achieving the Dream helps faculty and

students, stay in school and earn certificates or degrees.

administrators build institutional research capacity and data

“What most people don’t realize is nearly 50 percent of

analysis to track what’s happening in the classroom and with

students enrolled in post-secondary education are in commu-

student support. Ultimately, this information aids community

nity colleges,” he says. “A high percentage are low income and

colleges in making informed decisions about which practices to

students of color.”

adopt or abandon.

Unfortunately, while many of these students earned their high school diplomas, many are not prepared to take on college work.

“There’s a lot of talent being wasted each year because we

“Community colleges have been underresourced for a number of years and underappreciated,” he says. “They have been doing extraordinary work, and there are lots of excellent teachers and

haven’t invested wisely in helping those students prepare for

administrators helping students who are not as prepared as

college well,” he says. “We believe it’s an obligation of commu-

they should be. I believe it is urgent, and if we don’t begin to turn

nity colleges to help students who come into the doors become

around the rates of completion and success for our students of

college ready as efficiently and quickly as possible.”

color, then we are a weak nation.”

Achieving the Dream focuses specifically on helping community colleges serving low-income students in urban and rural

— Jill Anderson

1987

1989

1990

Pamela Gutlon, Ed.M., in November celebrated the second anniversary of her Outsiders Art Gallery located in Durham, N.C.

Deb Hirsch, Ed.M.’86, Ed.D., was named vice president for development and director of external relations at Mount Ida College in Newton, Mass.

Barbara Brown, Ed.D., was named head of school at the Marin School in Sausalito, Calif., in July 2011.

Tony Cipollone, Ed.D., was appointed the first president and chief executive officer of

the John T. Gorman Foundation, which aims to improve the lives of Maine residents through grantmaking. He was previously vice president for civic sites and initiatives at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore.

Harvard Graduate School of Education

41

alumni news and notes 2001

Jamie (Kornberg) Phillips, Indi (Avila) Lombardo, and Min (Chon) Kim have a mini-reunion with their children

1991

1998

Alice Charkes, Ed.M., recently celebrated her 20th year of teaching French in Vermont public schools. She lives in Brattleboro teaching K–6 and absolutely loves working with early language learners. She writes, “I would love to hear about other GSE alumni teaching FLES, especially here in New England. I continue to be a voracious reader and knitter; I’ve been playing on an ice hockey team for 18 years and still do self-supported bicycle tours once or twice every summer.”

José Cole-Gutiérrez, Ed.M., and his wife, Jennifer, welcomed son Santiago Arón ColeGutiérrez on October 13, 2011.

Santiago joins siblings Paloma, Marina, Nadia, Emilio, and Camila.

1993

1998 José Cole-Gutiérrez’s son Santiago Arón

Sharon Gleason, Ed.M., is director of development for the Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital. She recently earned the highest professional fundraising certification, the Advanced Certified Fundraising Executive, from the Association of Fundraising Professionals, the largest community of professional fundraisers in the world.

1994 Charles Haynes, Ed.M., was promoted to professor by the MGH Institute of Health Professions, the Boston health sciences graduate school. Haynes, who joined the MGH Institute in 1992, is a faculty member in the department of communication sciences and disorders.

1997 1999 Ingrid Schorr welcomes audience members to the 2011 Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts, which she produces

42

Ed.

• winter 2012

Sona Chong, Ed.M., is a writer and producer of educational content at Sockeye Studios, LLC. Nursery Rhyme Singing Time with Mother Goose Club, the company’s first DVD on its Mother Goose Club imprint, came out earlier this year.

1999 Christine Pina, Ed.M., has been named vice president for institutional advancement at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. She was formerly director of major gifts at Wesleyan University.

Ingrid Schorr, Ed.M., is associate director of the Office of the Arts at Brandeis University.

2000 Stacey Collins, Ed.M., is teaching creative writing classes at Santa Monica College. She is also working as a freelance magazine writer and trying to break into the entertainment business. In Los Angeles, she’s a board member of Harvardwood.org, an organization for Harvard alumni interested in the arts and entertainment fields.

B. Price Kerfoot, Ed.M., was honored by President Barack Obama with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. His research focuses on the application of rigorous clinical trial methodologies to the evaluation of education and educational technology. He is a staff urologist at a Boston VA hospital.

2001 Indi (Avila) Lombardo, Ed.M., lives in Aliso Viejo, Calif., with her husband, Chris, and their daughter, Ella Lucia.

The Serial Entrepreneur: Ana Gabriela Pessoa

A

na Gabriela Pessoa,

team of teachers produces

Ed.M.’07, has no

new content daily, personal-

patience for the status

ized to each student, to keep

quo. Since long before graduating

the users engaged. Pessoa is

from the International Education

particularly proud that Ezlearn

Policy Program at the Ed School,

uses a learner-focused model. “‘Learner-focused’ means

she has searched for a way to

the student is in command,”

education to the greatest number

says Pessoa. “We do that

of people in her home country of

by creating an algorithm that

Brazil. And in her experience —

personalizes each and every

which includes working at Senac

course based on each user’s

Rio, the largest professional

needs and his own goals. A

education network in Brazil, and

student can learn alone on

at Universidade Estácio de Sá,

the platform, although there is

the largest university in Brazil — there is only one way to accomplish this: through technology.

Her latest venture, Ezlearn Educacional, is an education technology company based in Rio

courtesy of Ana gabriela pessoa

bring high-quality, affordable

user interaction and interaction with teachers as well.”

Since its inception in 2009, Ezlearn has grown its subscriber list to more than 100,000 and shows no signs of slowing down, she says.

de Janeiro that helps people who have a high need for English language training but who have not

Pessoa is working on expanding the site’s services, including

previously had access. Through the company, Pessoa continues

adding several more skills-based courses, and hopes that its

to study how technology can be used in learning, particularly

subscriber list continues to grow, eventually reaching her goal

through adaptive learning platforms and social networking.

of 1 million users.

“The main goals,” Pessoa says, “are to democratize access

Similarly, Pessoa also has no plans to slow down. Despite a

to high-quality content, create a cheap and easy way to learn,

busy schedule that, in addition to her CEO duties at Ezlearn,

and create great usability on the site for people with little or no

includes being on the board of Ensina (Brazil’s Teach For Amer-

technology background.” The latter two goals, she hopes, help

ica equivalent) and starting the organization Women Entrepre-

Ezlearn reach the lower middle class, a segment of the popula-

neurs in Technology in Brazil, Pessoa plans on developing even

tion whose education has been particularly neglected.

more new businesses.

Currently, Ezlearn’s main product is Meuinglês, a website

“I’m a serial entrepreneur in education,” she says.

that helps Brazilians learn English through video lessons, social networks, and other learning technologies. The site’s

— Marin Jorgensen

She is currently teaching Spanish to grades 1–8 at a Waldorfinspired charter school. She recently published her first Spanish-language children’s book, Sana, Sana.

Cahn Oxelson, Ed.M., was recently named director of college counseling at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, N.Y.

guished Award in Teaching to study immigrant and language education in Finland.

Amy Stephens Sudmyer, Ed.M., and Jeff Sudmyer, Ed.M., welcomed their daughter, Elizabeth Stephens Sudmyer, on June 6, 2011. She joins big brother Charlie, who is now four.

2002

Min (Chon) Kim, Ed.M., lives in Houston with her husband, John, and their two kids, Ji-Oh and AJ. Jamie (Kornberg ) Phillips, Ed.M., lives in Los Angeles

with her husband, Josh, and their two kids, Hudson, 3, and Olivia, 4.5. She continues to run the educational enrichment company she founded in 2004.

She recently had a mini-reunion with Indi (Avila) Lombardo, Ed.M., and Min (Chon) Kim, Ed.M., and their families. “Although we have spread around the country, we are so happy to be able to get together once in a while,” she writes.

Kate Yocum, Ed.M., recently received the Fulbright Distin-

Diane Michalowski Freedland, Ed.M., is a director of community development at the PJ Library, an award-winning Jewish family engagement and literacy program under the Harold Grinspoon Foundation Harvard Graduate School of Education

43

alumni news and notes

that is designed to strengthen the identities of Jewish families.

Prior to that, she was executive director of Young Audiences of Massachusetts, an affiliate of one of the nation’s largest arts

education organization’s in the United States.

Craig Outhouse, Ed.M., was recently appointed assistant principal at Woodland School

in East Hartford, Conn., an alternative program that services more than 200 students in K–12. He continues to serve as an adjunct professor in the psychology department at Western New England University in Springfield, Mass.

Ann Sharfstein, Ed.M., started a new position as the reading specialist at Lebanon High School in Lebanon, N.H., at the start of the 2011–2012 academic year. This follows six years as an instructor at the

Stern Center for Language and Learning in Vermont. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and their two daughters, Sadie, 6, and Helena, 3.

2003 Tyler Hodges, Ed.M., has been appointed director of upper school academics and student life at Laguna Blanca School in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Previously, Hodges served as upper school dean of students.

Working with low-income families in the Massachusetts cities of Boston, Chelsea, and Lynn who would like to send their children to college, FUEL uses incentivized savings programs — including matching parents’ savings, offering seed money for parents’ accounts, and providing additional access to scholarships opportunities — and college access workshops called Savings Circles. FUEL’s programs actively promote budgeting and saving and encourage family motivation, what the organization sees as “one of the most important factors in educational attainment.”

Currently, in order for families to take advantage of the programs, they need to belong to the schools or organizations with which courtesy of Kaitlin LeMoine

FUEL is partnered. How to reach more families, says LeMoine, is among the organization’s challenges moving forward.

One of LeMoine’s own challenges, though, in her new role as director of education and research, is ensuring that FUEL is best serving the families they are already working with. To that end, LeMoine attends as many of the workshops as she can in order to get to know the families personally and observe how the

Fuel to the Fire: Kaitlin LeMoine

W

content she has designed is being received.

“I take a very hands-on approach,” she says. “In my experi-

hen she walked into the Ed School’s 2010 Fall

ence, curriculum design only becomes real when I can see how it

Internship Expo, Kaitlin LeMoine, Ed.M.’11, never

is both implemented and reacted to by those learning from it. …

guessed that she’d be walking out with a new career

One of my primary goals is to ensure that the material provided

direction. What the former teacher and student enrichment co-

to families is meaningful and truly helps them guide their chil-

ordinator at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Somerville,

dren down the pathway to higher education.”

Mass., found was inspiration in the form of Families United in Educational Leadership (FUEL), a Boston-area nonprofit.

“I had just wrapped up a summer job developing and teaching a personal finance curriculum for high school students and was

And her efforts are paying off, as FUEL is seeing its families send their children on to successful college careers. FUEL even receives letters from former participants expressing their gratitude.

“Learning how the FUEL program empowers families who may

struck by the influence that financial knowledge had on youth,”

have otherwise found the pathway to college education almost

she says. “To work at FUEL was a unique chance to develop cur-

impossible,” says LeMoine, “serves as a potent reminder of just

riculum to promote further awareness of both financial literacy

how powerful our work is.”

and higher education access among whole families, including their students.”

44

Ed.

• winter 2012

— Marin Jorgensen

Boris Korsunsky, Ed.D., was named one of the winners of 2011 Amgen Award for Excellence in Science Teaching. Only 31 teachers in the United States and Canada, including four teachers in Massachusetts, were so honored.

Adrian Lim, Ed.M., was the honoree in the academic leadership category of the Junior Chamber International 2011 Ten Outstanding Young Persons in the World Award. He recently contributed as a member of the New Media Consortium K–12 Horizon Project Advisory Board to produce the Horizon Report 2011 K–12 Edition. He is currently the principal of Ngee Ann Secondary School in Singapore.

2004 Matt Underwood, Ed.M., was promoted to executive director of the Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School, a K–8 charter school with two campuses. The school is a member

of the Coalition of Essential Schools. He continues to serve as the principal of the school’s middle school campus, a position he has held since 2007. He lives with his wife and son in the Cabbagetown neighborhood of Atlanta.

2005 Max Klau, Ed.M.’00, Ed.D., is the director of leadership development at City Year, a national service organization headquartered in Boston. He recently contributed the chapter “City Year: Developing Idealistic Leaders Through National Service” to The Handbook for Teaching Leadership, a textbook published last October.

Louie Rodriguez, Ed.M.’99, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D., was honored in October 2011 as a Person of Distinction by San Bernardino Valley College in California. He also recently wrote a blog entry for The White House Initiatives.

It can be read at www.ed.gov/

blog/2011/11/from-the-inlandempire-to-the-white-house-buildingcommunity-and-winning-our-future.

2006 Charlene Desir, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D., is the cofounder of The Empowerment Network (T.E.N.) Global, a nonprofit organization that supports the psychological development and academic advancement of women and children in Florida and Haiti. She has recently opened a youth center in the village of San Raphael, Haiti, which provides vulnerable youth with art-based programming to promote psycho-social development and overall healing. www.tenglobal.org.

2008

Molly Shaw, Ed.M., was named executive director of Communities In Schools of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Inc., in North Carolina.

2009

2007

Mark Hecker, Ed.M., founder and executive director of Reach Incorporated, a literacy program that recruits and trains struggling adolescent readers to tutor Washington, D.C.-area elementary school students in need of additional support, was one of 22 people from eight countries named a 2011 Echoing Green fellow.

Echoing Green is a nonprofit social venture fund that identifies, invests in, and supports some of the world’s best emerging social entrepreneurs.

Deirdre Duckett, Ed.M.’03, Ed.M., is working as director of recruitment and hiring at the Achievement Network in Boston.

Ryan Miller, Ed.M., recently became associate director of campus diversity and strategic initiatives at the University of

In Memory Dorothy Rundle Lamborn, Ed.M.’41

George Isaac Brown, Ed.D.’58

Joanne Mitchell, Ed.D.’67

Irvin Gaydos, GSE’46

Judith Richie Demerath, Ed.M.’58

Nap Dufault, C.A.S.’69

Emilie Gustava Larson, M.A.T.’46

James Tatro, M.A.T.’59

Joanne Dellaporta, M.A.T.’70

Caesar Gregory, Ed.M.’47

Joyce Friend Everett, M.A.T.’61

John Elmer, M.A.T.’46, C.A.S.’72,

Dorothy King Pethybridge, Ed.M.’49

Paul Judge, M.A.T.’61

Joseph McLean, C.A.S.’72

Elaine Kaufman Navias, GSE’50

Norman Walker, M.A.T.’61

Donald Robert Parkhurst, M.A.T.’72

Charles Smith Jr., GSE’52

John Bradford Davis, Ed.M.’49, C.A.S.’59,

Howard Ramagli Jr., Ed.M.’74

Roger Hahn, M.A.T.’54

Ed.D.’62

Bonnie Page MacFadyen, Ed.M.’76

Oscar lan Rogers Jr., M.A.T.’54

Geraldine Anderson, Ed.M.’63

Hsiao-ti Falcone, Ed.M.’78

James Wallace, M.A.T.’54

Judith Gartner, M.A.T.’63

Catherine Jenkins, Ed.M.’81

Arthur Wiscombe, Ed.M.’55

Anne Kane McGuire, M.A.T.’63

Lavern Hunter, Ed.M.’82

John Beebe, M.A.T.’56

Lloyd Blanchard, Ed.M.’49, C.A.S.’66

Janice Attean, Ed.M.’88

Nathaniel Ober, M.A.T.’51, C.A.S.’56

Charles Toth Jr., M.A.T.’66

Nancy Neill, C.A.S.’88

Shirley Osepchuk, Ed.M.’56

Peter Francis Carbone Jr., Ed.M.’62,

Mary Fries, C.A.S.’96

Robert Vandenberg, C.A.S.’56 Katharine Kharas, M.A.T.’57

Ed.D.’67 Helen Harry Johnson, M.A.T.’67

Sergei Samoylenko, Ed.M.’00 Kolajo Paul Afolabi, Ed.M.’10

alumni news and notes

Texas at Austin. In his role, he works with constituencies across campus on strategic planning, diversity education initiatives, campus climate incident response, and creating the university’s first institutional diversity plan. Previously, he directed the LGBT Resource Center at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Fla.

That Figures

24,813 21,138 1,710 17,327 22,848 Number of all living Ed School alumni

Number of domestic alumni

Number of international alumni

Number with valid email address

Alumni in United States

12,102 3,905 Northeast

1,538

West

3,509

Midwest

South

2010 Maxie Glass, Ed.M., got engaged in June 2011 to Evan Harnik, and will be getting married next July at the Harvard Club in New York.

Kim Snodgrass, Ed.M., has taken a position as special projects associate to the CEO and vice president at Olive Grove Consulting, LLC. She continues as director of her nonprofit, REACH: Realizing Every Action Creates Hope.

2011 Scott Barge, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D., joined his alma mater, Goshen College in Indiana, as director of institutional research. He is also a member of the faculty, teaching statistics and research methods.

127

696

Africa

• winter 2012

71

Asia

Australia/ Oceania

316

21,506

Europe

North America

132

South America

Ed. It Is

156

Number of alumni with first name starting with “Ed”

Michael Clarke, Ed.M., last year’s class gift chair, is teaching chemistry at Old Mill High School, an Anne Arundel County public school in Maryland, and settling back into life in the Washington, D.C. area.

Class Gift Chair Michael Clarke, Ed.M.’11, his wife, Gail Hewitt-Clarke, and his children, Michael and Michaela HewittClarke, hold the giant class gift check at Commencement 2011

Ed.

71

Other: Guam, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, federated state of Micronesia, and military

Geographic Spread

2011

46

Number with valid mailing address

1,982

Number with a January birthdate (Ed.’s publication month)

He says, “It is great being back with my wife and kids, but I do miss Appian Way!” Liliana Garces, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D., is serving as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Poverty Center of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

She was also appointed assistant professor of higher education administration in the Department of Educational Leadership at George Washington University School of Education and Human Development. She is spending this year in Michigan before moving to D.C. Michael Hurwitz, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D., is working as a research scientist in the policy and advocacy division of the College Board.

Kaitlin LeMoine, Ed.M., is working at Families United in Educational Leadership, a Massachusetts nonprofit, as director of education and research. (See profile page 44.)

Katherine Pezzella, Ed.M., is assistant director of Greek life at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

michael tallman

2

1

5

4

Where’s Ed.?

Well, it seems the answer to that is everywhere. And that’s great. But we have too many to print only on the back cover so we decided to run a whole bunch here. Keep them coming! classnotes@gse.harvard.edu

3 6

1 Yes, the dean took a copy of Ed. to the recent wedding of her daughter, Kaitlin, and son-in-law, Chad. 2 Mayra Yaez de Saldaa, mom to Jerusha Saldaa Yaez, Ed.M.’11, reading at the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. 3 Red Skullton hanging out in the living room of Perla Manapol, Ed.M.’73. 4 David Torres, waiting for his mother, Jennifer Monie de Torres, Ed.M.’96, to accept the Secondary Teacher of the Year award for Mobile County Public Schools. 5 The children of Catherine Wu, Ed.M.’97, in Taiwan. 6 Current Ed.D. student Liz Hale Rozas and her husband, Xavier Rozas, Ed.M.’10, on a bike trip down the California coast this past summer. 7 Martyna Sarnowska, Ed.M.’10, Lecturer Haiyan Hua, and Magdalena Wierzbicka, Ed.M.’10, at a conference in Warsaw, Poland.

7

Harvard Graduate School of Education

47

mark silber

recess

jill anderson

William Coperthwaite and his yurts, in Maine and on Appian Way

In the Round If you walked down Appian Way in 1968, it would have been hard to miss the circular, tent-like structure with a shiny red roof on the Ed School campus. The yurt, a round wooden living structure first used by Mongolians, was the campus home of then–doctoral student William Coperthwaite, Ed.D.’72.

It was a smaller version of his permanent home, a three-story yurt he built in 1962 on 300 acres of land in Machiasport, Maine, set 1.5 miles from the nearest road.

Since then, he has spent the years working as an educator and learning about disappearing cultures from around the globe.

It was the latter pursuit that brought him to the Ed School in the late ’60s. At the time, he was deeply immersed in learning the ways of the American Eskimo and planning a traveling exhibition for schools. According to Coperthwaite, when administrators got word of his work, they encouraged him to apply for the doctoral program and bring the traveling exhibition to fruition.

A lover of nature and sustainable living, for Coperthwaite the shift to Cambridge, Mass., was tough, so he asked the school to let him build his own yurt on campus where Gutman Library now stands. With a price tag of $600 and the help of other students, Coperthwaite erected the yurt in two days. For the next year, the yurt became a gathering place for those interested in handicrafts and hosted lively debates and informal seminars about education. The yurt was so popular that nearby Radcliffe College asked Coperthwaite to design another yurt for their faculty and administrators in what is now the location of the sunken garden.

“Living in the round is different than living in a square,” Coperthwaite says of the popularity. The circular shape of the yurt encourages conversation and interaction with one another, he says, noting that while sitting in the round, everyone can be equal.

48

Ed.

• winter 2012

For years, Coperthwaite has worked to generate interest in yurt living and has helped people all over the world — even school districts — design and construct the buildings.

Phil and P.J. Coperthwaite has become the go-to expert on yurt design and construction, which resulted in the book, A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity. He even created the nonprofit Yurt Foundation, which focuses on research, education, and dissemination of yurt living.

Today, on his 300 acres, Coperthwaite continues to cherish the simplicity of yurt living. Despite many technological advances, he still has no electricity or plumbing at home. He balks at phones and email, preferring to write letters. Now, in his 80s, he still travels the world studying disappearing cultures and shares what he learns via workshops. An avid whittler, Coperthwaite believes people need to make more things by hand and understand the hard work involved in such crafts.

“The hands help the brain and the brain helps the hands,” he says.

He admits that much of what worried him about education and modern society in his days at the Ed School still exists today.

“The erosion continues, the population explosion continues, and there are more and more cars just pushing out more problems,” he says, looking out at the trees. “We are living beyond our means as a society and it’s scary. So I live in the woods and carve spoons.”

— Jill Anderson For those interested in reaching out to Coperthwaite, visit www.yurtinfo.org/theyurtfoundation.

Watch a video of Coperthwaite in Maine.

Dick and Meg with their son on the steps of their Chauncy Street apartment in 1962

the appian way investing

Pass It On

G

rowing up in the rural town of Chazy in upstate New York,

and acted in school plays, and advised the literary and graphic

less than 10 miles from the Canadian border, Richard

arts magazine. Meg notes that Dick became the first Eng-

“Dick” Dodds, M.A.T. ’62, relied on financial help to

lish teacher at Mt. Greylock to have his name placed on the

pursue his educational goals — an academic route that eventually led to the Ed School and, later, to a sabbatical at Oxford.

“I was a scholarship guy all the way through,” he says, which is

school’s Hall of Honor. ““Although he went to Harvard and Oxford, we grew up in the country,” she says, explaining why she was so proud when he

why he and his wife, Meg, decided to set up a planned charitable

was given the honor. “So he was able to teach students from all

gift annuity to benefit student fellowships.

walks of life.”

During her husband’s time at the Ed School, Meg worked in

“Public education is in my blood,” Dick says. “Both of my par-

the university’s development office, and now she fondly recalls

ents were teachers for about 35 years.” The family’s passion for

museum visits and spending days riverside with their new baby.

education continues with the Dodds’ son, Richard Jr., Ed.M. ’85,

“We know how wonderful it is to have a scholarship to a very good college,” she says, “and it’s nice to pass it on.”

In making this type of a gift, the Dodds will receive steady, guaranteed lifetime payments from the annuity — a tax-advantaged way to provide income during their retirement as well as to support the school’s mission.

who works as a data warehouse developer at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

In establishing their legacy at the school, the Dodds are now members of the Paul Hanus Society.

“We both love children of all ages, and we love to help them,” Meg says of their decision to put their money into the annuity.

“I had a tremendous time at Harvard with people who were in-

“These are very unusual times that we are living in now, so we

terested in ideas and who were doing a lot of good research,” Dick

feel a little more comfortable knowing that we have invested in

says. “I would like to see that continue.”

Harvard — something that will be solid in the future.”

Eventually, Dick taught English at Mt. Greylock High School in Williamstown, Mass., for 36 years, where he also directed

— Amy Magin Wong Harvard Graduate School of Education

49

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Where’s Ed.?

Are you right as Rainn? You can be if you glam it up while reading Ed., as Rainn Wilson, star of the television show The Office, did in November when he was at the school recording an EdCast.

Send the photo of yourself or someone in your family to classnotes@gse.harvard.edu.

michael rodman

To see more Where’s Ed.? photos, go to page 47.