Harvard Ed. Magazine, Fall 2015

FA L L 2 0 1 5

Where Do You Find an Average Student?

You don’t.

May 28, 2015 Professor Patricia Graham, former dean of the Ed School, received an honorary degree from Harvard University at this year’s commencement ceremony in the Yard. Graham, who joined the Ed School in 1974 and served as dean from 1982 to 1991, was the first woman at Harvard to be named a dean. Prior, she spent nearly a decade as director of Barnard College Education Program, where she learned about underserved students in New York City schools. During that time, she also helped Princeton University adapt to its new co-ed student body, in step with other Ivy League schools. Graham started her teaching career in 1955 (with an annual salary of $2,250) at Deep Creek High School, a segregated white school in Virginia with a 75 percent dropout rate. Graham herself had dropped out of high school at the age of 16, impatient with the education she was receiving in West Lafayette, Indiana. As she told the Harvard Gazette in 2010, a few years after retiring, “I had enough credits. I figured they owed me a diploma.”

B

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

1

MICHAEL RODMAN

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

FA L L 2 0 1 5

Where Do You Find an Average Student?

ISTOCKPHOTO

You don’t.

EDITOR IN CHIEF Lory Hough lory_hough@harvard.edu SENIOR DESIGNER Paula Telch Cooney paula_telch@harvard.edu DESIGNER Angelina Berardi angelina_berardi@harvard.edu ASSISTANT DEAN OF COMMUNICATIONS Michael Rodman michael_rodman@harvard.edu

departments 04 CONVERSATIONS 06 APPIAN WAY 40 NEWS AND NOTES 48 CAMPAIGN

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Brigham Fay Elaine McArdle Brendan Pelsue CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER Emalie Parkhurst ILLUSTRATORS John S. Dykes Daniel Vasconcellos PHOTOGRAPHERS Iman Rastegari Michael Rodman Martha Stewart COPYEDITING Marin Jorgensen Abigail Mieko Vargus POSTMASTER Send address changes to: Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 13 Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02138 © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Harvard Ed. Magazine is published three times a year.

contents FA L L 2 0 1 5

22 Lecturer Todd Rose, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’07, wants you understand that when it comes to people, including students, we have to stop believing that there is such a thing as average.

28 Based on his own tough experience, Charles Drake, Ed.D.’70, started a school more than four decades ago for students struggling with dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities.

34 While nearly every American family struggles to pay for college, undocumented young people have an even tougher time without the same access to financial aid.

RYAN SMITH

In the summer 2015 issue, we ran a feature-length profile of alum Rick Hess, Ed.M.’90, a prolific education blogger for Education Week and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a center-right think tank in Washington, D.C. @charlesmurray, author of The Bell Curve, wrote on Twitter: Profile of education expert @rickhess99, marveling that a conservative can also be smart and sensible. It’s progress.

After Hess responded, another tweet from Murray: But now @arthurbrooks knows you don’t toe the AEI party line. Time for a visit to the AEI Reeducation Camp.

Arthur Brooks, president of AEI, responded: @charlesmurray @rickhess99 Think of it like summer camp for Ph.D.s. We sing about free enterprise around the campfire.

4

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

I’m interested enough (“Hess, Straight Up”) to consider perusing and then maybe reading The Cage-Busting Teacher. The truth is that another 320 pages won’t fit neatly into my life just now. Good article about a man I had no idea about before now.

— michelle degondea amato

Went to AEI with Teachers College’s Federal Policy Institute in 2009, and I never forgot this guy. He spoke to us in one of our sessions and really stood out. Very sharp, excellent ideas.

— phil murphy, teacher, bronx preparatory charter school

@vivaserafina wrote on Twitter: Love this article. I’m also glad to see he got dressed up for the photo shoot. #shortsallday. @RandallSampson tweeted: Straight up beast mode.

Our popular story, “What’s Worth Learning in School?” from last winter’s issue, asked a provocative question based on the work being done by Professor David Perkins.

This is a great question and I am in agreement with much (maybe all) of what is written. But a central point that may be missing is that what is worth learning may differ for each and every one of us who is in school. And that is why I like and support the model introduced by the Sudbury Valley School, where activity, learning, and development are left free and independent of any particular curriculum or external agenda. Nearly 50 years of experience has demonstrated the validity of this approach. — mike sadofsky

Readers continue to comment on the story “What Happened to the Common Core?” that we ran a year ago, in our fall 2014 issue.

The theory is that the Common Core was “designed to raise student proficiencies so the United States can better compete in a global market,” but it is actually putting the students behind. It is irresponsible to state that this is a “right” or “left” issue. The educators, the ones asked to implement these theories, are telling us that they simply are not practical. Go into a second-grade classroom and see how confused the students are with the math specifically. For our students to compete better globally, let’s look at the habits of the generation that made this such a strong country. What our students are lacking is structure, accountability, and a strong sense of community. Let’s work on that and we will again be a strong, prosperous, and UNITED nation.

— sandie torres The human contact in a child’s education is missing in this complex puzzle. The experts are all saying the same thing about successful work when it comes to education at large. The building block in the classroom ought to look at the whole picture in reaching the parental and community involvement within our schools. — jose gustavo lujan

Send letters (150 words or fewer): letters@gse.harvard.edu Post a comment on the Ed. website: gse.harvard.edu/ed Tell us your thoughts and ideas on Facebook or Twitter: harvardeducation @hgse twitter.com/hgse facebook.com/harvardeducation youtube.com/harvardeducation instagram.com/harvardeducation

DANIEL VASCONCELLOS

In our summer 2015 piece about Kim Marshall, Ed.M.’81, and his weekly Marshall Memo (“Designated Reader”), we overstated how Marshall feels about the full day he spends each week reading education articles and research.

Marshall says it’s really hard work, but he’s never thought of it as hell.

I see no real content focused on the effects that are being seen in our children with the implementation of CCSS {Common Core State Standards]. Let’s top looking at numbers, political agendas, graphs, and opinions. Let’s look at our kids and do what is best for them. And what is best for the children is to stop Common Core and all of the political and financial greed that is behind it! — caryn jenkins

harvardeducation.tumblr.com issuu.com/harvardeducation

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

5

appian way

6

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

ISTOCKPHOTO

At the Ed School’s hackathon last October, participants were asked to mull over a bunch of questions, including this one: How would you learn if the only thing you had access to was a smartphone?

Farhan Quasem, Ed.M.’15, and Cindy Yang, Ed.M.’15, both students at the time in the Technology, Innovation, and Education Program, took the question one step further: What if you didn’t even have a smartphone?

As they tried to answer this question, they started talking about the many homeless people they passed every day in Harvard Square who, they were certain, didn’t have smartphones or Internet access.

So on the first day of the hackathon, along with classmate Hannah Fidoten, Ed.M.’15, the two walked around the square and asked some of the homeless a twist on their question: What would you do if you did have a smartphone and Internet access?

One woman, a pregnant mother with another child living with a relative, said she’d use it to better manage her appointments, especially with doctors. Another said she’d use it to apply online for jobs. Others talked about being able to locate services like food pantries or reconnect with loved ones.

From this, the nonprofit Mobilizr was born. Quasem and Yang spent the past spring and summer in the Venture Incubation Program at Harvard i-lab creating a plan for Mobilizr to digitally empower the homeless by giving them smartphones, data plans, and ongoing tech support. Their pilot, which was partially funded by an Indiegogo crowdsourcing fundraiser and the Harvard Coop, distributed donated phones and limited data plans for three months to eight people living in transitional housing through a local organization called HomeStart. Initial reports from case managers show that the phones have helped, especially in helping to set up and keep appointments. “We definitely know that task management is one of the ways we can help our clients,” Quasem says.

A second pilot with Lazarus House Ministries will include 30 people in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts, using brand-new Lenovo phones.

“We decided we had to go through organizations that serve the homeless, to target individuals living in some form of transitional housing who are post-detox and on the road to recovery,” Quasem says. “A lot of them are really motivated. Their goal is to get out of transitional housing or shelters and into their own homes.” The data plan is purposefully limited, he says. “We are holding them accountable. We don’t want them to just watch YouTube all day, but to use it to improve their condition.” Beyond the practical uses, this includes also being able to reach out to lost family and friends.

— Lory Hough for more information:

mobilizr.org

or

@wearemobilizr.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

7

8

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

OS ELL ONC VA S C IE L DA N

When the school year started last fall, new master’s student Chad Velde, Ed.M.’15, remembers issues like race and gender being talked about a lot in his School Leadership Program (SLP) classes. Program director and lecturer Lee Teitel, Ed.D.’88, designs classes so that students are forced to work through their biases, Velde says.

Still, he noticed that during the many discussions, some of the white men in class didn’t talk much.

“On the one hand, it’s great for white men to sit back and listen. We’ve been the benefactors of how society has been set up,” Velde says. “But it’s also important for us to break that down and see what it means.”

Velde decided to reach out to the rest of the SLP students and invite those who identify as white men to come to an initial ally meeting to explore their privilege. The meeting would be a safe space where conversations would be confidential. It was an email, he says, that took forever to pull together.

“My five-sentence email took me two hours to write,” he says. The response was immediate, and the group met — and continued to meet throughout the year. They talked about what they were learning in class, their biases, and active steps they were taking at their practicum school sites to address racism and sexism. He also learned why some of the men were hesitant to participate in class discussions.

“A lot of it comes from the stereotype threat,” he says — people feel they are at risk of confirming negative stereotypes. “In talking openly about race or gender, white men are seen as the bad guys.

We are the ones who have kept things down. We think, ‘Oh great.

I’m going to say the wrong thing.’” For some men, simply having this kind of conversation is also a new experience. For this reason, Velde had the men watch part of the documentary White Like Me, based on the work of educator and author Tim Wise, at one of their last meetings.

“I wanted the guys to see that there are a lot of people doing this work,” he says.

As the spring semester was ending, Velde said he hoped the work the ally group had started would continue, in some form,

when a new crop of master’s students started in the fall. If so, Velde, now located in Chicago, where he took a position with the Uno Charter School Network, says he would love to offer suggestions or act as a coach. He also plans on continuing conversations in Chicago with two of the men in the SLP group who also moved to the Windy City.

Before commencement, Velde learned that several male Ed.L.D. students, including Kevin King, decided to form a similar ally group on campus. King says that, like Velde, he noticed that in class he was often hesitant to join in the conversations. Looking back at his past jobs as a teacher, a principal, and an administrator, he also realized he hadn’t been doing enough as an educator to address issues like racism and sexism. He says he always did his work with equity in mind, “but I always wanted to see myself as the good guy in the fight,” not as someone who had been a recipient of privilege.

“But if I move into a superintendent role, it’s imperative for me to see where I have blind spots,” he says. “If I’m not actively working against privilege, racism, and sexism, then I’m not neutral. I’m in the way.” — Lory Hough

to learn more:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

Typically, studies of leadership in education focus on “formal” leaders — the individuals who have official management roles, such as principals or superintendents. But doctoral student David Sherer is more interested in “informal” leaders — the people in a school or district who may or may not have official leadership roles but are nonetheless prominent, and often formidable, in the organization’s social network. As he continues working toward his final dissertation options, he talked about social ties, seeking good will, and why it’s important to find these leaders.

You’ve probably worked with colleagues who are very connected to others in your organization, who are very popular and are very informed about what’s going on. I’m interested in these “hubs” of communication.

A lot of research suggests that people who are very wellconnected to others can exert a high level of influence on an organization’s overall success.

In schools, this is important because it relates to the school’s change strategy. Say you’re a district superintendent.

A classic way to initiate change is to rely on your formal chain of command. First you roll out your ideas to assistant superintendents and then your principals. You should be seeking out the informal leaders and educating them about what you want to do.

Why? You’ll get feedback from these informal leaders before you even move forward. You want to get them on board.

There’s a lot of power and influence in that network.

It can be hard to identify these hubs using typical research strategies. You can’t look at a formal organizational chart and find the informal leaders. This is where social network analysis comes in. Social network analysis lets you look at the social ties in an organization and find the people with the most social ties — the informal leaders.

MARTHA STEWART

I used social network survey data to identify the informal leaders in a reforming elementary school. Then I used interview data on these same individuals to understand their perceptions. I was interested in what these informal leaders had to say about changes that the school was experiencing because it’s likely that informal leaders can play a large role in facilitating — or sabotaging! — school reform efforts.

I found that informal leaders were more opinionated than other staff members. They were more likely to say positive or negative things about new instructional programs. They were also more likely to say negative things about the principal.

The informal leaders were formidable individuals. If someone wanted to make a change at the school, they would be wise to seek the goodwill of these hubs.

— Lory Hough HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

9

Wh a

te o ri

Your Fa s a W v t

COURSE IN COLLEGE and

? y h W

JAMAAL BARNES, ED.M.’11, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF ADMISSIONS

My favorite college class was freshman Ancient Greek; it was a blast learning with my peers and translating texts like Plato’s Republic. However, no matter how much I studied, it was still all Greek to me!

• FALL 2015 •

LECTURER VICKI JACOBS, C.A.S.’80, ED.D.’86

My favorite class was the one in which I worked the hardest. As a sophomore English major, I took an upper-level class on Milton and slaved (with frustration and fascination) over Paradise Lost. By so doing, I first became cognizant of the intrinsic rewards (including an addictive “runner’s high”) that disciplined literary analysis affords.

PROFESSOR ANDREW HO

In my first fall at Brown, due to a fluke of scheduling, my English Literature class ended up with only six students. My instructor, Nelina Backman, decided we should meet in a coffee shop. Line edit by line edit, she began to teach me how to write.

Psychology and the Law. This course, which I took in my junior year at Washington University in St. Louis, was fascinating then and particularly relevant today, given what has happened in Ferguson, Staten Island, Baltimore, Cleveland, and elsewhere.

KATHERINE CARTER, ED.M.’14, CURRENT DOCTORAL STUDENT

Grassroots Community Development at the University of Massachusetts– Amherst. It was unique in that it was a studentrun class founded on the Freirean concept of critical praxis. It engaged us in hands-on community service projects while also requiring us to actively reflect on our positionality and identity in community-centered social justice work.

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

My favorite course in college was Cell and Structural Biology 308: Immunology. It ignited my imagination and illustrated how even micro activity in our body can represent macro animal activity. In many ways, it helped to catalyze my entrance to the pathway of the field of education.

MICHAEL RODMAN, ASSISTANT DEAN FOR MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS

HEATHER MCCORMACK, ED.M.’15

10

ANJALI ADUKIA, ED.M.’03, ED.M.’12, ED.D.’14

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

One course that I remember well was a class I took with Angela Davis titled Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex, where I learned that today’s legacy of institutional racism in the prison system began with the conversion of slave plantations in the South into state prisons during the reconstruction period.

KATHLEEN LYNCH, ED.M.’08, CURRENT DOCTORAL STUDENT

History & Literature Senior Thesis Tutorial. I loved having the opportunity to work one on one with a faculty member on a research project, as well as to explore topics in the history of education.

MARC JOHNSON, ED.M.’99, ED.D.’15

My favorite course in college was REL 203: Introduction to Religion. The professor, the Rev. Aaron Carter, helped me understand the role of faith and reason in my religious beliefs.

MEGHAN LOCKWOOD, ED.M.’09, CURRENT DOCTORAL STUDENT

When I was a senior at Yale, I loved John Gaddis’ class The Cold War because learning the history that happened the few decades before and after my birth helped me understand current events on a deeper level and to really feel like an adult.

CELA DORR, ED.M.’13

Linda Nathan’s Democratic Schools. Freedom.

I M A N R A S T EG A R I

1960

I was born in China Lake, California, a Navy base in the middle of the Mojave Desert. My father, who had come to the United States from Iraq, joined the Navy in part to secure his effort to become a citizen and in part to seek adventure at sea. His path through the Navy led to an engineering degree from George Washington University and a job in the desert but never to a ship.

1982

I wrote a senior honors thesis that won the departmental prize. I decided not to apply to law school. A year later, I entered the Ph.D. program in American history at Stanford University.

1965

I began public school in China Lake. I remember enjoying the Ritz crackers that my teacher served as a snack before naptime, the harsh desert sun shining through the big plate-glass classroom windows, and sitting in rows of desks, but nothing about learning.

1979

I took my first history class. I discovered that I had ideas and I liked thinking. I began to cultivate a side of me that I had not known before.

1978

I graduated high school, a member of the National Honor Society and president of my school, and entered Brandeis University.

1985

I did an independent study with George Fredrickson on American intellectual history.

I became interested in this debate among historians about what happened to religion in the late-19th-century American culture: Did it diminish in importance (secularization), or did it separate from its institutional base in churches and diffuse through culture (sacralization)?

I decided to focus on religion at universities founded in the late 19th century. I found the sources so fascinating that I would end up writing my dissertation on universities.

1990

I earned my Ph.D. and took my first academic job teaching American intellectual and religious history at the University of Texas–Dallas.

1993

1966

My family moved to a suburb of Los Angeles so my father could take a job at Hughes Aircraft.

I began first grade at Pedregal Elementary School. I had difficulty learning to read, I had a speech impediment, and I was teased badly by my fellow students. There was nothing about my early schooling that would point to my future as a professor at HGSE. Luckily I had a good first-grade teacher and a capable speech therapist and learned to read and to pronounce my s’s and my r’s.

1974

1970

My time through elementary school was uneven. I worked hard to please my good teachers, but I had trouble staying engaged. Unfortunately, I had a rocky relationship with my fourth- and fifth-grade teachers.

When my fifth-grade teacher tore up the essay I wrote on “What America Means to Me” because it was insufficiently patriotic, I stopped doing my schoolwork.

I entered Rolling Hills High School. Midway through my freshman year, while daydreaming in math class, I was struck with the clear insight that I did not like whom I was becoming and that I had better change. I distanced myself from the kids I previously associated with, started doing my schoolwork, and got involved in extracurricular activities. It was not easy. It took months of walking around the periphery of the school before I worked up the courage to sit in the lunch area and eat alone. My transcript will reflect that I sometimes slipped into old habits of disengagement. But eventually I made new friends, got engaged in school activities, did well in classes.

I received a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. When I presented my research, [Professor Emerita] Patricia Graham, former HGSE dean, then president of the foundation, was in the audience.

She asked me if I wanted to join a foundation committee reviewing major grants. Being on the committee exposed me to research on education and to scholars with a wide range of backgrounds.

1994

I went on the job market.

My partner, Lisa, and I wanted to become parents, and Dallas did not seem like the best place for a lesbian couple to raise children.

I applied to positions in history and education, including a job in higher education at HGSE.

1971–1973 In middle school, my disengagement from school got even worse.

With some help from my older siblings, I became a juvenile delinquent. Sparing the details, let’s just say my behavior was not good for me or anyone else. I still feel like I owe my eighth-grade math teacher an apology for driving her to tears.

1995

I started my job at HGSE three days after our daughter, Phoebe, was born. I immediately loved teaching here and knew I had found the right academic home.

2015

This year, I celebrate my 20th year at the Ed School. The field of education is no longer a new world, but I am still excited about all I have to learn.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

11

Huntington High School located in New York was faced with a dilemma common for many schools across the country: In order to better understand school climate, it knew it needed to make changes, but it didn’t know what changes or where to begin. Dealing with the day to day of running a school left little time for teachers and administrators to collect data or even reflect on what data should be collected.

Last fall, the school turned to the Ed School’s Making Caring Common initiative. Carmela Leonardi, the principal at the time, had attended a couple of other professional development programs at the Ed School and had found them helpful.

“We knew that if we wanted to make changes, we needed to know what direction we needed to move in,” she says.

“That’s important.”

The Making Caring Common folks, through their new Caring Schools Initiative, provided Leonardi and her team with a free survey for students and staff that would allow them to “get under the hood” of the school’s culture, says Senior Lecturer Rick Weissbourd, co-director of Making Caring Common. In particular, the survey was designed to help them learn how students and staff perceived the school environment and who, besides family, was in their circle of concern. The survey also allowed them to hear from the quiet students, the ones who normally wouldn’t express their opinions. “You have to get data on kids to guide your decisions,” Weissbourd says.

Once the survey was done, Huntington and the other 50 middle and high schools that took part in the initiative were given reports in clear, accessible language that summarized the results, plus a set of resources and customized strategies that teachers and principals could use to make changes based on their results.

Last spring, Caring Schools participants were then invited to attend a three-day professional development program on Appian Way that allowed them to really pull apart their survey results and figure out how to best apply the information in their schools, says Trisha Anderson, a research project manager for Making Caring Common. “We really wanted them to walk away with an action plan.”

For the team at Huntington, the survey, which was given to more than 1,000 students and 130 teachers, revealed an issue that did not surprise social studies teacher Ken Donovan: empathy.

“My classes regularly discuss issues of justice, equity, and the like throughout our curriculum. While I find students are generally strong in recognizing alternative perspectives in an academic way — for example, analyzing different arguments on why the American Revolution took place — I think there is a shortfall when it comes to empathizing with people outside their demographic,” he says, adding that he saw the same pattern at other high schools where he has taught in the past. “As we 12

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

discussed immigration, racial profiling, minimum wage, and other controversial issues, I found that students tended to stick to thoughts and explanations that fit the framework with which they have grown up. I feel this has significant consequences for creating a caring environment in the school, but also in the larger community, state, country, and world.”

Bonnie Guarino, an English teacher at Huntington, says the Caring Schools recommendations indicated that one way for them to improve empathy was to improve communication between teachers and students — even something as simple as teachers asking students anonymously to share more about themselves.

“Anonymously, students complete index cards stating ‘the things I wish my teacher knew about me,’” she says. “This is in addition to the profiles most teachers have students fill out in the beginning of the year. The anonymity encourages students to share things that are important to them, but which are often difficult to say. This way the teacher has a better sense of some of the underlying issues in the classroom.”

Donovan says that this is just one “low-burden” exercise they learned about that could easily be done in a school that doesn’t have to cost a lot — or anything, other than time.

“Very often, when schools roll out programs to address perceived problems or change cultural direction, there may be an overhaul of practice, the purchase of prepackaged materials, outside consultants, and the like. That really isn’t the case here,” he says of the survey recommendations. “The institute stressed lowburden changes that could be made. This makes it much more

Recent notable stories from the Usable Knowledge website If you’re trying to boost outcomes for your students by awarding scholarships to encourage attendance and achievement, do you give them to the best students, or to the neediest? According to Associate Professor Felipe BarreraOsorio, both pathways are beneficial.

Read a white paper by Project Zero’s Agency by Design that explains how maker-centered learning has more to do with building character than building the next computer.

DA N

IE L

VA S C

ONC

ELL

OS

A look at digital online stress and how teenagers cope, by Professor Robert Selman and current doctoral student Emily Weinstein.

practical in a world where teachers may feel overwhelmed by the various demands of the day and year.”

Brenden Cusack, the new principal at Huntington who attended the Caring Schools sessions as assistant principal, plans on trying out another low-burden suggestion: creating lunch discussions between faculty, staff, and students of all grades and all participation levels.

“The focus will be to have discussions about our school, the climate, the concept of ethical responsibility, and what it means for us as a learning community,” he says, starting with topics suggested in the survey results. “The intent here is for these regular meetings to serve as a platform for conversation that would not be limited to students in leadership positions, but would also include kids with a variety of social and academic backgrounds from all walks of life.” In time, Cusack hopes that students and teachers will feel more ownership over the process as they begin to generate their own discussion topics. “I feel that the very process of holding these talks will promote a deeper understanding among our students and between the students and our faculty. The subtext herein, of course, is that everyone’s voice matters and needs to be heard on a personal level.” — Lory Hough

check out these and other pieces:

uknow.gse.harvard.edu.

Have you signed up yet for a Usable Knowledge Webinar, one of the new 90-minute, interactive sessions that give you access to education leaders like Professors Tom Hehir and Catherine Snow? And there’s an added bonus: Ed School alumni get $10 off the webinar cost.

gse.harvard.edu/ppe/usable-knowledge-webinars

13

DAYMON GARDNER

TIME magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world is usually populated with individuals — most of them famous — from certain categories: politics, business, science, media, and the arts. It’s not often that an educator, especially one working behind the scenes, cracks the list. But this past year, one did — an Ed School alum who was featured in the winter 2008 issue of Ed. magazine: Kira Orange Jones, Ed.M.’06.

“I was humbled,” Orange Jones says of hearing the news that she had been chosen. “Most educators will tell you, you don’t get into the field of education for the pay, certainly not for the fame.

We work for our students.”

And she has.

In the TIME essay written about her by Walter Isaacson, a journalist and former TIME editor, Orange Jones is cited as “one of the critical engines of innovation” in the successful reinvention of schools in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. “As Teach For America’s executive director in New Orleans,” Isaacson writes, “she attracted educators from across the United States and developed ways for reformers, community members, and veteran teachers to respect and learn from one another.”

She is also helping to make the teaching staff in Louisiana more diverse.

“As we’ve experienced so much change in our schools over the past decade in the wake of Katrina, the New Orleans community has seen the demographics of our teaching force shift,” she says.

14

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

“As a result, fewer of our majority African American students can look to the front of the classroom and see a teacher who looks like them. Knowing that teachers who share the background of their students have potential for profound additional impact, we have prioritized building a more diverse teaching corps. We believe that we need leaders who share the racial and economic backgrounds of our students as well as those who bring the privilege of our current education system and a commitment to using that privilege to create greater equity.”

As a result, Teach For America’s 2014 corps is the most racially and socio-economically diverse in their history. “Thirty-four percent of the Louisiana corps identifies as a person of color — 20 percent African American — 35 percent come from a low-income background, and 22 percent were the first in their family to go to college,” Orange Jones says. “Additionally, 20 percent identify as a Louisianan, and many went to school at one of our state’s great colleges or universities.”

It these kinds of changes and this kind of impact that Orange Jones hoped to make when she moved to New Orleans after Katrina, during what she saw as a small window of opportunity for energetic educators to truly transform the battered area’s schools.

“We have to get this right,” she said in Ed., back in 2008. “There are thousands of kids getting up every morning depending on us for a future. It’s everyone’s responsibility. Certainly it’s mine.”

— Lory Hough

Ed.L.D. graduates go on to work in a range of high-level education jobs in the nonprofit sector, in policy, and in government. Some even start their own organizations, like these graduates from the first three cohorts.

Building 21* Chip Linehan and Laura Shubilla, 2014 This nonprofit developed two new public high schools in Pennsylvania (to start), using a new, innovative school design that adapts to meet all learners where they are and empowers them to discover their passions and interests. b-21.org

Supporting Women Artists Project Francesca Kaplan Grossman, 2013 Nonprofit based in New York City that works with schools on curriculum development and supports female artists, offering free studio space to emerging women artists who will mentor and encourage young female students interested in art. swap-nyc.org

Discover Create Advance Karl Wendt, 2013 Web-based nonprofit that helps students and teachers learn through projects that allow them to design, build, break, and fix — the basis, they say, of true learning. discover-create-advance.org

TandemEd* Brian Barnes and Dorian Burton, 2015 Viewing the connection between community and school as a key element for innovation and reform, this nonprofit in Pittsburgh offers services that address racial issues and allows local communities to self-design and deliver educational content to young people. tandemed.com

* Started while students were in the Ed.L.D.

Program and served as the students’ yearthree residencies.

This past spring, one of the largest studies to date on massive open online courses — more commonly known as MOOCs — was released. Co-led by Ed School Professor Andrew Ho, who is the head of research for edX, and including Justin Reich, Ed.D.’12, and Rebecca Petersen, Ed.M.’99, the research used two years of data from HarvardX and MITX to explore this question: What happens when well-known universities offer online courses, assessments, and certificates of completion for free? The authors came up with some interesting findings.

GROWTH IN ENROLLMENT HAS BEEN STEADY. FROM JULY 24, 2012, THROUGH SEPT. 21, 2014, THE END OF THE STUDY PERIOD:

1,300

AN AVERAGE OF NEW PARTICIPANTS JOINED

A HARVARDX OR MITX

COURSE EACH DAY.

1.7 MILLION TOTAL PARTICIPANTS

1 MILLION

UNIQUE PARTICIPANTS

MORE THAN

THE STUDY EXPLORED

PEOPLE HAVE PARTICIPATED IN MORE THAN ONE

CERTIFICATE-GRANTING COURSES.

300,000 HARVARDX AND/OR MITX COURSE.

CUMULATIVE ENROLLMENT

ACROSS ALL COURSES INCREASED AT A RATE OF

2,200

PARTICIPANTS A DAY.

68

AMONG THE ONE-THIRD OF PARTICIPANTS WHO RESPONDED TO A SURVEY ABOUT INTENTION:

57%

STATED THEIR INTENT TO EARN A CERTIFICATE;

24%

OF THE ONE-THIRD DID EARN A CERTIFICATE. AMONG THE REMAINING

COMPUTER SCIENCE COURSES HAD AVERAGE PARTICIPATION NUMBERS ALMOST

FOURTHANTIMES HIGHER OTHER COURSES.

43%

WHO WERE UNSURE OR DID NOT INTEND TO EARN A CERTIFICATE,

8%

ULTIMATELY DID.

MANY PARTICIPANTS ARE TEACHERS. AMONG 200,000 PARTICIPANTS WHO RESPONDED TO A SURVEY THAT THE STUDY CONDUCTED ABOUT TEACHING:

69%

OF PARTICIPANTS HAVE

BACHELOR’S DEGREES.

39%

SELF-IDENTIFIED AS A PAST OR CURRENT

TEACHER.

21%

OF THOSE REPORTED TEACHING IN THE

COURSE TOPIC AREA.

ONE TAKE-HOME MESSAGE: According to Ho, each course should have its own approach for recruitment and retention based on its specific goals. “A Harvard Ed School or School of Public Health course may be a graduate-level course and therefore have no particular interest in recruiting undergraduates. On the other hand, if an instructor or institution is missiondriven to reach younger, less-educated students, opening doors alone is unlikely to result in a majority-undergraduate population.” In response to that, he says, many edX initiatives are specifically targeted toward undergraduates and high-school students. “On the other hand, our finding that many MOOC students are in fact teachers suggests that excluding older students — who may in fact be instructors — would be unwise. This is the power of ‘open’ to surprise us with unexpected ways that MOOCs can make a difference.” read the full study:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

15

WISE WORDS

Professor CATHERINE SNOW discussing the downside to babies between 0 and 15 months being talked to as adults by adults. (Today)

Professor JUDITH SINGER, senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity, noting that all of the pictures and busts in the faculty room in University Hall are primarily white men, which doesn’t represent the university’s efforts to diversify the teaching staff. (Harvard Crimson)

Associate Professor MARTY WEST on what happens when educators try to explain nonacademic “soft” skills that lead to student success but can’t agree on what to call those skills. (NPR Ed) Associate Professor NATASHA WARIKOO, Ed.M.’97, commenting on a recent study that examined teacher bias when it comes to disciplining misbehaving black and white students. (Reuters)

Professor ANDRÉS ALONSO, Ed.M.’99, Ed.D.’06, commenting on how parents respect any educator who cares for their children, but it is still problematic that 80 percent of U.S. teachers are white. (The New York Times) 16

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

Professor CHARLES NELSON on the growing dependence of researchers on the private sector for funding as federal grants shrink. (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Visiting Professor HELEN HASTE on how discussions about dress codes in school, such as no yoga pants or sleeveless shirts, should include students. (The Boston Globe)

ARE D L R E WO H T N EI WHER

This past August, Professor Heather Hill and Associate Professor Jon Star, Ed.M.’93, packed up their family and moved, temporarily, to Madrid, Spain.

The power couple will spend a year doing research and visiting Spanish math classrooms to learn more about math teaching and learning in this European kingdom.

“

Emancipatory schooling means teaching freedom. It is a way of schooling that gives students the tools that they need to free themselves from oppressive forces.

Emancipatory schools focus on directly addressing social injustice and building up students to be agents of change. They also focus on affirming students’ identities and giving students an opportunity to be involved in activism.

“I became interested in emancipatory schooling after teaching in an elementary school in Atlanta that was 100 percent African American. I could see the consequences of racism in my students’ everyday lives, and I felt they needed a different kind of education from the one we generally provide. I wanted my students to leave school ready to advocate for themselves and for their community. Emancipatory schooling ensures that.”

— AALIYAH EL-AMIN, ED.M.’13, ED.D.’15, ON THE TOPIC OF HER DISSERTATION read a story about el-amin as a student:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

17

Danielle Allen

James Antony

Roland Fryer

Stephen Mahoney

PROFESSOR AND PRINCIPAL

SENIOR LECTURER IN THE

PROFESSOR

LECTURER OF EDUCATION

INVESTIGATOR AT PROJECT ZERO

HIGHER EDUCATION PROGRAM

Fryer, an economist and MacArthur

AND ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR

A political theorist and MacArthur

Prior, Antony served as the

recipient, is the founder and

OF THE HARVARD TEACHER

recipient, Allen will maintain a

associate provost at Yale

faculty director of the Education

FELLOWS PROGRAM

joint appointment at the Harvard

University and professor adjunct

Innovation Laboratory at Harvard

Mahoney was founding principal

Faculty of Arts and Sciences as

in educational leadership and

University, which provides

of the Springfield Renaissance

a professor in the government

management at the Yale School

scientific evidence to support good

School, an urban, high-poverty

department and director of the

of Management, as well as a

decisions in education, particularly

middle high school in Springfield,

Edmond J. Safra Center for

fellow of the Institute of Higher

for minority students and those

Massachusetts. He was also

Ethics. Prior, Allen worked at the

Education at the University of

living in poverty. He will maintain

an adjunct member of Smith

Institute for Advanced Study in

Georgia. His work focuses on

his appointment as an economics

College’s department of Education

Princeton, New Jersey.

preparing forward-thinking leaders

professor at the Harvard Faculty of

and Child Development.

in higher education.

Arts and Sciences.

Dana Charles McCoy

Luke Miratrix

Eric Shed

Eric Taylor

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

LECTURER ON EDUCATION AND

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

McCoy was a postdoctoral fellow

Most recently, an assistant

DIRECTOR OF THE HARVARD

Most recently, Taylor was a

working with the Ed School-

professor of statistics at

TEACHER FELLOWS PROGRAM

doctoral student and Spencer

based Center on the Developing

Harvard, Miratrix was a math

Shed comes to the Ed School

Foundation Dissertation Fellow

Child at Harvard University.

and computer science teacher

from Brown University, where

at Stanford University. His

She researches the ways that

and has most recently been

he was a lecturer and director

research examines labor and

poverty-related risk factors in

working on applied projects in

of history and social studies

personnel economics in the

children’s home, school, and

effectiveness of educational

secondary education. He is

education sector, as well as

neighborhood environments

programs. As part of the Ed

currently the lead investigator

the impact of instructional

affect the development of their

School faculty-convened group

on a Library of Congress-funded

technology in the classroom.

cognitive and socio-emotional

Economies of Education, he

project that explores how K–12

skills in early childhood.

examines quantitative research

educators can use primary

in education.

sources to teach local history.

for more details and a list of faculty appointed

18

after july HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

1: gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

ON MY BOOKSHELF

The LEGO Ideas Book by Daniel Lipkowitz

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Get a freshly brewed mug of tea, sit in a comfy chair, glance at the clock to gauge how much uninterrupted time I have, savor that moment, and open the book.

Bibliotech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google by John Palfrey

This past March, I attended the Ed School’s professional development institute Library Leadership in a Digital Age where John [Palfrey], a former Harvard colleague at the law library, challenged us to create new and different partnerships, including those outside of academia, as we transition to a digital future and redefine the role and work of libraries.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

First-floor reading room of Lamont Library in one of the chairs facing the windows overlooking the garden. There’s a serene feel to the room, and it’s bright with a lovely view. I find myself looking out of windows when I stop and think about something I’ve just read.

I was excited to learn that Gutman’s Special Collections contain unpublished scripts of the Sesame Street television program between the years of 1969 and 1972. This is a primary source in the history of Sesame Street and children’s television. (My favorite Muppet is Rowlf, the piano-playing dog.)

Creating Thinking Classrooms: Leading Educational Change for a 21st Century World

by Garfield Gini-Newman and Roland Case and Read Between the Lines by Jo Knowles, an interesting young adult author.

— Lory Hough I can’t say which is my favorite until I visit them all! (I have not yet visited the Berenson Library at Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy.)

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

19

20

Educating Incarcerated Youth

Finnish Lessons 2.0

Go Blended!

Lynette Tannis

Pasi Sahlberg

Liz Arney

It’s something we as a society rarely think about: What happens to school-age young people when they become incarcerated? More than 130,000 young people in the United States are incarcerated, 87 percent of them male. Unfortunately, as Lynette Tannis, Ed.M.’10, Ed.D.’13, found in her study for this book, only 65 percent of the nearly 3,000 juvenile justice facilities even offer an educational program for these young people — and this, she writes, would be considered a crime if these children were free.

In his first version of Finnish Lessons, published in 2011, Visiting Professor Pasi Sahlberg looked at how Finland was able to move from being a “mediocre” education system in the 1980s to a model one, with its high test scores on international student assessments like PISA and no high-stakes testing until the end of high school. In this second edition, Sahlberg includes updates on Finland’s education scene, a look at Finland’s future, and his response to the often-asked question: What explains Finland’s recent PISA decline?

Based on the experience of Liz Arney, Ed.M.’93, director of innovative learning at Aspire Public School, this handbook provides practical tips on how to successfully launch blended learning — a mix of online and in-class learning. Chapters include how to recognize when your school is ready, how to build a team and get community buy-in, setting up your space, training teachers, and making mistakes along the way.

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

Readers Writing

Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan

Elizabeth Hale

Dana Burde

Recounting her school days when she loved reading but not the required book reports that came after, Elizabeth Hale, a current doctoral student, provides nearly 100 practical lessons (aligned with the Common Core State Standards) for busy teachers and students at all levels who don’t want to just summarize when it comes to writing independently about books. Hale includes a list of books for teachers to consider, along with strategy lessons.

In her new book, Dana Burde, Ed.M.’93, uses field-based research to explore the complications when government and international aid organizations provide support and aid for education in countries like Afghanistan. Instead, Burde writes, efforts should be refocused on quality community-based schools, which receive government and NGO support, but where learning can take place anywhere — someone’s home or a mosque, for example.

read a full list of books featured in this issue:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

if you’re part of the ed school community and

you’ve recently published a book, mail us a copy or let us know:

booknotes@gse.harvard.edu.

— Briefs by Lory Hough

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

21

ISTOCKPHOTO

Why Lecturer Todd Rose is on a mission to help us all understand that when it comes to people — including students — there is no average. by lory hough

T

odd Rose isn’t your average Harvard professor — but not because he dropped out of high school, spent time on welfare, and had 10 different minimum wage jobs and a wife and kid before he even finished being a teenager.

Todd Rose isn’t your average Harvard professor because when it comes to people, the average is a statistical myth, he argues. There is no average.

Repeat: There is no average.

No average professor.

No average worker.

No average soldier.

No average Joe. And what might just be the single most important lesson for educators: There definitely is no average student. Not one. Yet, as Rose, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’07, a lecturer at the Ed School and director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program, writes in his forthcoming book, The End of Average, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die, we are measured against a mythical yardstick — the average human — and it’s hurting everyone. That’s why with this book and through his nonprofit, the Center for Individual Opportunity, Rose is on a mission to dismantle this myth of the average and instead help the public understand the importance of the individual.

“We talk so much about the individual,” he says, “but there’s such a divide between what we say we believe and what we actually do.”

HOW DID WE GET HERE? When it comes to school systems, Rose says it’s no accident how we got here: Schools were designed during the industrial age by people who were “absolutely obsessed” with averages because averages worked so well in managing factories. The goal wasn’t to nurture creativity and develop individuality. The system mostly accomplished what it set out to do: prepare students for standardized jobs in an industrial economy. Since then, we have continued to think that the average — a human invention — represents everyone or that any deviation from the average is what defines you. You’re gifted, and you don’t need as much help, for example.

During the 1950s, the United States Air Force began thinking a lot about averages. At the time, pilots were having trouble controlling their planes. As Rose explains, at first the problem was pinned on pilot error and poor training. But the real problem turned out to be the cockpit or, more specifically, the fact that the cockpit had just one design: one for the average pilot of an earlier era, the 1920s.

24

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

The Air Force concluded that Americans had gotten bigger over the past couple of decades and they simply needed to update their measurement of the average pilot. With the help of a young Harvard College graduate named Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels, they measured more than 4,000 pilots on 10 dimensions of size that seemed important for fitting into a cockpit — torso length and chest circumference, for example. The thinking was that once they redesigned the cockpit for the average pilot of the 1950s, controlling the plane would no longer be so troublesome. Most pilots, they assumed, would be within the average range on the majority of dimensions and that a good number would even be average on all 10 dimensions.

“Do you know how many really were?” Rose says. “Zero.”

Even when just three dimensions of size were picked, fewer than 3.5 percent of the pilots fell within the range defined by Daniels as average. Instead, what Daniels found is that every single pilot had what Rose calls a jagged profile. One pilot with long arms may also have long legs while another may not. Not everyone who was average height (5 feet 9 inches) had the same chest circumference or head size.

Finally, the Air Force had its “aha” moment: If every pilot had a jagged profile and the cockpit was designed for the average pilot, it was actually designed for no one. Its response was bold — it banned the average and forced reluctant manufacturers to instead design “to the edges,” meaning a cockpit that would be adjustable for even the extremes — the tallest or the shortest, for those with wide or narrow chests. Manufacturers balked, but once they realized the Air Force wasn’t budging, they figured it out, creating options like adjustable seats.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH EDUCATION? Rose’s “aha” moment came when he was a doctoral student at the Ed School. Based on his own struggles in school, he came to Harvard interested in understanding individuals. But, he says, “like everyone else in psychology and neuroscience, I had been trained to use group-level statistics as an undergraduate to study people.” When he was a teaching fellow for Professor Judy Singer’s statistics class, he remembers having a conversation with her about individuality. She told him that the statistics they were using were not meant to make claims about individuals, but rather about the population at large. Rose started seeing what she meant when he was doing his own research on kids who were struggling to read.

“There would be what the research says these kids should be like,” Rose says, “and then the reality of their individuality that hits you in the face if you spend even a few minutes with them.”

“

Rose approached his mentor, Professor Kurt Fischer, one of the leading pioneers in the science of the individual and the brain, to talk about this dilemma — the reality of individual kids and what the research says — and why we think this way.

“Rather than giving me a generic answer about people being too messy or complex, he just said that the root of the problem is our belief in averages — that somehow averages will tell us what we need to know about individuals,” Rose says. “He really pushed me to accept that understanding individuals means really explaining individuality and variability rather than ignoring it or explaining it away.”

In the context of schools, Rose says that while most of us will never need to worry about the flexibility of a fighter plane, we do need to worry about what he calls “the cockpits of our economy” — classrooms. We’re spending more on education and getting not-so-great results, but instead of looking at design and fit the way the Air Force did, we blame bad teachers. We blame lazy students. We even blame parents.

“But how much of this problem is just bad design?” Rose says. Students are grouped in grades based on chronological age. Curriculum and textbooks are written to be “age appropriate.” Most standardized assessments, like the SAT or IQ test, are designed based on a comparison to a hypothetical average student.

Walk into an elementary school classroom and even the literal design of the room is for the “average” kid: one size desk, one size chair, one size table.

But just as there isn’t one size pilot, there isn’t one size student or one way to learn. “Human beings don’t line up perfectly. There is no average learner,” Rose says. Every student has a jagged learning profile, too.

“They have strengths and weaknesses. They all do,” Rose says.

“Even geniuses do.”

The danger in not understanding and appreciating this, Rose says, is that we will continue not reaching all students. Fischer once told Rose that today’s schools basically fail about 80 percent of students. A student who struggles to read may be talented in physics, but that talent gets lost because math requires reading textbooks and worksheets. A gifted student may get bored and only do the minimal amount of work, which was designed for the average student. As a result, some students fall behind or act out. Others get ignored or eventually drop out. As Rose pointed out in a TedX talk on the topic, of the 1.2 million high-schoolers in the United States who drop out every year, about 4 percent, or 50,000, are known to be gifted. And even if a student “gets through,” Rose says, he or she may never reach full potential.

Thinking back on his own education, Rose says that poor working memory was something he struggled with and teachers

Human beings don’t line up perfectly. There is no average learner. They have strengths and weaknesses.

They all do. Even geniuses do.”

— LECTURER TODD ROSE, ED.M.’01, ED.D.’07

didn’t recognize. As he wrote in his first book, Square Peg, “By not understanding how much people vary in their working memory, teachers force kids constantly to jump through needless hoops, much as if they were obliging their students to ride unicycles between classes. Were that the case, a kid who was a budding genius at math but hopelessly uncoordinated might never be able to get to his class and show what he could do.”

Unfortunately, Rose says, “if we ignore jaggedness, we end up treating people in one-dimensional terms” — the struggling student, the good tester. “If we want to know your intelligence, for example, we give you an IQ test that is supposed to tap a range of abilities, but then we merge that into a single score.” Imagine two young students have the same IQ score of 110 — the exact same number. One has great spatial abilities but poor working memory, and the other has the exact opposite jaggedness. “If we just want to rank them then we could say the students are more or less the same in intelligence because they have the same aggregate scores.

But if we wanted to really understand who they are as individuals enough to nurture their potential, we can’t ignore the jaggedness — it is the essential information for providing them with an optimal environment and matching them with optimal strategies for success.”

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

25

So how do we, as a country entrenched in an education system that distributes standardized tests and groups students based on chronological age rather than rate of learning, break through its mental barriers and start to embrace — and demand — the science of the individual?

In order to do this, Rose says that rather than forcing students to fit to the environment, we need to have the environment fit each student, just as the Air Force was only successful when it stopped making pilots fit into to a one-size-fits-all cockpit.

Rather than getting mad at a student with poor working memory who constantly forgets to write down homework assignments, a teacher could easily help that kid by verbalizing assignments and writing them down on the white board.

Rather than making all students in a grade fill out the same worksheets, assignments could be customized.

BASED ON EXPERIENCE

This issue of “fit” is exactly what helped Rose go from being that struggling student, the “troublemaker” with a 0.9 GPA in high school, to a Harvard professor with a doctorate.

“It wasn’t that a switch just got turned on one day,” he says. He wrote in Square Peg, “I know there was no single intervention that turned my life around. No heart-to-heart talk with a great teacher.

No perfectly tailored drug that helped me sit still and concentrate.”

Instead, he adds in his new book, The End of Average, “I gradually realized that if I could just figure out how to improve the fit between my environment and myself, I might be able to turn my life around.”

26

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

Fit, he believes, is the birthright of every person.

“Right now because we believe in the myth of average, we believe that opportunity means providing equal access to standardized educational experiences,” he says. “However, since we know that nobody is actually average, it is obvious that equal access to standardized experiences is not nearly enough to provide equal opportunity. To me, if you accept the reality of individuality, then it means that we have to rethink how we define equal opportunity in education and beyond.”

Equal opportunity, then, requires equal fit between individuals and their educational environments.

“Anything less is inherently and profoundly unequal,” Rose says. “I believe that we should set a much higher bar for ourselves in the 21st century. If we are going to be a country that cares about equal opportunity, then we must strive to ensure that equal fit is the birthright of every single child in this country. But right now in education we do not take this idea seriously, in part because until recently we didn’t have the science or technology to do it. But we do now. So if you accept the idea of equal fit, then it means something radical for the future of education — it means we cannot accept a system based on averages; it means we cannot accept standardized curricular materials, or simplistic one-dimensional assessments, or fixed amounts of time for learning or one pathway to academic success.”

And now, he says, is the perfect time to focus on individual learning. Using the technology we have on hand, educators can easily create learning environments that are flexible. Language

translation programs, for example, can help students — at any school — better sound out puzzling words as they read.

Professor Howard Gardner, one of Rose’s first professors at the Ed School, says, “Todd’s focus on what we know about the individual student and how we can mobilize pedagogical and curricular resources to meet the particular student is of fundamental importance. We are fortunate enough to live at the first time in human history [when] such individualized teaching and learning is not restricted to a tiny wealthy elite but can be distributed far more widely, if not universally.”

Rose says we have already seen how technology has helped scientists around the world understand the individual, leading to major breakthroughs in everything from cancer research to the treatment of diabetes.

“And this only happened after scientists broke through a mental barrier,” Rose says, “after they recognized this one allimportant fact: that you can’t understand individuals using group averages” because there is no average cancer, no average cell, no average genome.

So how do we, as a country entrenched in an education system that distributes standardized tests and groups students based on chronological age rather than rate of learning, break through its mental barriers and start to embrace — and demand — the science of the individual?

Well, if you’re Todd Rose, you start by turning to Hollywood.

“People in places like Hollywood, they’re used to thinking differently or being told they’re not good enough,” Rose says. “If you want to have a public that understands this new science and this new way of thinking about individuality, then it will require more than just the dissemination of information through usual channels. Instead, you have to get these ideas to permeate the culture — to change the way that people think about themselves and the people around them. To do that, I believe that you need to engage the storytellers in Hollywood because they are in the business of creating culture and changing social norms whether people realize it or not.”

Walter Haas, a founding director at Rose’s nonprofit, specializes in digital marketing and has worked on projects for Levi Strauss and Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. He says getting the message to people is a first — and critical — step.

“Once you understand the world through the lens of the science of the individual, you can’t see it in any other way,” he says.

“Our goal is to simply allow more people to have that same moment of realization. We do not have the resources, frankly, or the patience to engage in a traditional policy lobbying effort. Instead, we plan to share this science-based idea in an accessible manner to stimulate ground-level demand for institutional reform.”

It’s the same approach, Rose says, that the Harvard Alcohol Project took in the 1980s, when it teamed up with every major movie studio and television network to help launch a new term into society that resulted in demand from the public: the designated driver. With the help of Hollywood, over the course of just four years, more than 160 popular movies and shows like Cheers and L.A. Law added designated drivers into scenes and drunkdriving prevention into dialogue. PSAs flooded the market. The term “designated driver” even officially appeared in Webster’s Dictionary in 1991.

“It is such a terrific example of what is possible if you combine a good idea with a clever approach to getting it to the public,” Rose says, noting that he is starting to team up with Hollywood in the same way.

His nonprofit is also creating partnerships with non-Hollywood groups that can also make a difference, like Teach For America, which places young teachers in high-needs schools, as well as influential companies that create tests for schools. They also plan on creating a free flexible digital textbook that will allow teachers to customize learning for each student.

Eventually, he says, “I want CEOs to say, ‘What’s our plan for this?’ I want schools to say, ‘Wow! We need to get our act together. This is the new thing.’”

The bottom line, Rose says, is that we all need to ask ourselves who we are supposed to be as a country.

“I’m incredibly grateful, even though it wasn’t easy, that I got a second chance,” he says. “We need all of the potential we can possibly get. We need innovation and creativity. That’s where all of the jobs are. I keep thinking, this letting go of the average and instead focusing on the individual is just in our best interest.” Ed. access the first chapter of the end of average for free

in january and watch a video of rose’s 8x8 talk at the ed school: gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

27

DECODING

DRAKE’S

DREAM A look at the school that Charles Drake, Ed.D.’70, started more than four decades ago to help students who were like him: struggling with dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities. by brendan pelsue photography by kieran kesner

O

n the leafy campus of the Landmark School in Manchester, Massachusetts, math program director Chris Woodin, Ed.M.’89, stands in front of what can only be described as a contraption: a grid of ropes and pulleys attached to the side of a building, each rope with a plastic pennant flag tied to the bottom. Along the edges of the grid, numbers painted on boards mark out Cartesian coordinates — the horizontal edge is x, the vertical edge is y — so that the whole wall is a three-dimensional version of the graphing planes that generations of middle school math students have dutifully plotted out in their notebooks.

“Let’s take a simple equation: y=2x,” Woodin says with the gusto that tends to overtake him when he explains how he teaches math. “Okay, now if x is zero, what’s y going to be? Zero, because two times zero, right? So our flag here where the x value is zero” — he indicates the pennant at the far left corner of the grid — “is not going to move, right?

28

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

“But if we take a step over here, where x is one, what’s the y value going to be? Two, because one multiplied by two is two, right? So let’s do that.”

Woodin hoists the x=1 rope until it is level with the 2 value on the y coordinate plane. “And if I keep going, pretty soon you’re going to have a pretty good illustration of what it means that y=2x,” he says.

He’s right. The rope grid is the abstract Cartesian coordinate system made physical, and it’s only one of many nontraditional tools he’s developed for teaching math concepts to students with language-based learning disabilities (LBLDs), the population Landmark has specialized in teaching since it was founded in 1971. On the same campus, he’s constructed an oversized clock, a gridded outfield for rotations and transformations, and a baseball wins-and-losses chart for percentages. In each case, the thinking is the same: If students can associate the abstract language of

problem-solving with specific physical movements that help them move through an equation’s component parts, then they are more likely to develop the bone-deep understanding of math concepts that will be essential to their high school careers. Woodin calls this method “whole-to-part” learning because the emphasis is on understanding the relationship between the question and the answer rather than on being right or wrong — a notion that flips traditional classroom dynamics on their heads.

Woodin’s approach is typical of Landmark, a combined boarding and day school that is known nationally and internationally for pioneering teaching methods that can transform the academic performance — and self-esteem — of LBLD students, many of whom arrive reading far below grade level and leave ready for college. The story of that success dates back to the school’s founder, Charles Drake, Ed.D.’70, who created a culture, with dozens of Ed School alumni, of experimentation matched with a unique clarity of mission. Over time, this combination has led to fruitful collaborations with researchers, including many at the Ed School, such as Professor Kurt Fischer, Assistant Professor Gigi Luk, and Lecturer Todd Rose, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’07. As Landmark nears its fifth decade, its outreach arm is consulting with school districts and finding new ways to reach educators. The hope is that as one small school on Boston’s North Shore continues to impact the lives of a small group of nontraditional learners, it can also have an impact on the national education conversation.

W

hen Drake founded Landmark, he was looking to fill a need he had experienced first hand. As a young man growing up with dyslexia in Braselton, Georgia, he often struggled with reading and writing despite public-speaking skills that helped him in a successful first career as a minister. One teacher even laughed when he wrote an essay about wanting to be a writer. To cope, he developed a technique of breaking reading tasks down into their smallest possible units — a practice that allowed him to count success in small ways and on his own terms.

These habits held him in good stead over the 10 years that he completed his doctorate at the Ed School, where he studied with Harvard Reading Laboratory founder Jeanne Chall, who empha-

sized an individualized, explicit, phonics-based approach to reading instruction. After graduating in 1970, Drake ran a dyslexia diagnostic center in Wellesley, Massachusetts, but found there was nowhere to send his clients once they were diagnosed. He had teaching experience from running remedial summer reading programs at Hebron Academy in Maine and decided it was time to start a school of his own. It would service students with diagnosed nonverbal learning disabilities and what they describe as “average to above-average” intelligence. And it would teach according to six core principles that still guide the Landmark School today: 1. Provide opportunities for success.

2. Use multiple modalities.

3. Offer micro-unit and structure tasks.

4. Ensure automatization through practice and review.

5. Provide models.

6. Include the student in the learning process.

These principles would be enacted throughout the curriculum but primarily in one-on-one daily tutorials where students would focus on their specific areas of weakness. Often, this meant breaking words down into phonemes and morphemes, their smallest parts, in order to decode the mechanics behind more complex ideas like meaning and syntax. But approaches varied.

All learners were different, Drake thought, and their instruction should be, too.

With little cash on hand, Drake procured a mortgage on an old brick mansion in Prides Crossing, Massachusetts, about 30 miles north of Boston, by using promissory notes from friends and HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

29

family as collateral. Instruction began in the fall of 1971 with 40 students, many of whom slept in bunk beds that were stowed away each morning so that dormitories could be used as classroom space. Bob Broudo, Landmark’s current headmaster and a founding faculty member at the school, remembers that in those early days, challenges included not just learning new methods of teaching, but figuring out how to put 10-year-olds to bed. Still, the pervasive feeling was of idealism.

“What a romantic concept” it was, he says, “to get together a bunch of Peace Corps-type personalities to start a school to help kids who were struggling to learn but had every cognitive tool they needed to learn.”

Although things were touch and go at the beginning, the school received a major boon in 1972, when Massachusetts enacted Chapter 766, the first comprehensive special education bill in the nation, which required that districts either meet the learning needs of all students or pay for those students to be educated elsewhere. This meant that Landmark, along with places like the Perkins School for the Blind, could receive public funds for certain students. Chapter 766 became a model for later federal policy. Fifty percent of Landmark students currently receive some amount of public funding.

With this newfound stability — and bestowal of legitimacy — the school embarked on a period of growth and experimentation. Drake, according to Broudo, was “a southern gentleman … and entrepreneurial visionary” who seized opportunities wherever they could be found. When he learned that General George Patton’s will required that his beloved schooner, the When and If, be given to an educational institution, Drake started a sailing program that lasted through the early ’90s. (They received the boat.) At the request of parents, he sent groups of teachers to start satellite Landmarks in Encino, California, and Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and founded Landmark College in Putney, 30

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

Vermont, in 1985. Over time, it became clear that it was impossible to keep multiple institutions operating on mission under a single aegis, so while all three schools still exist, none are currently affiliated with the original Landmark. Instead of expansion, the school’s tactic starting in the 1990s was to double-down on the breadth and depth of its offerings and to make sure that Drake’s unique approach to teaching LBLD students infused every aspect of the program. Still, the experiments of the early days were attempts to answer a question that the school is still tackling: Can such a resource-intensive model have a broader impact?

F

orty-four years on, Landmark’s program is an almost undeniable success. Most students show quantifiable improvement, and many only stay at the school for two to three years before transitioning out to other institutions. “It’s not our expectation that someone who enrolls in second grade will graduate from the high school,” Broudo says.

The school’s offerings have expanded, too. A separate elementary– middle school campus opened for day students in grades 2–8 in 1994. The high school now breaks its offerings down into three distinct parts: the Founder’s Program, which still operates on the original one-on-one tutoring model created by Drake; the Expressive Language Program, which, in addition to the one-on-one tutorial, offers special instruction in writing, oral expression, and linguistic pragmatics; and the Prep Program, which is for students who do not need the one-on-one tutorial but still benefit from Landmark’s emphasis on effective study skills and reading and writing instruction using a strategy called micro-uniting, meaning you analyze the parts of an assignment and teach and learn those parts one step at a time. The goal is for students to feel less overwhelmed as they process step by step.

The micro-uniting of language permeates not just English classes, but every aspect of the program — every class at Landmark is, to some extent, a language class. Chris Woodin’s pulley graphs and floor clocks are as much about language as about math since they get students to understand that problems must be sequenced in time in order to be solved — and sequencing, with its semantic emphasis on past, present, and future, is fundamentally the domain of language.

The same can be said of the methods that Sophie Wilson, Ed.M.’88, uses in her middle school science classes. Traditionally, she says, science education has been “inquiry based,” meaning students do laboratory style-experiments and then interpret data in order to illustrate basic concepts like density, gravity, or inertia. But without an adequate understanding of the language grounding these experiments — terms like “rate” and “motion” —

students can have difficulty connecting what they observe in class with larger principles. In Wilson’s class, therefore, the traditional order is flipped. Students begin with micro-units of vocabulary (“force,” “mass,” “acceleration”) then go on to explore the semantic relationship between those micro-units (“force = mass * acceleration”), and then finally, once those concepts are cemented, do experiments to show how physical laws are acted out in actual time and space. Once again, the emphasis is not on solving a problem correctly, but on looking at a concept as a whole and in parts so that it can be fully understood.

In the Expressive Language Program, meanwhile, students learn about language as a tool not for comprehension, but for communication — a subject many schools leave to osmosis. In an Oral Expression class, students break down spoken language into its five primary domains: phonemes, morphemes, semantics, syntax, and discourse. They then learn to think about their own speech in terms of simple, compound, and complex sentence structures (i.e., in terms of independent and dependent clauses).

To accompany the mechanics of Oral Expression, a two-year long Pragmatics class teaches about the implicit, social aspects of language, such as body language, small talk, and how to agree and disagree appropriately. The Expressive Language Program director, Caitlin Parker, says she hopes all this emphasis on grammar and manners helps students to be good self-advocates, whether in their relationships, in the workplace, or in future educational settings.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

31

“I

As Drake told People magazine in a 1987 article about the school, “virtually all students have low self-esteem when they get here. You can quickly see the change when they have the confidence that they can learn. Its like a pall lifting.”

In large part, the successes of Landmark’s curriculum come from the school’s ability to combine its founding vision with direct engagement in education research. Landmark currently hosts two to three outside research projects per year through an institutional review board that is run in cooperation with Harvard. Over the years, many Ed School researchers have done work at Landmark, such as the study on reading fluency at Landmark High School conducted by Rose. Studies focusing specifically on dyslexia in adolescence are relatively rare, and Rose found that for this cohort, individual differences in vocabulary knowledge are an important predictor of reading fluency whereas word-level reading (i.e., decoding skills) is a greater factor earlier in childhood — an insight that could change where teachers place their energies.

Christina Hinton, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D.’12, an adjunct lecturer at the Ed School and an expert on the relationship between schools and researchers as head of the Research Schools Initiative at the Ed School, believes the presence of researchers on Landmark’s campus makes it an ideal example of a laboratory school. Landmark has “researchers and teachers work hand in hand,” she says. “Rather than filling a theoretical gap, it’s solving a real world problem, so that it’s more impactful.”

But the question remains of how Landmark, with its small student body and 3:1 student–teacher ratio, can have a broader impact. If satellite campuses aren’t the answer, how can one small school hope to improve the schooling experience of the estimated 10 to 20 percent of American students with a diagnosed or undiagnosed learning disability?

32

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

n the ideal world, we’d be out of business. That’s the goal,” says Dan Ahearn, director of the Landmark Outreach Program. What he means is that if every school adequately serviced students with LBLDs, there would be no need for Landmark. That dream may be far off, but under his leadership the school is making a real voice for itself in the national conversation on learning disabilities.

A former head of the Massachusetts Bureau of Special Education Appeals, Ahearn also is the school’s legal counsel and assistant headmaster and teaches occasionally at Harvard Law School. He says that while the school has experimented with multiple approaches since founding its outreach program in 1977, today the school has narrowed in on working directly with teachers — up to 1,000 per year — “to reach kids who can’t get to Landmark.”

This work with teachers takes a variety of forms. Landmark offers a series of summer workshops, including day-long seminars and week-long graduate credit courses, at its Prides Crossing campus, and shorter sessions on Cape Cod and in Chicago.

Course titles range from Language-Based Classroom, about designing learning environments for LBLD students, to Special Education Law 101, an overview of federal policy taught by Ahearn. In fall 2015, the school will also begin offering five online graduate courses through Southern New Hampshire University.

A publishing arm, meanwhile, provides access to curricular materials and graphic organizer templates.

Beyond that, the school’s outreach coordinator, Adam Hickey, Ed.M.’02, is one of a few employees who consult directly with school districts looking to incorporate some of Landmark’s methods into their own teaching. Consultations are in-depth, typically lasting three to five years, and recommendations are based on a district’s own assessment of its needs and capabilities. Past clients include public schools in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Puerto Rico, as well as the KIPP and UP Education charter school networks, who received services pro bono. No district is turned away due to inability to pay.

Hickey says the biggest challenge for Landmark’s consulting arm is creating institutional memory after a three-to-five-year consultation period has ended since it is easy for schools to lose knowledge as teachers move to other districts. He is not sure if there is an answer to this conundrum yet, but he does believe the new Common Core State Standards Initiative is changing how much districts think about educating students with learning dis-

LANGUAGE-BASED LEARNING DISABILITIES abilities. He suspects that’s because disparities in reading levels become a more urgent problem when teacher evaluation is pegged to students’ ability to perform at grade level.

Whether this newfound urgency is productive, however, is the subject of some controversy. Ahearn and Broudo both believe that while there is a broader understanding of LBLDs in the culture at large than there was a generation ago (Broudo recalls looking up “dyslexia” in the dictionary after he was first offered a job by Drake), the new emphasis on high-stakes tests linked to teacher evaluations can be a disaster for Landmarkstyle learners.

“Nationally, we’ve missed the boat,” Broudo says, by expecting students to learn content without giving them the tools they need for mastery. “So [at Landmark] we’re beating the drum for more interventions.” He says it’s not about the model; it’s about the methods. “It’s about understanding that students need to learn language skills and … organizational skills right through their careers, and you use content as a tool to do that.”

Could Landmark’s outreach programs create that shift nationally? Broudo believes they can help push the needle, but the country’s current thinking about teaching requires a more seismic shift than even the most entrepreneurial school can deliver. “The work that needs to be done is from Washington down,” he says. “I think we need a huge shake-up in terms of how we teach kids to learn.”

P

erhaps the best evidence for the sort of “shake-up” Broudo is calling for comes from Landmark students themselves. On a rainy Tuesday in May, seven of these students gathered as part of a question-and-answer session for prospective Landmark families. At first, the questions were softballs: How’s the food? (Variable.) How’s dorm life? (Fun.) But soon, students were sharing stories about how Landmark transformed their experience of education. One 10th-grade student said that in just a few years he had gone from a secondto a ninth-grade reading level. Another said that being around so many other students with LBLDs gave her a new sense of belonging and made her more open.

Asked what advice he would give to incoming Landmark students, a 10th-grade boy delivers his first answer in a flash: “The first thing you should do is know everything about your roommate.”

Then, reflecting further, he added, “Be optimistic about it because it’s basically a second chance at school. You can evolve a new you.”

— Brendan Pelsue is a freelance writer. His last piece in Ed. looked at schooling in the rainforest. Ed.

Landmark defines a language-based learning disability (LBLD) as “a spectrum of difficulties related to the understanding and use of spoken and written language.” These include but are not limited to:

Dyslexia: difficulty reading, often because of a difficulty decoding written language at the level of phonemes, the basic sound units symbolized by the letters that make up speech Dyscalculia: difficulty with arithmetic, especially decoding numbers and math facts such as multiplication and division Expressive Language Disorder: a difficulty with written and oral expression, especially where expressive abilities are not commensurate with language comprehension ability Auditory Processing Disorder: difficulty processing auditory information not related to a physical hearing disorder Executive Function Disorder: difficulty with high-level cognitive functions such as organizing, planning, and breaking down tasks (not an LBLD, but a “commonly co-occurring difficulty”) It is estimated that 12 to 20 percent of people globally have some sort of language-based learning disability. When untreated, this can put them at a higher risk for academic failure or even functional illiteracy. New studies also show, however, that people with certain LBLDs, such as dyslexia, may be particularly well suited to artistic and scientific pursuits because they tend to take in the “visual gist” of a situation — whether that situation is a landscape or a page of text — rather than immediately breaking things down into their component parts.

LBLDs can often go undetected until middle or high school because students find ways of compensating for their areas of difficulty. Landmark recommends that schools administer annual literacy screening assessments to all students, so that LBLDs are identified as early as possible.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

33

34

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

What About the

Gloria Montiel, Ed.M.’11, can’t recall the first time she heard about a place called Harvard, but from the sixth grade on, she could dream of nothing else.

“I was sure I was going to go there,” says Montiel, who set about figuring out how. At the top of her class in eighth grade, she learned of a program that places children of color in elite prep schools. But her school counselor revealed a devastating truth: Montiel couldn’t apply.

“At that moment, I realized that all this time, everything I had been doing toward my goals — this was going to become a problem,” Montiel recalls.

This was her status as an undocumented immigrant.

When she was eight, Montiel’s parents crossed the border from Mexico and settled in Santa Ana, California, where Montiel established herself as a serious student in the local schools. It had never occurred to her that something about her identity would hurl into her path an insurmountable obstacle.

DREAMERS? by elaine mcardle illustrations by john s. dykes

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

35

rom that painful moment in the counselor’s office to this day, Montiel’s status is never out of mind. Like the estimated 65,000 or more undocumented students who graduate high school each year into uncertain futures, the reminders of their precarious situation are constant.

For those who hope to go onto college, one of the most daunting challenges is how to pay for it since their families typically can’t help and their immigration statuses preclude any federal financial aid. No Pell grants, loans, or work study.

In high school, Montiel couldn’t get a job without a social security card, and her parents — also undocumented — worked in a restaurant for under-the-table wages. Her dream seemed to be receding. When she was a freshman, a friend asked Montiel why she was in upper-level math.

“I said, ‘I want to go to Harvard,’ and she said, ‘Don’t you know Mexican girls don’t go to Harvard?’ I went into the bathroom and started crying. It was a reminder that I’d have to pull off a miracle.” The next year, the school valedictorian, one of Montiel’s best friends, received a prestigious Regents Scholarship to attend a University of California school — which was rescinded because he was undocumented.

But when Montiel learned of Harvard’s need-blind admissions policy, she sent in an application, along with applications to local colleges that she might, perhaps, be able to afford. When Montiel received her Harvard acceptance letter, “I just started jumping up and down,” she recalls. “It was my hope that I wouldn’t have to worry about finances, and I could finally just focus on studying.”

That hope, she learned, “was only partially true.”

Harvard offered a generous scholarship but still pegged her required contribution at $3,000 a year — a small amount to some, but not to a struggling, undocumented family ineligible for a Pell grant, work study, or federal loans. Montiel scraped up money to cover the cost by babysitting. Once at Harvard, unable to afford travel, she spent winter and other breaks far from her family in the near-empty dorm and didn’t tell her roommates or anyone about her status.

“At that time, the national discourse was dominated very much by conservatives who used terms like ‘illegal,’” she says. “It would have taken so much emotional preparation for me to say this is my situation, especially when they couldn’t help me at all, that I wasn’t ready to share with them.” It was an often-lonely existence; only months before graduation did she meet another undocumented undergraduate.

Montiel’s status was outed soon enough. Credentialed to teach through the Harvard Undergraduate Teacher Education Program (UTEP), she decided to apply to the Ed School but, reluctant to reveal her status, she waited too long to apply for school-based scholarships. The Ed School, like most graduate schools, has a limited financial aid budget, which can result in a gap for some students. Most students at the graduate level can offset that gap by applying for federal loans like the Perkins or working on campus

F

36

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

through the federal work study program. Some apply for private loans through banks. International students often receive scholarships and loans available in their home country.

None of these were options for Montiel because of her status.

(A private bank may have considered her for a loan if she could have found a U.S. citizen to co-sign.) So Montiel went back to California and worked for a year for one of her mentors at a nonprofit. The mentor encouraged Montiel to reapply to the Ed School and promised to help raise funds to fill the gap. Montiel was again accepted, and received an Ed School scholarship, as well as funding from Fundacion Mexico en Harvard, a nonprofit organization that provides financial support to Mexican graduate students in exchange for either teaching in Mexico upon graduation or paying back the money. To offset the rest, Montiel got creative — and she went public. She set up a crowd funding website that garnered local news and generated donations. Additional money was raised by local women who sold tamales and a $10-aticket turkey mole event at the restaurant where her parents worked. It helped: Montiel spent a year getting her master’s in the Learning and Teaching Program and graduated in 2011.

Today, she is working at a nonprofit and paying back her loan from Fundacion. She is getting her Ph.D. in education policy, evaluation, and reform at Claremont Graduate University in California, where she’s among a group of four undocumented students who support each other. “In general, a lot has changed since my days at Harvard,” she says.

Indeed.

In 2012, the Obama administration announced that youth who’d arrived in the United States as children could request consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows them to stay in the country two years at a time and to work. Free from fear of deportation, at least in the short run, an untold number of these young people are enrolling in institutions of higher education. At the same time, on college campuses and in middle and high schools, there’s far more advocacy and support. The year after Montiel graduated, Act on a Dream, a student-run group for undocumented undergraduates and their allies, launched at Harvard College to provide information and community; it currently has about 25 members. Similar clubs and support networks are growing across the country.

But financing higher education remains a huge challenge.

While a sizable number of states now offer in-state tuition to undocumented students, and some private universities are targeting them for special assistance, it’s not an easy path.

“I feel very fortunate and thankful to Harvard because it was a dream I had since I was 12,” Montiel says. “Being undocumented, that was unheard of, and I’m just very thankful for everything.

But, in general, she says, many colleges and universities across the country have to make an intentional effort to make financial aid opportunities available for students, rather than just admitting them. “That,” she says “is only half the battle.”

n estimated 11.2 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States today, and their fates — especially as the 2016 presidential election looms — is a highly contentious issue. Although 56 percent of Americans think they should be allowed to apply for citizenship, 29 percent think they should be deported, according to a 2014 New York Times /CBS News poll. Ensnared in this political battle are the approximately 2.1 million youth — 1 million of them now adults — brought to the United States as children by their families and whose futures hang in the air.

This cohort of undocumented children and youth is fairly new, explains Roberto Gonzales, an assistant professor at the Ed School, who, as one of the nation’s leading experts on undocumented youth and young adults, has been studying this group for 23 years. In 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, 2.7 million undocumented immigrants received legal status, in what was the last comprehensive national effort on this front. At the same time, the government beefed up security at the borders, making it much harder for seasonal workers — most from Mexico — to travel back and forth. When they began bringing their families into the United States to stay, a new social problem was born.

Until they graduate high school, undocumented children in the United States are pretty well protected (although their parents are not). In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court in Plyler v. Doe held that undocumented children have the legal right to a K–12 education, and schools cannot release information about them to immigration authorities. But until DACA, those rights ended after high school, making the transition to adulthood jarring and frightening.

Assimilated into American schools and internalizing American beliefs, these youth may not think about their legal status until they learn they can’t get a driver’s license or a social security number in order to work.

“For many of them, that’s the first time they find themselves on the outside looking in,” says Gonzales, who has a book that will be published in December on his 12-year study of undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America.

Before DACA, prospects for these youth were grim. Undocumented kids have the highest high school dropout rate in the country except for Native Americans “because if you’re going to be consigned to a life of working under the table, why not start at 16 rather than 18?” says Karen Willemsen, Ed.M.’94, education director for Define American, a media and cultural campaign to share stories of the immigrant experience. Nationally, 40 percent of undocumented adults ages 18 to 24 did not complete high school, according to Gonzales’ current longitudinal study of about 2,700 undocumented youth, the National UnDACAmented Research Project (NURP), which is investigating how DACA affects this group. It is the largest study ever of any undocumented immigrant population in the world.

A

Of the estimated 65,000 undocumented youth who do graduate high school every year, what then? Only about 5 to 10 percent move on to higher education, it is estimated, although the number may be higher since that data was compiled before some states began to offer in-state tuition, Gonzales notes. Most attend community college rather than four-year institutions, and little is known about retention rates. Primarily for financial reasons, 45 percent of undocumented students in college “stop out” — leaving with the intention of returning — and many do so multiple times, he’s found. “Many go to school one term at a time, then leave, work for a while, then go back,” Gonzales says. “It takes them six or seven or eight years to graduate.”

Efforts to help them have met strong resistance. In 2001, the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act was introduced in Congress to offer legal residency to undocumented youth — now often referred to as DREAMers — who arrived before the age of 16 and met other requirements.

But it has languished due to political pressure, despite widespread bipartisan support.

DACA is making a difference. In the past three years, about 650,000 youth and young adults have obtained DACA status, Gonzales says, and now have social security numbers, work permits, and drivers’ licenses in states that allow them to drive, which opens up their prospects. “What Roberto says in his research and what many know intuitively is that undocumented youth have terrible prospects if they don’t graduate high school or only graduate high school, and that they have much better prospects if they can get through that transition to college,” Willemsen says.

“DACA has really enabled that.”

But only half the eligible population has applied for DACA, Gonzales says. Moreover, an entire generation of these youth was lost before it was enacted; the intended beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, now in their late 20s or early 30s, have aged out of DACA eligibility. And DACA is an imperfect Band-Aid, Gonzales adds. Applicants must pay a $465 fee to apply and reapply every two years, a prohibitive cost for many. And with a huge backlog at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of applications and renewals, young people can get caught in a legal limbo, their work permits in question as they await reissuance.

And DACA has very powerful opponents. On May 26, a federal appeals court refused to expand DACA to include the generation that missed out on it, and, as an executive order, DACA could be rescinded by the next U.S. president.

“If someone who’s against DACA is elected, we’ll revert back to our previous status, which is kind of a terrifying thought,” says Ilian Meza-Pena, an undocumented Harvard College student from Mexico who’s lived in the San Francisco area since age 3.

Nor does DACA address financial aid for education. “That’s huge,” says Gonzales, who teaches Contemporary Immigration Policy and Educational Practice at the Ed School while workHARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

37

SOURCE: NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF STATE LEGISLATORS

ing on his DACA project. “Upwards of 70 percent of American students receive some form of financial aid, and when arguably your most vulnerable students have no or limited access to that, it’s problematic.” ince Congress has stalled in addressing immigration reform, states are left to deal on their own with the undocumented immigrants in their communities. And it’s in the area of education where the most action has taken place, Gonzales says.

Eighteen states currently offer in-state tuition to undocumented students: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, and Washington, according to the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL). Virginia offers in-state tuition to students covered under DACA, and the University of Hawaii and the University of Michigan provide in-state tuition rates to admitted DREAMers. Four states — California, New Mexico, Texas, and Washington — offer state financial aid to DREAMers.

Others have gone in the opposite direction. Alabama and South Carolina prohibit undocumented students from enrolling at any public college or university, according to NCSL, while three states — Arizona, Georgia, and Indiana — specifically prohibit in-state

S

38

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

tuition for them. Wisconsin offered in-state tuition for two years before Governor Scott Walker removed funding for the program soon after he was elected in 2010.

Some university systems are trying to address the lack of federal work-study aid by providing their own work opportunities on campus for this group, but that’s not yet widespread, Gonzales says.

Some private institutions, including Harvard, provide very generous need-based financial aid to students who happen to be undocumented, such as Montiel, in what President Drew Faust calls “passport-blind” financial aid. Faust has also come out publically in support for the DREAM Act. “The DREAM Act would throw a lifeline to these students who are already working hard in our middle and high schools and living in our communities by granting them the temporary legal status that would allow them to pursue postsecondary education,” Faust wrote in letters in 2009 to Massachusetts Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, and Representative Michael Capuano. “I believe it is in our best interest to educate all students to their full potential — it vastly improves their lives and grows our communities and economy.”

Harvard College student Lisette Candia Diaz came to the United States from Chile at age 6 and grew up in Oceanside, New York. “My mom used [our undocumented status] as a way to get me to excel in school because she knew the only way I could go to college was to get into an elite school that would give me a full

scholarship,” says Diaz, co-director of Act on a Dream, who was at the top of her high school class until her senior year, when her dad lost his job and she began working at Burger King 35 hours a week to support her family.

But schools that can offer this level of financial assistance — Harvard is free to any student whose family earns less than $65,000 per year — are very hard to get into. “Only about 10 undocumented students are admitted to Harvard each year,” speculates Meza-Pena, who had planned to attend University of California–Berkeley — and pay in-state tuition — if she hadn’t attended Harvard.

Recently, some private schools are going further. Last year, New York University, prompted by a student group for undocumented students, invited undocumented New York residents to apply for scholarships. Both Pomona College and Oberlin College have been very public in welcoming undocumented students. In April, Emory University announced it would provide financial aid to DACA students while Tufts University announced it would actively recruit undocumented students and provide financial aid.

That same month, 70 percent of students at Loyola University of Chicago voted to increase their student fees to fund scholarships for DREAMers.

“It’s a really big announcement because a lot of other private universities, Harvard included, have what amounts to a kind of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ whereby undocumented students get financial aid based on family income,” Gonzales says. “What’s different about what Tufts and Emory are doing is that they have an explicit policy now whereby admissions offices are actively recruiting undocumented students, so there’s intentionality around it.” While it’s too early to tell, Gonzales hopes these policies “may impact issues of retention and graduation.” or anyone working with undocumented students of any age, it’s important to know the legal landscape and financial options for these youth, including exciting new opportunities.

For one, TheDream.US scholarship fund, whose program director is well-known DREAM Act advocate Gaby Pacheco, has raised $81 million for DREAMers nationwide.

It’s also essential to recognize the personal — and deeply individual — experiences of these students, DREAMers say.

“Our stories are really complex and not as simple as sometimes the media portrays them,” says Carolina Vildivia, a current undocumented student who chose the Ph.D. Program at the Ed School so that she could work with Gonzales as she focuses her work on undocumented students. “Try getting to know us — our immigration status, the opportunities we do or don’t have, the way we feel about ourselves — and try to know immigration policy. Just stay informed as much as possible.”

Vildivia, who writes a blog called “My (Un)documented Life” and plans to become a scholar-activist, believes she is the only undocumented doctoral student at the Ed School but suspects

F

there were at least four DREAMers in the master’s program last year. Of course, there may be more. Undocumented students don’t always reveal themselves.

Many undocumented students say their teachers made all the difference. “I consider myself one of luckier ones,” says MezaPena, who has older relatives who, pre-DACA, simply couldn’t attend college. “I have five mentors, older students and educators, who supported me through the entire process.” And, as a California resident, she could pay in-state tuition at a state school.

Mentors made a difference for Jose Antonio Vargas. Vargas, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who’s written for The Washington Post and The New Yorker, founded Define American.

A native of the Philippines, Vargas was sent at age 12 to live with his grandparents in California. A high school superstar — editor of the newspaper, on the student government, in theater — he learned he wasn’t eligible for college financial aid and resigned himself to working at a local newspaper for $10 an hour. But when the school superintendent and principal learned why he wasn’t going to college, they connected Vargas with a parent at the school who paid for him to attend San Francisco State.

Four years ago in The New York Times Magazine, Vargas outed himself as an undocumented immigrant and now travels the country speaking about immigration reform, especially as it pertains to children and youth. He hopes that teachers and other educators, on the front lines of the issue, will join in the effort.

“Right now, undocumented people in this country are under attack in so many ways,” says Vargas, who regularly appears on Fox News, the O’Reilly Factor, and other national programs. “What if we heard from our allies — from our teachers and mentors, all across America — what if they came out, too? I actually think this is the moment now when there is no other choice but to come out, to say, ‘This is not what you think — these are our kids.’”

It’s also important for teachers to establish safe places for students to reveal their status. For teens and young adults, getting embarrassed in front of their peers may be a more paralyzing fear than worrying about deportation, Gonzales notes. Teachers can place a symbol on their doors to designate a “DREAM Zone Safe Space,” Gonzales suggests, similar to LGBT safe-space designations.

What’s paramount, Gonzales says, is that everyone is responsible for recognizing these youth: the talent they offer, the particular struggles they face. While nearly every American family struggles to keep up with the incredible cost of college education, those without access to financial aid face a dark future. Without more resources and help, Gonzales says, “undocumented kids are being left further and further behind.”

— Elaine McArdle is a writer whose last piece in Ed. tackled the rocky waters of the Common Core State Standards. Ed. listen to edcasts with jose antonio vargas and karen willemsen:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

39

news & notes Frances Hess, M.A.T., passed away on May 12, 2015, at the age of 82. She was a trustee of Vassar College and on the board of governors of Hebrew Union College.

Eve Sullivan, M.A.T., was inducted into the Ohio Senior Citizens Hall of Fame during a special ceremony in Columbus, Ohio.

She joins more than 400 individuals who have been inducted since 1978. Sullivan, a resident of Cambridge, is originally from Yellow Springs, Ohio. Bonnie Burman, director of the Ohio Department of Aging, said of Sullivan’s recognition, “Eve and the other inductees are not defined by their age; they are inspired by it. They set a stellar example for other Ohioans to follow and are a precious resource for our state, nation, and the world.” Sullivan founded the nonprofit peer support organization Parents Forum more than 20 years ago.

James Morrow, M.A.T., recently published his 10th novel, Galápagos Regained, which he describes as “a loopy historical epic in which Charles Darwin’s fictional zookeeper, Chloe Bathurst, undertakes a harrowing journey to South America and beyond.” In a recent Washington Post review, the book’s heroine was described as “another of Morrow’s brilliant female characters caught in the confluence of intellectual revolution.”

Norman Tjossem, M.A.T., retired in 2013 after 42 years of teaching secondary school history, the last 30 at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Tjossem held two honorary endowed teaching chairs, taught for a year in Germany under the Fulbright program, and specialized in offering history courses in the International Baccalaureate Program. He writes that he was “proud and delighted” to see two of his former students, Sara Wolf, Ed.M.’04, and Liz Grossman, Ed.M.’13, featured in the winter 2015 issue of Ed. magazine in the article, “Around the World in 8 Pages.” He also writes that he is grateful to the Ed School for helping to launch a fulfilling career.

Randie Gottlieb, Ed.M., is the founder and executive director of UnityWorks, based in Washington state. The nonprofit foundation, she writes, is “on a mission to promote understanding of the oneness of humanity, the value of diversity, and the need for unity.”

Gottlieb recently completed a pilot program in the Yakima [Washington] School District.

She also developed a variety of easy-to-use antiracism materials, including her newest book, Teaching Unity, designed to teach children about unity, diversity, skin color, and overcoming prejudice. unityworks.org

Alums: Are You Ready to Launch?

The Harvard Innovation Launch Lab, a co-working space for highpotential ventures started by Harvard alumni, is growing. Located directly adjacent to the Harvard i-lab in Boston, the Launch Lab nearly tripled in size in just one year — from 3,000 to 8,550 square feet.

Don’t you want to be a part of this?

If you’re a Harvard alum working on your own entrepreneurial venture, visit harvardlaunchlab.com for more information and to apply.

40

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

Joanne Huskey, Ed.M., recently co-authored Make It in India about what it takes for CEOs at companies like Starbucks, Facebook, Ford, and IBM to successfully run multicultural businesses in India. Since 1995, Huskey has operated Global Adjustments, an international relocation company based in India.

Ronald Kronish, Ed.D., recently edited Coexistence & Reconciliation in Israel, a book of essays. Kronish, a rabbi, is the founding director and now senior adviser of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel.

Jane Attanucci, Ed.M.’74, Ed.D., wrote First Mud, a collection of poems published this past summer. She was a finalist in the 2014 Blast Furnace Chapbook Contest and a recipient of the New England Poetry Club’s Barbara Bradley Prize.

John Silvanus Wilson Jr., Ed.M.’82, Ed.D., was elected as one of the new members of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Wilson is currently president of Morehouse College.

Vicki Jacobs, C.A.S.’80, Ed.D., was named this past summer as faculty director of the Special Studies Program at the Ed School.

Jacobs has been Jacobs a member of the Ed School community since 1981, first joining as an instructor in education before transitioning to her current role as lecturer in 1990. During her time here, she has also served as associate director of master’s studies, director of the Field Experience Program, and director of fieldwork for the Teacher Education Program. Jacobs teaches courses on teaching and literacy.

FROM EDUCATION WEEK, MARCH 9, 1988:

Two of the 10 suggestions offered by Wiggins on how to address the shortcomings in American high schools.

1. DO NOT WASTE CLASS TIME ON “TEACHING.” Every activity should serve at least one of the three basic

purposes of assembling students in a class: to work collaboratively; to practice or perform with the benefit of “coaching” from teachers and peers; to gain, through talk or activity, knowledge or experience that cannot be effectively communicated in print. It is a waste of precious time to devote classes primarily to lectures when students have textbooks and assignment sheets. To raise and uphold standards in class is to make homework essential; classwork should build on it, not take the place of it or duplicate it.

2. STOP THINKING OF EDUCATION IN TERMS OF “CONTENT” AND START THINKING OF IT IN TERMS OF “INTELLECTUAL HABITS.” It is hard to imagine a soccer coach saying, “But we ‘covered’ corner kicks

last month” or a music teacher complaining that “I already gave you a clear lecture on how to position your fingers on the guitar.” But teachers routinely expect that an idea or skill taught once will be internalized — as if education were inoculation. What would it mean for teachers to approach the aim of careful reading, insightful questioning, or respectful dialogue as a habit? At the very least, the concept of “coverage” would give way, and with it superficial teaching that pays little mind to its effect on student performance.

GRANT WIGGINS, Ed.M.’82,

Ed.D., passed away in May 2015. Wiggins was president of Authentic College in New Jersey. He was best known for Understanding by Design, a book that promoted “backward planning,” a classroom instruction approach where teachers focus first on learning goals and then curriculum is created to reach those goals, instead of the other way around. Wiggins worked for 14 years in schools as a teacher and coach. He also contributed to Ed School Dean Ted Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools, including, in 1988, writing an op-ed for Education Week that offered 10 ideas for addressing what he saw as shortcomings in American high schools.

Ronald Thorpe, Ed.M.’78, Ed.D., president and CEO of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, died this past July after a battle with lung cancer. Prior to joining the National Board, he was vice president for education at the New York public television station WNET. In his early career, he served as a teacher and later as assistant to then-headmaster Ted Sizer at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Thorpe was 63 years old.

Heather Exby, Ed.M., was named dean of the Roaring Fork Campus of Colorado Mountain College. Prior, she was director of student services at Western Colorado Community College at Colorado Mesa University.

Sonia Caus Gleason, Ed.M., published Growing into Equity: Professional Learning and Personalization in High-Achieving Schools in 2013. She has been an education consultant since 1997.

Len Duevel, Ed.M., announced this past spring that after 42 years serving as a teacher and then principal at International School of Stavanger in Norway, he is retiring. “In the next years, Linda and I will volunteer with schools around the world, teach graduate courses in leadership for Endicott College, and [find] time for family and travel.”

Linda Duevel, Ed.M., writes, “Forty years working for the International School of Stavanger in Norway comes to a close in June 2015.” She says she will continue as board chair of the Association for the

Advancement of International Education and looks forward to staying active in international education through volunteer and short-term opportunities while continuing to live in Norway.

Dionne McLaughlin, Ed.M., recently published Insights: How Expert Principals Make Difficult Decisions, which offers case studies that explore how expert principals handle crises, make tough decisions, and work effectively with their teachers. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at North Carolina Central University.

John Carfora, Ed.M., co-edited two books on inquiry-based learning: Inquiry-Based Learning for Faculty and Institutional Development: A Conceptual and Practical Resource for Educators and Inquiry-Based Learning for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences: A Conceptual and Practical Resource for Educators. Carfora is the associate provost of research advancement and compliance at Loyola Marymount University.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

41

Faculty Programs and Projects

@hgse (main feed) @UKnowHGSE (Usable Knowledge) @hgse_admissions (Admissions) @Harvard_Ed_Pub (Harvard Education Publishing) @HGSE_live (live tweeting during Askwith Forums) @EdRedesignLab (Education Redesign Lab) @ProjectZeroHGSE (Project Zero) @AgencybyDesign (Project Zero Agency by Design) @HarvardCenter (Center on the Developing Child) @HarvardCEPR (Center for Education Policy Research) @HFRP (Harvard Family Research Project) @GPHarvard (The Good Project) @MCCHarvardEd (Making Caring Common) @hive_hgse (Harvard GSE Innovation & Ventures in Education)

@DeanJimRyan @DavidRose_CAST @karen_brennan @RGGonzales1 @jal_mehta @FernandoReimers @NKWarikoo @ProfMartyWest @karen_mapp @ltoddrose @pasi_sahlberg @childprof (Nancy Hill) @chrs_dede @MSavitzRomer

@AndrewDeanHo @DrPamelaMason @drydenpeterson @mattmiller617 @felbarrera @PaulReville @LizDuraisingh @danielwilsonPZ @KayMerseth @Howard_Gardner (also: @OfficialMIOasis) @Joe_HGSE (Joe Blatt)

Degree Programs

@HGSE_TIE @HGSE_PSP @HarvardEdLD

Whether you’re a Twitterholic or a Twewbie or you aspire to be a part of the Twitterati, you’ll want to connect with your favorite Ed School programs and people. Here’s a list to get you started.

Are you an alum who tweets about education? Send a tweet our way (@hgse) to let us know.

Jianping Wang, Ed.M., was named president of Mercer County Community College in New Jersey, effective July 1, 2015. Prior, she was vice president of Ocean County College.

John Chittick, Ed.M.’88, Ed.D., is executive director of TeenAIDSPeer Corps, a nonprofit dedicated to educating young people about HIV/AIDS. In November, Chittick did outreach work in West Africa, including training scouts living in the Ivory Coast to become peer teachers on HIV prevention. Chittick, a full-time volunteer, says he has now worked in 86 countries.

42

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

Phyllis Gimbel, Ed.M., was promoted to full professor, effective June 18, 2015, at Bridgewater State University.

Elaine Schear, Ed.D., was named the firstever executive director of the Friends of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a non-

profit she co-founded in 2006 as a way to support students and programs in the only public high school in the city of Cambridge.

Katherine Dinh, Ed.M., head of the K–8 Prospect Sierra School in El Cerrito, California, was elected chair of the board of the National Association of Independent Schools.

Dennis Holtschneider, Ed.D., president of DePaul University, had his contract extended through the end of 2019. Holtschneider became the university’s 11th president in 2004. Last fall, Holtschneider served as a visiting scholar and president-in-residence at the Ed School.

Chittick after a training in the Ivory Coast.

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

Judith Pace, C.A.S.’90, Ed.M.’95. Ed.D., a professor of teacher education at the University of San Francisco, recently published The Charged Classroom: Predicaments and Possibilities for Democratic Teaching.

Emily Buser, Ed.M., writes that April 2015 marked her one-year anniversary working at the Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML) as the business intelligence analyst for the Public Services Department, where she provides data analytic services to staff throughout their 22 locations in central Ohio. “Part of my work responsibilities also involve bridging connections between CML and the school districts we serve,” she writes.

“Are we having an impact on literacy skills throughout our children’s programming? It’s a wonderful, challenging career path!”

Living in a place like New York City, there’s not a lot of space or a lot of calm, so being able to get out on the water with amazing, hardworking teenagers is a huge gift. There is a wonderful combination of peace and strength all at once.

To see our kids find their way from novices where they’re just beginning to learn to set the boat to varsity rowers with confidence and ability is also a great thing to be a part of.

and programming, and serves as a dorm parent to 40 young women and an actual parent to her two young sons. , Ed.M., was featured in the new book Unselfish for her work starting Row New York in 2002 with one borrowed boat and eight rowers. The program teaches young people in underresourced communities in New York City the sport of competitive rowing. Today, the program serves more than 2,000 students each year; 98 percent of the participants graduate from high school and go on to college. @RowNewYork

Jenna Mancini-Rufo, Ed.M., is the director of special education and student services for North Penn School District, which serves roughly 13,000 students in Lansdale,

Pennsylvania. She writes that some of her proudest accomplishments include leading the implementation of a tiered reading intervention system at the high school level and establishing a multiple disabilities support program for students with severe cognitive and physical disabilities. She is currently chairing an inclusion task force for the district in an effort to refine and expand inclusive practices for students with disabilities. She lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with her husband and two daughters and is currently pursuing her doctorate at Immaculata University.

Taryn Sabia, Ed.M., is lead researcher at the Florida Center for Community Design and Research within the University of South Florida School of Architecture and Community Design. Her work focuses on resilient urban design, transit and the public realm, and the sustainability of cities. For eight years she has also overseen Urban Charrette, Inc., the nonprofit she co-founded to build community capacity around better

Peter Mueller, Ed.M., was named principal of Basalt High School in Basalt, Colorado.

Prior, he was a project director at the Nature Conservancy and a middle and high school principal in the Telluride R-1 School District.

Kimberly (Zern) Evelti, Ed.M., serves as the associate academic dean at the Williston Northampton School, a co-ed boarding and day school offering grades 7–PG in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Last year, Evelti helped develop and implement the school’s 1:1 tablet computing initiative, deploying over 600 Microsoft Surface Pro devices to all students and faculty. She also founded the school’s Williston Scholars program, wrote and teaches a course in video game design

In February 2015, classmates Jenna ManciniRufo, Kim Evelti, Robyn Wiens, and Taryn Sabia had a mini-reunion at St. Pete Beach, Florida.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

43

urban design, to organize efforts for community building through the arts, and to advocate for more livable cities. Sabia lives with her husband and two children in Tampa, Florida.

Robyn Wiens, Ed.M., is the founding principal of the Hawthorn Leadership School for Girls, the first single-gender public school to open in Missouri. Hawthorn is a STEM-focused charter school sponsored by Washington University and an affiliate of the Young Women’s Leadership Network. The school opened in August 2015 with approximately 160 girls in grades 6 and 7. Hawthorn is expected to grow to serve about 500 young women in grades 6 through 12 by 2020. Wiens lives in St. Louis with her husband and two daughters.

Frank Tuitt, C.A.S.’96, Ed.M.’97, Ed.D., was honored in November with the Mildred García Award for Exemplary Scholarship from the Council on Ethnic Participation.

Tuitt is the associate provost for inclusive excellence at the University of Denver. The scholarship recognizes a tenured scholar for “exemplary scholarship” that focuses on research and issues specifically related to underrepresented populations of color in higher education.

Amy Henry, Ed.M., was named senior vice president of strategic insights for Strottman International, a family marketing company.

In this role, she focuses on understanding millenials who are raising families.

Jessica Mayorga, Ed.M., joined Destination DC as the director of communications. Prior, she was senior director of marketing for the National Council of La Raza in Washington, D.C. Destination DC is a marketing organization for the nation’s capital.

Kirsten Olson, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D., recently published The Mindful School Leader. She is the chief listening officer at Old Sow Coaching and Consulting.

44

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

Kira Orange Jones, Ed.M., was named one of the 100 most influential people in TIME magazine this past spring, in the Pioneers category. (See story, page 14.)

Zeke Phillips, Ed.M., a fifth-grade English teacher at Excel Academy in Chelsea, Massachusetts, was awarded the Fishman Prize for Superlative Classroom Practice.

The prize, which honors teachers working in high-poverty public schools, includes $25,000 and the chance to participate in an intensive summer residency.

director for the Office of Community and Economic Development at California State University, Fresno.

John Boccella, Ed.M., launched the Fierce Women Project, which aims to connect girls with female mentors working in various fields and to engage men as allies in supporting opportunities for women. The project commissioned a series of original portraits, including one of Valerie Sutton, director of career services at the Ed School. jgboccella.com

read the full story:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras..

Vincent Bertram, Ed.M., president and CEO of Project Lead the Way, spoke at two commencement ceremonies this past May at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Project Lead the Way is a nonprofit that develops curricula in science, technology, engineering, and math fields and provides training for instructors.

Danielle (Cavanna) Ogden, Ed.M., is the associate director of academic programs at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Erika Smith, Ed.M., earned a Ph.D. in social policy and management from Brandeis University this past May. Her dissertation was on the role of financial aid and assets in postsecondary education and training persistence of youth aging out of foster care. She has worked with the Myra Kraft Transitional Year Program at Brandeis since 2000, and as director of the program since 2004. She plans to continue in this role, plus teach in the university’s concentration in social justice and social policy.

Ismael Diaz Herrera Jr., Ed.M., was elected to the Fresno County [California] Board of Education in November 2014. He previously served on the board of education for his hometown, Mendota, California, from 2010 to 2013. Herrera is the associate

Stephen Zrike, Ed.M.’03, Ed.D., was named receiver for the Holyoke Public Schools effective July 2015. Prior, Zrike served as principal at three Boston Public Schools and led a network of elementary schools in Chicago. Most recently, he was superintendent of schools in Wakefield, Massachusetts.

Modupeola Fadugba, Ed.M., a native of Nigeria, is head of curriculum and instructional design at WAVE (West Africa Vocational Education), a nonprofit that works with unemployed youth in West Africa. WAVE

Academy launched in August 2013 with a focus on screening, training, and placing local West Africans in hospitality and retail jobs in the region. wavehospitality.org Philip Lee, Ed.M.’12, Ed.D., is an assistant professor of law at the David. A. Clarke School at the University of the District of Columbia. In 2014, he published his first book, Academic Freedom at American Universities: Constitutional Norms, Professional Norms, and Contractual Duties, based on his doctoral dissertation. Recently, his students voted him professor of the year.

Sofia Bahena, Ed.M.’13, Ed.D., is an education associate at the San Antonio-based Intercultural Development Research Association. In February, Bahena gave a talk at Trinity University, her alma mater in San Antonio, about what leads some undocumented students to be more hopeful than other undocumented students.

Bilal Malik, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D., became dean of Leverett House at Harvard College after serving as the acting dean for two semesters and as a house tutor since 2007.

Elizabeth Gillespie, M.A.T.’50 Eleanor Wells, Ed.M.’50 Janet Marcus, M.A.T.’56 Joseph Pavlovich, M.A.T.’57 Patricia Khoury, Ed.M.’59 Janet Bernard, M.A.T.’60

Jessica Armytage Scott, Ed.M.’08, Ed.D., received the Jeanne S. Chall Doctoral Student Research Award this past June for “Beyond the Fourth-Grade Glass Ceiling: Understanding Reading Comprehension Among Bilingual/Bimodal Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students.” The award will be awarded during the annual Jeanne S. Chall Endowment Lecture in October.

Michelle Brown, Ed.M., won the Teach For America Social Innovation Award for CommonLit, the education tech startup that she created when she was a student at the Ed School. @CommonLit

Martin Katz, Ed.D.’60 Janet Rawdon, Ed.M.’62 Peter McHugh, M.A.T.’63 Harold Berlak, M.A.T.’57, Ed.D.’64 Chester Towne, Ed.M.’56, C.A.S.’65 Paul Cronshaw, Ed.M.’67 Richard Fiander, Ed.M.’63, C.A.S.’65, Ed.D.’67 Peter Hanson, M.A.T.’67 Sydney Lieberman, M.A.T.’67 J. Gerald Fitzgibbon, M.A.T.’61, C.A.S.’65, Ed.D.’69 Georgia McWhinney, M.A.T.’70 John Henderson, Ed.M.’75 Gary Seltzer, GSE’78 Frances Cash, Ed.M.’87 Donald Fitzsimmons, Ed.M.’87 Grant Wiggins, Ed.M.’82, Ed.D.’87 Nicole Durham, Ed.M.’88

, Ed.M., was named the 2016 Massachusetts Teacher of the Year. The award was announced on May 5, National Teacher Day. Jackson is currently a data facilitator and fifth-grade teacher at the J.P. Manning Elementary School in Boston.

Ronald Thorpe Jr., Ed.M.’78, Ed.D.’88 Grover McCarver, C.A.S.’94 Mary Patricia Chartrand, Ed.M.’11

We Miss You! So I might be giving away a secret here, but honestly I’d rather spend my day with fifth-graders than adults, or at least my working days! Fifth-graders can definitely try your patience, but they are still learning how to make sense of the world, and, thus, when you respond calmly with reason and are direct with them, they — most often — actually listen to what you have to say. Even when they don’t, that’s usually because they are in a moment of crisis, and they’re able to process with you later on.

Fifth-graders also love to play and learn new things; sometimes adults forget how awesome that can be, so I’m pretty lucky to be a part of that process on a regular basis.

Let us know what you are up to. classnotes@gse.harvard.edu

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

45

46

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

“If you survived the snowpocalypse this year,” Ryan joked, referring to the more than 110 inches of show that pummeled Cambridge this past winter, “you can survive anything.” read ryan’s full speech and watch the video:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

MICHAEL RODMAN AND IMAN RASTEGARI

At this year’s commencement ceremony, Dean Jim Ryan congratulated the 701 students seated in Radcliffe Yard for many things: the hard work they had put in over the past year, the obstacles they overcame to get here, and the talent they showed. But the best congratulations of all from Ryan had to do with a different kind of grit — the kind connected not with academics, but with New England weather.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

47

One of the priorities of the Campaign for HGSE is “Cultivate Leaders and Innovators” — preparing our students to make a significant difference in the field of education. Each Ed School graduate, whether he or she works as a teacher, principal, policymaker, scholar, or entrepreneur, has the potential to influence the lives of thousands of others. In this issue of Ed., we take a closer look at how support for our master’s and doctoral degree programs fosters the next generation of pioneering educators.

For Katiusca Moreno, helping young people achieve goes hand in hand with helping adults develop their leadership skills. Following this passion, she was recently named senior managing director of organizational culture initiatives at Teach For America (TFA), which recruits recent college graduates to teach in low-income communities across the country. Deploying many of the strategies she learned in the Doctor of Education Leadership Program, Moreno is examining how the culture among TFA’s staff and teaching corps — specifically engagement and inclusion — can catalyze efforts to improve outcomes for students in each region where TFA operates.

We are piloting a new initiative with a handful of regions looking to explore how the culture that these regional teams create with their staff, as well as with their teaching corps, impacts the efficacy that they are trying to achieve. As part of the larger TFA model, each region believes that one day all kids can receive a great education, but how to reach that is specific to each region, especially given its unique local context, whether in a large urban area or small rural area.

When we think about team culture, we ask: Is there intentionality behind how teams operate? What are the systems, routines, and structures that reinforce culture? Is there an equitable and inclusive environment on this team?

TFA strives to ensure diversity across our staff and teaching corps. And while we can celebrate the increased number of staff and corps members that share the same racial or economic background as the students we teach and the communities read more of our conversation with moreno:

48

HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE

• FALL 2015 •

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

we partner with, we must also build a thriving and inclusive culture where all our staff feel valued for their individual experiences, unique leadership, and assets they bring to our work. My work is to figure out, from a regional perspective, how to create these thriving and inclusive team cultures, where everyone feels that they can be part of an effective team that will create the outcomes that we want for our teachers and, in turn, create that ripple effect of what we want for students.

The strategies I design and facilitate in my work are directly tied to the learning experiences I had as a student with my cohort. I could not have done it without this firsthand experience. And the Ed.L.D. coursework continues to give me those “aha” moments of thinking, “This is what we’re going through as a cohort; this is about effective teams, it’s not just about the one person who can be a superstar.” What our system needs is a better understanding of how adults and teams work, through a lens of race, identity, and inclusiveness.

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

$250 million goal $172 million raised (as of 7/31/15)

11,159+

Education is the critical building block of our democracy, which is why the majority of my support is directed towards education-focused organizations. I believe in Dean Ryan’s vision to “change the world through education” and his leadership to realize this vision. HGSE can play a unique role, given its history and independence from any particular ideology, to focus on discovering, sharing, and implementing education best practices.

My favorite component of the program is the practical leadership experience each student receives. A 10-month residency with a first-class partner organization is the best way for students to apply the theory they learn in the classroom to real-life organizational challenges. After absorbing a rigorous curriculum and serving in some of our nation’s leading organizations, Ed.L.D. graduates are prepared to effect immediate change in the field.

88%

of all gifts made by HGSE alumni

IMAN RASTEGARI

A member of the Dean’s Leadership Council and the Ed School’s Campaign Executive Committee, Tushara Canekeratne, founder and CEO of business operations at Nadastra, Inc., has given generously to the Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) Program. Ed. recently asked Canekeratne about what drives her support for the school and its unique doctoral program.

gifts made to the campaign

At Convocation on May 27, Rina Deshpande, Ed.M.’15, announced that the Class of 2015 had raised more than $24,000 and broken the all-time record for participation in a class gift drive, with a remarkable 78 percent of graduates making a gift and five program cohorts achieving 100 percent participation. With a goal to invest in paying education forward, the class designated their gift to financial aid for future Ed School students, with the hope that they, too, will support future education leaders. “We are now and always a part of Harvard,” said Deshpande of her classmates. “We will change the world together.”

It would be rewarding to have the campaign achieve and exceed its goals, so that HGSE faculty could commence work to realize our vision and goals for the future. I wish for a day where every child in our world receives an education of the highest quality.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

49

Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 13 Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02138

On our back cover, we usually highlight superstars reading Ed. This issue is no different, with the world’s smartest two-yearold, Avery, devouring the summer issue in a Zen-like fashion while sitting in her favorite chair. We think the daughter of Larina Mehta, Ed.M.’06, may just be our best back cover yet. using instagram? post your pics reading

ed. using #wheresED hashtag. using email? send them to classnotes@gse.harvard.edu. the

Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Holliston, MA Permit No. 20