Ed. Magazine, Winter 2013

Ed.

the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education Winter 2013

education post conflict | Margaret H. Marshall | just draw!

jill anderson

the appian way

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Ed.

• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

October 4, 2012 What do you get when you cross a ladybug, an Ed School master’s student, and a room full of four- and five-year-olds? One of the cutest pictures we’ve ever published in Ed., of course. Once a year, across the country, millions of people read the same book as part of Jumpstart’s Read for the Record literacy celebration event. This year, current master’s student Emma Thadoni was one of the dozens of Ed School volunteers who read Ladybug Girl and the Bug Squad to school children across Cambridge. Thadoni read to pre-K and kindergarten students at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School, where Gerald Yung, Ed.M.’07, is principal.

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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contents

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winter 2013

Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M.’69, talks about apartheid, Goodridge, and how she’s finally catching up on sleep.

18 Artist and new author Deborah Putnoi, Ed.M.’92, wants you to pick up a pencil and draw anything, even a bumpy line.

Reforming how mathematics is taught

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From Katrina to Sudan to Somalia, educating school children in postconflict and post-disaster zones is daunting and sometimes dangerous, but — as many Ed School graduates working around the world say — critically important.

and learned is once again taking center stage in the United States due to the

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Common Core Standards.

a l s o of i n t e r e s t 4 6 42 48 49

Letters Appian Way Alumni News and Notes Recess Investing

Look for these icons throughout the magazine and then go online for web-only content at

kathleen dooher

www.gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras

Curious what Senior Lecturer Joe Blatt, Ed.M.’77, is currently reading? (Hint: The word “technology” isn’t in the title.)

19 How one allergy and immunology doctor found joy in being back in school, without coffee or a muchneeded sleep battery.

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@

Modeling Behavior

I was glad to see that your recent article on bullying emphasized new skills, rather than just outlawing behavior (“The Bullying Conundrum,” fall 2012). The instinct for hierarchy needs to be channeled productively, otherwise it will just be driven underground.

After HGSE I taught at a boarding school and spent the first year observing the negligible effects of an anti-hazing campaign. At the start of my second year I held a “seniors only” dorm meeting. I explained that the oftused claim of “but I’m a senior!” as an argument for privileges was not going to carry any weight with me. But, for inexplicable reasons, the underclassmen looked up to them solely for their age. There were two ways they could handle this undeserved power: They could be tyrants or leaders. They could rule by fear or by respect.

Leadership, unlike mere age, was something I could reward. Leaders, not tyrants, could expect from me what their predecessors simply considered their due.

I can’t claim a miraculous transformation occurred, but the impact was noticeable.

A few months later, as the boys crowded into my study for a Saturday night check-in, I asked for somebody to run down a couple flights for the out-of-town permission slips from the bulletin board. The boys started touching their noses with one finger, their sign for “Not It.” A ninth-grader was too slow, and a chorus of “Elliot has to go!” arose.

As he headed out, an older boy couldn’t resist: “Plus he’s just a freshman!”

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Ed.

• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

You Don’t Say? Actually, we wish you did. In words. 150 or less. Don’t be shy.

We love letters. Especially yours. It goes without saying. letters@ gse.harvard.edu

The group froze, and a collective and entertained “Ohhhhh …” arose.

The boys, all four grades, knew that pulling undeserved rank was taboo, and they spontaneously intervened without me. The older boy grimaced when he realized his mistake but took it in good grace and with a laugh ran down for the slips.

— David Rea, Ed.M.’94 This is a wonderful article and highlights the reality that there is no single magic solution to the problem of bullying in any of its forms. It is fantastic for schools to be developing curricula around building empathy and tolerance, but, as stated here, if parents, families, and communities don’t model what is being taught, the impact will fall short of what it could be. I will choose to be optimistic and say that the fact that there are articles like this that stimulate conversations across the

country is a really good start. Instead of getting frustrated, I am proud to be on the board of Greater Boston PFLAG (www.gbpflag.org), whose mission is to help transform school climates and cultures in many of the ways that Jill Anderson’s article suggests.

— Ken Heideman “It’s an opportunity to talk about socialemotional learning, moral development, responsibility for others, standing up and having courage, and also an opportunity to talk about the way schools function and what we are doing and not doing to prepare adults to connect to students and to be helpful to them around peer troubles.” In other words, character development for all students is a must at home and at school. The example presented (sex change as early as high school) is a moral dilemma itself. Moral development — the teaching of what is right and what is wrong,

letters

Thank you for this thoughtful article. I agree that creating a culture of caring and compassion starts with the adults.

When we can come from a true place of seeing the nobility in all of our students and ourselves, then we model what honoring looks like. Using language to be a witness to virtue can help students develop authentic self-esteem and resiliency. The Virtues Project is a global grassroots initiative that utilizes five strategies for bringing out the best in ourselves and in others. It is not an add-on curriculum; it is a language and a lens.

— Dara Feldman, director of education Virtues Project

Shared Agenda

Thank you so much for this article (“(Il)literacy,” fall 2012); we look forward to reading this new book by Robert LeVine, Sarah LeVine, Beatrice Schnell-Anzola, Meredith Rowe, and Emily Dexter, and are thrilled that their research supports the work we have been doing in communities around the world for decades. … Two-thirds of the world’s nonliterate adults are women.

Worldwide, women, more often than men, live in poverty, suffer from disease, and deal with daily discrimination in

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

their homes and in their communities.

Our Women in Literacy Programs give women the reading, writing, and math skills they need to understand their rights, fight poverty, stay healthy, confront discrimination, and change their daily lives.

— Alesha Anderson and Amy Schmitz ProLiteracy

Homework Balance

The truth is that if our children are not well engaged after school, homework or not, they will find other activities to occupy their time, such as games and the Internet, some of these in excess (“Are You Down With or Done With Homework?” winter 2012). The children of this generation have an information overload, and the interesting information (which is often leisurely and more fun) is not coming from school. So that makes schoolwork all the more of a chore. Homework is one of the activities that helps bring

contributing writers Jill Anderson Rachael Apfel Don Heller, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’97 Elaine McArdle David McKay Wilson Deborah Putnoi, Ed.M.’92 copyeditor Abigail Mieko Vargus photographers Jill Anderson Kathleen Dooher Martha Stewart

balance after school, if it is not too much and every other activity has its place. Children need time after school to rest, relax, play, and do some work. … There must be a balance. Too much homework … becomes rote, a despised [exercise] at that. Another way to look at is to consider the learning styles or personality styles of children. Some children are of a studious nature and will thrive on homework anyway.

But there are more playful ones who, though intelligent, will not win a prize in performance based on the regular forms of assessment. What sort of children and for what sort of future are educators preparing for?

— Ngozi Enelamah, Ed.M.’13 Correction: In the fall 2012 issue, we incorrectly spelled the last name of Mary Henton, Ed.M.’89.

jessica esch

of the natural moral law, of the objective standards of morality — should be our priority as educators.

— Salabat82

v send letters to letters@gse.harvard.edu.

illustrators Ruth Rowland Daniel Vasconcellos © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 13 Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02138

aclickaway HGSE www.gse.harvard.edu events www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/events twitter www.twitter.com/hgse facebook www.facebook.com/harvardeducation youtube www.youtube.com/harvardeducation flickr www.flickr.com/photos/harvardeducation issuu www.issuu.com/harvardeducation foursquare www.foursquare.com/hgse Harvard Graduate School of Education

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jill anderson

appian way lecturehall Assistant Professor Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell

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he’s interested in understanding how organizations work — their internal processes and how they produce the outcomes they do. And schools, as organizations, are her specialty. For Assistant Professor Ebony BridwellMitchell, this means looking at three big external forces, or institutional pressures, that influence organizations: regulatory pressure, normative pressure, and mimetic pressure. In August, not long after she arrived on campus from Brown University, where she had been teaching since 2008, the Cambridge-raised Bridwell-Mitchell explained to Ed. what these pressures mean, the influences that led her to do this work, and why she sometimes lets her “research brain” chill out.

Explain what you mean by these three “big pressures.”

Regulatory pressure refers to the laws and policies that schools have to follow as well as the cultural values that shape laws and policies. Normative pressure concerns the norms and values that come from the professions, the pressures from the field that determine what organizations should be doing.

And mimetic pressure is not the law or the profession’s way of doing things; it’s looking around at what other organizations are doing.

What’s an example of how these pressures work in school?

Say I’m a teacher. I really want to do great things for my students. I put every piece of energy out there to get these

32 kids to reach their potentials, but try as I might, I can’t reach all of the outcomes I was hoping for. There could be many reasons for this, and not all of them are within a teacher’s control.

Some of them are the result of organizational dynamics, such as the way the organization might be constrained by laws and policies, or the way professionals, like school leaders, are trained to do their jobs, or the access that teachers do or do not have to best practices.

In your research, you talk about how most examinations of schools are focused on the “technical core.” What do you mean?

The technical core is the learning and teaching that goes on in the classroom.

This is important, of course, and at the core of what happens at a school, but classroom learning and teaching is only one component that determines how effective a school, as an organization, will actually be. There are other factors like the leadership style of the principal, how teachers work together, understanding how teachers are motivated, and understanding how activities in the classroom are constrained by external factors, such as institutional pressures.

Why are people sometimes reluctant to think of schools as organizations?

Because people hear the word organization and think business, and many educators resist the influence of business logics and practices in the education sector.

Why the personal interest in schools and education?

The study of schools is imprinted on me. Both of my parents are committed to human development. My mom is a professor of education at Cambridge College. My dad is director of a community action agency. So there’s a nur-

turing environment that takes my focus toward schools and their ability to help young people fulfill their potentials.

That focus includes teaching in a public school after getting your master’s at the Harvard Kennedy School.

I ended up at a public middle school in Brooklyn, N.Y. I taught for three years; one of those years I was an instructional lead teacher. One thing I learned: Policy gets lost when you’re on the ground. Organizational dynamics come to take precedence. That’s how I became fascinated with what was happening in organizations.

Do you miss the classroom?

There are days when I really, really miss it, mostly because there is really no other professional experience, at least for me, where the amount you invest multiplies so quickly. The 10 minutes I spend talking to this child, teaching her how to read this sentence, is so immediate and so rewarding. The way you experience human development, there’s nothing like it.

What kind of students do you hope to see in your classes here?

Students who say, “I want to improve education, either at the building level, state level, or national level, but I have to understand how schools work.”

Being able to recognize the importance of organizational dynamics is critical.

You love reading trashy fantasy novels because the …

Trolls and wizards let me use an entirely different part of my brain than that required by my research. It’s like letting my research brain take a nap without actually going to sleep.

— Lory Hough

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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PELP For the past four years, Tom Boasberg, superintendent of Denver Public Schools, has brought a team to the annual Public Education Leadership Project (PELP) summer institute, where leaders from urban school districts learn how to apply management concepts to

FACULTY RESEARCH Lecturer Karen Mapp, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’99, former associate professor Mark Warren, and 15 doctoral students include a chapter on Denver in their new book, A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform.

the challenges they face.

ontheground Denver Appian Way is, without a doubt, a pretty short street. But its size doesn’t define the Ed School’s reach, which goes way beyond this tiny section of Cambridge.

On the Ground is a new feature in Ed. that will focus on one of the many places around the world where we’re doing good work as a community. First up: Denver, the largest city in Colorado, and one that is lucky enough to have more annual hours of sunshine than even Miami.

CURRENT STUDENTS Two current Ed.L.D. students from cohort 1, David Rease and Alex Smith, are doing their residencies with Denver Public Schools. They are assessing data systems and trying to improve academic outcomes for students with special needs and English language learners.

Ed.L.D. cohort 3 student Thalia Nawi joined the Ed School this year. Nawi was the founding director of the Denver Public

ALUMS Alyssa Pearson, Ed.M.’03, is the executive director of accountability and data analysis for the Colorado Department of Education. Colorado state senator Mike Johnston, Ed.M.’00, was named by Forbes Magazine as one of the “7 Most Influential Educators” in 2010.

School’s Denver Teacher Residency Program.

CEPR

PPE Last spring, the Ed school’s Program

Two projects under the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) included

in Profession Education (PPE) held

Denver connections. Three Strategic Data Project fellows, Chung Pham,

a four-day program called Leadership

Tracy Keenan, and Megan Marquez, are in Denver developing an early warning

Institute for Superintendents:

indicator system that tracks student progress in the Denver Public Schools from

Systemic Reform in School Districts

K–12 toward high school graduation and college readiness.

and Schools. It included a team of 15 from Denver.

A team from Denver participated in the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness conference last May, which focused on taking improved teacher evaluation to scale.

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About Time Time during the day when classrooms are empty. It seemed like an odd request, especially considering the source: students and members of the faculty.

But that’s exactly what a bunch of faculty and students asked for — blocks of time each week when no classes were scheduled so that a variety of other things could happen on campus without anyone having to miss out.

Matt Miller, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’06, the school’s associate dean for academic affairs, knew the logistics wouldn’t be easy, especially given that this hadn’t been done before at the Ed School. But he also knew it was worth a shot. And he wasn’t worried that the unscheduled time would go to waste.

“If we do good stuff,” he says, “they will come.”

And they have. Since the school’s Community Block pilot started last fall, faculty, students, and staff have used the three open times (Monday, 12–2 p.m.,

Pat On Our Back to master’s programs increased

44% During the past seven years,

Virtual and international

admissions outreach events:

9 30

75% classrooms

(2008–09) to

have seen major renovations

(2012–13)

of

Sneakers Not Required If you miss your beloved Ed School campus, or if you know a brilliant future student who wants to come here but isn’t ready to travel to Cambridge, you (or they) can now take a walking tour online. Guided virtually by a current doctoral student and two recent alumni, visitors get 360-degree views of popular sites like Gutman Library, Longfellow Hall, the Parents’ Room, and even Harvard Square.

v take the virtual tour at www.gse.harvard.edu/about/campus/tour.

So much has been happening at the Ed School. But as Henry David Thoreau once said, “It is not enough to be busy. The question is: What are we busy about?” We’re happy to say that we’ve been busy growing, in lots of interesting ways. We can’t spell them all out here, but we’ll try to highlight a few.

Between 2008–09 and 2012–13,

applications

Thursdays, 4–5 p.m., and Fridays, 12–1 p.m.) to organize and attend various events and meetings. There’s a popular “nexus” series that has allowed all doctoral students time to meet. Once a month, students have hosted HGSE Debates, an off-the-record discussion of timely topics such as the Chicago teachers’ strike. During the Thursday block, the Office of Student Affairs has been running a series of diversity dialogues.

Faculty members have used the time to meet with cohorts over lunch or bring outside speakers to campus to meet casually with students.

Miller says it was important for the administration to offer these open blocks.

“Our community depends on us, as school leadership, to create the conditions to bring people together,” he says.

“This is our version of trying to think like school principals and teacher-leaders to create a schedule that will give people time to collaborate and work together.”

Since 2006, staff engagement, as reflected in Harvard’s annual staff engagement survey, increased from

55% 86% to

moving the Ed School from last to first among Harvard schools

financial aid support for Ed.D. students has increased from

1 5 years to

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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atob Don Heller, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’97

The year was 1989, and I was trying to convince my then-girlfriend, who lived two hours away in western Massachusetts, to move closer to me in Somerville. I was working in information technology at MIT, and she was a special education teacher in the Berkshires, interested in becoming certified as a school administrator. I was tired of an every-other-weekend commute from Somerville out west on the Mass Pike so we could be together, so I came up with the brilliant idea that she should attend a graduate program in the Boston area rather than at UMass Amherst or North Adams State College, where she had been looking.

In the fall, she took a Friday off from teaching and drove Thursday night to Somerville, so that she could attend an open house at a couple of education schools in the area. I also took Friday off in order to keep her company. The first one we attended was at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

I remember very clearly two things from that day. First, when some of the faculty got up to describe their work, Bob

From 2006 to 2012,

Core faculty: has grown from

59 76 to

Brennan, instructor in education, ended his presentation by saying, “I have to wrap up — I’m suffering from PMA. That’s Parking Meter Anxiety, for those of you not familiar with this Cambridge ailment.” And second, I was surprised to learn that one could get a graduate degree in a field called “higher education.” I had never heard of such a thing and always thought of education schools as places where teachers went.

I walked away from that day with some information sheets and a catalog in hand and, after looking through the materials, decided to apply to the Ed.M. Program. Somewhat to my surprise I was accepted, and I attended part time while continuing to work at MIT. Twice a week, I would get on the red line at Kendall and ride two stops to Harvard Square.

The master’s program got me hooked, and I stayed on for the doctoral program in administration, planning, and social policy after quitting my job. I had the chance to work as a teaching fellow and research assistant, and these opportunities whetted my appetite for a faculty career — a switch from

EdCasts have had 271,197 listens between 2010 and 2012 From 2005 to 2012,

core faculty Of color: has grown from

8 20 to

Tenure-track faculty has grown from

10 22 to

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Ed.

• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

Institutional grants for Ed.M. students have increased from

$2.4 million $5+ million to

In the past 10 years, new fall books published by

Harvard education press increased by

233% The school

composted

18 tons of material in 2012

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daniel vasconcellos

my entrance to the doctoral program, when I thought I would continue as a university administrator.

I was fortunate enough to land a faculty position at the University of Michigan after graduation, where I specialized in higher education policy and economics. I subsequently moved on to Penn State for a decade, and last January, I began a new position as dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University.

And that woman whom I accompanied to the open houses? Well, she was not that impressed with the Ed School, but I did convince her to go to graduate school in Boston nonetheless. She enrolled at Wheelock College, where she received a master’s degree and became certified as a principal and special education director. And last year Anne Simon and I celebrated 20 years of marriage together.

— Don Heller, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’97, is dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University.

The school won

Tuition for the new

for classroom and space renovations

Ed.L.D. Degree

4 LEED project designations

was funded

Social Media

From 2006 to 2012, annual

followers

class gift student participation

today:

Facebook

19,949 Twitter

30,776

100% for students

increased from

PPe

26% 76%

institutes

to

have jumped from

In the past five years, the incoming class

Online

Career Workshop participation increased from

5% 72% to

26 35 to in the past three years

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3

4

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• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

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homeroom Jeanne Chall Reading Lab It’s one of the oldest spaces on campus, started in 1966 to help students who were training to become teachers and reading specialists. Chock full of children’s books and instructional material, the Jeanne Chall Reading Lab allows students to conduct research, create curriculum, and prepare for classes. Staff and faculty can also borrow books. Located in the basement of Larsen Hall, the homey space also serves as headquarters for the Language and Literacy master’s program.

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A photo of Jeanne Chall, a psychologist and

reading researcher, hangs in the lab. Chall joined the Ed School in 1965 and started the lab a year later. Initially called the Harvard Reading Laboratory, the space was renamed in her honor after she retired in 1991.

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The back wall of instructional material,

organized by a system of reading levels called Fountas and Pinnell, includes the Chall-Popp

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Phonics program, Voices Reading literacy series

by Professor Catherine Snow, Open Court decodable books, the Little Talentum program created

by Valeria Fontanals, Ed.M.’04, and Leap Frog phonics games.

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Lecturer Pamela Mason, M.A.T.’70,

Ed.D.’75, standing next to assessment tools that students use in the field, has been director of the Language and Literacy Program and the lab since 2006. Prior, she was a principal at three elementary schools. She says her favorite thing about the lab is “always being able to find students working together on assignments and engaged in lively discussions of literacy research and practice. It’s also fun to share favorite books to read with their students in their practicum placements.”

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There is a huge collection of nonfiction:

phonics guides, books promoting social skills, bibliographies, and photo-heavy books focused on subjects like sports and animals and nature, including those published by Child’s World and the ever-popular National Geographic.

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On the big wall is fiction — picture books

martha stewart

and chapter books, including one of Mason’s favorites, Honey, I Love by Eloise Greenfield.

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studybreak David Sloan, Ed.M.’13

F

martha stewart

or David Sloane, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, the best part of his work has to do with what he calls the “teaching moments” — the times when he’s helping patients, medical students, and even colleagues understand complex information or new ideas.

“I have loved teaching and learning for as long as I can recall,” he says. “From my cultural background, there is no one as Program: venerated as a great rabbi, who is a Tool for Change: student and teacher by definition.”

Hometown: Recently, after noticing that he was turning the latter half of clinic visits into mini-lectures, he even paid homage to the online video teaching master, Sal Khan, by posting his own Kahn-like video on YouTube, explaining the immune system for patients. But as a specialist in immunology and allergies, where does the Ed School fit in? He found the connection in one of those “aha!” moments. (He says it was more of a “well, duh!” moment.) Shoveling his driveway one day, he realized that knowing something about education — learning about learning, teaching, thinking, and understanding — was the first logical step in making medical education (as opposed to medical research) the next focus of his career.

It hasn’t been easy, especially with five kids at home, ranging in age from five months to 12 years, and still working full time. But he says it’s more than worth it. “The Ed School has been a dream come true, a way for me to pursue my love of cognitive studies (neuroscience and psychology), complex systems, and philosophy, to name just a few, all under the guise of reshaping my professional identity. I am in a constant state of amazement that I have not been charged with criminally intense enjoyment.”

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• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

appian way

Are other students surprised to learn that you’re a medical doctor?

They are indeed! But when I wax poetic about how fantastic an experience I am having, I think they can see that glint in my eye telling them that this is where I belong.

Special Studies Either that, or Medical Education that they should Boston via Cleveland call 911.

Typical day:

Television or movie doctor whom you think you’re most like: Today

sometimes until 11 p.m.

Home: dinner, kids’ homework, bedtime Homework: 3-6 a.m.

Hardest part of trying to juggle being a doctor and being a master’s student: The critical dimension is time. If only there were some sleep battery that I could charge up during the summer and live off during the academic year.

r Dr. Brown

r 4 other

My goal is to be a cross between Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock.

Allergy you treat the most?

Why?

Without a doubt, allergies to medications: antibiotics, pain relievers, and chemotherapy agents.

Clinically competent and compassionate while simultaneously thinking logically about harmonizing quantum physics and general relativity by means of M theory.

Allergy you’d least like to have:

4 r

4 r

4 r

4 r

dairy

caffeine

pollen

cat

I am already intolerant to dairy, pollens, and cat. Now you’re going to take away caffeine from me as well?! Actually, I stopped all caffeine in 2009, so the end effect is, sadly, similar.

images from istockphoto.com

r Dr. Bricker

?

Favorite class so far: T543: Applying Cognitive Science to Learning and Teaching with Associate Professor Tina Grotzer, Ed.M.’85, Ed.D.’93.

r Dr. Ross

work, part I: 7 a.m.

Classes: late morning Work, part II: until at least 5 p.m.,

Your blog ends with, “Beam us up, Scottie!” Are you a Star Trek fan?

See answer to the last question. I need say no more!

v read sloane’s blog at www.pacasthma.blogspot.com.

Yes or no: Do you ever see a day when asthma will be eliminated?

In the word of Matt Groening, “N-ye-maybe.”

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Futures of School Reform In some ways, argues Assistant Professor Jal Mehta, the United States school system has been a tremendous success.

“It’s probably our single most popular public institution,” he says. “It enrolls 90 percent of our students, and it meets a wide variety of different goals and needs.”

But — and there is a but, he adds — “if the goal is to challenge persistent achievement and attainment gaps by race and class and to play a powerful role in equalizing life chances, the history of school reform is pretty depressing.”

As he points out in his new Harvard Education Press book, The Futures of School Reform, which he coauthored with Professor Robert Schwartz, C.A.S.’68, and Frederick “Rick” Hess, Ed.M.’90, there has been no shortage of ideas on how to “fix” education. Vouchers. State standards.

National standards. School choice. Merit pay.

Small schools. Charter schools. More money. More time. More accountability. And these are just the ones tried in the past few years.

Unfortunately, they write in the book, “if we were to honestly appraise all of this activity, we would have to conclude that the results have not been what we hoped.” When it comes to making real gains in education reform, “if we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re never going to get there.”

And so four years ago, Mehta and Schwartz decided to see what they could do. Realizing there really weren’t any existing groups talking comprehensively about what was wrong and what could be done, they took the next logical step: They started one. But they didn’t want the Futures of School Reform working group to be just academics, so they pulled people from various circles and with differing ideologies, including academics, government officials, politicians and policy wonks, practitioners already working on reform, foundation folks, entrepreneurs, and one international deputy minister of education.

When Hess, a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., was first approached, he says he was hesitant, wondering if this project would be more rehashing of the same old ideas.

“I was always worried about that,” he says. “In fact, I’d like to think that we were so aware of the tendency to rehash that we made avoiding that trap our organizing principle.

When it came to inviting participants, structuring delibera-

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Ed.

• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

tions, and considering takeaways, I think we worked very hard to steer clear of a consensus format, which would simply yield more of the same — or of simply giving folks a platform to reiterate their familiar talking points.”

They also invited the world, literally, to be a part of the discussions by hosting a seven-part series on Education Week’s online commentary pages, explaining to readers, “This isn’t about one more jar of snake oil.”

As a result, there were often heated (but welcome) debates, within the group and from online followers, with a wide range of opinions on what could be done, what wasn’t working, what sounded good but wasn’t feasible, and even on what the real problems are. Core group members did,

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however, agree on one thing: When it comes to education reform, we’re thinking too small. Making incremental changes won’t work, given that the basic structure of schooling is the same: same teachers, same schools, same subject matter. However, Mehta says, thinking in a bigger way is a challenge.

“Inertia is powerful,” he says.

“Structures are created and layered upon, but rarely fundamentally changed or transformed. Schools are critical public institutions that are responsible for children, and hence we are reluctant to change them too much. Many people benefit from the current system, and it’s not in their interest to change it. We are all imaginatively challenged. We have trouble seeing outside existing paradigms. For all those reasons and many others, it’s easier to tinker than to make more fundamental change.”

Does this mean we basically need to start fresh with schools and how we educate kids? Blow up the Industrial Age model and start from scratch? In the last chapter of the book, Mehta says he sees five options: transform, replace, reassemble, expand, or dissolve the system.

“Transform is keeping the structures as they are, but creating a teaching profession with a level of knowledge and skill that would change what happens inside those structures,” he says. “Replace is essentially creating new institutions to do the functions of the old. Reassemble is to break schooling into its components and recreate anew. Expand is linking schooling and other social agencies, and dissolve is imagining a world where students are more directly connected to knowledge and the mediating forces of schooling get weaker. Essentially I think that without making changes in one or more of those directions, we really are just tinkering in ways that more won’t have real lasting online changes.” — Lory Hough

“

Quote Unquote We could start to tackle the teacher-quality problem not by finding more superheroes able to master a hugely demanding job, or by placing boundless faith in training and professional development, but by rethinking the way we define the role so that more people might do it well. This entails ‘unbundling’ the teaching job so that each teacher is not asked to excel at so many things, and reimaging it in such a way that permits individual teachers to spend more time doing what they are best at.”

“

— Rick Hess, Ed.M.’90, and Olivia Meeks, chapter 4, “Unbundling Schools and Schooling”

As the sheer volume of information increases, the portal associated with formal schooling begins to look increasingly restrictive and, in a world of direct access to information, increasingly dysfunctional. What qualifies as ‘official’ knowledge looks old-fashioned in an age when there are many possible portals for access to information and many possible ways to attach meaning to that information through the process of learning.”

“ “

— Lecturer Elizabeth City, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D.’07; Professor Richard Elmore, C.A.S.’72, Ed.D.’76; and Doug Lynch, chapter 6, “Redefining Education”

Consider a simple thought experiment. Suppose we could go back to square one and design the nation’s education system from the ground up, in a way that seemed most productive. Would we build an extreme, all-government system in which choice and competition are virtually absent? For most people who are actively involved in the nation’s reform movement, the answer is clearly no.”

— Terry Moe and Paul Hill, chapter 3, “Moving to a Mixed Model”

Let’s start with what these [high-achieving] jurisdictions do not do.

Several of the most significant features of recent education policy debate in the United States are simply not found in any of these countries — for example, charter schools, pathways into teaching that allow candidates with only several weeks of training to assume full responsibility for a classroom, teacher evaluation systems based on student test scores, and school accountability systems based on the premise that schools with low average test scores are failures, irrespective of the compositions of their student populations. Nor is choice or competition a main driver in any of these countries, though several have some degree of parent choice.”

— Professor Robert Schwartz, C.A.S.’68; Ben Levin, Ed.M.’75; and Adam Gamoran, chapter 1, “Learning From Abroad”

17

Everything changed with 9/11.

Up until that moment, I was a painter, an artist. Exhibiting my work across the country and working alone in the studio. I had made that choice, left educational research at Project Zero, and decided my calling was as an artist.

But after 9/11, everything shifted.

I wanted my pieces of art to be more than just passive objects. I needed to be on the front lines, with people, to change something at the core of our society. As the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, I knew I needed to help people see each other as individuals, as interdependent, not in stereotypical terms. I needed something simple.

The art form that is central to my work is drawing. I draw all the time. I always have a sketchbook tucked away in my bag or next to the driver’s seat so that I can draw even in the in-between moments of my life. I need to draw like I need to eat. And I know that there are others out there in schools, starving in classrooms across the country because their way in the world is through the tip of a pencil, through visual thinking, and they are not being taught how to nurture or develop what I call the “drawing mind.”

Drawing doesn’t happen in schools. If it happens at all, it is shunted to the side. I thought, How do I bring drawing into the heart of classroom learning — not as a way to develop artists, but as a thinking skill, as a language that could help students solve problems and enter different curricular material, be it a math problem or a science experiment or the journal of a historical figure? When students enter kindergarten, drawing is a natural language — stories, ideas, discoveries naturally erupt from the tip of a pencil. But quickly, students are required to learn and master writing, reading, and math. The drawing mind is shut down.

Walking into any classroom, I begin to uncover students’ and teachers’ drawing minds. For visual thinkers, it is a relief to draw in the classroom, to be asked to draw an experience instead of write about it. For the verbal/logistical learners, although perhaps uncomfortable at first using their drawing minds, they are stretched in new ways.

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• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

deborah putnoi, ed.m.’92

The Drawing Mind

For most people, the mere thought of drawing something — anything — sends a wave of panic. “But I can’t even draw a straight line.” As an artist, I always think, What artist cares about drawing a straight line? As an educator, I think, How can I fix this problem? How can I teach people to find, embrace, and explore their innate drawing abilities? Even students as young as first grade will sometimes look at me in panic when I say, “Draw a bumpy line.” They ask, “But where? How? Is this OK?” And I just say, “There are no mistakes.” In some ways, this assertion in the classroom that there are no mistakes when I come in and we draw together is the most important thing I say. Your line is your line — no one else’s.

— Deborah Putnoi, Ed.M.’92, recently published the book, The Drawing Mind: Silence Your Inner Critic and Release Your Inner Creative Spirit. She also creates interactive installations called Drawing Labs and just opened a community art space in Boston called Artheads Studio, where she more online teaches classes for children and adults.

v connect to www.thedrawingmind.com.

onmybookshelf

Professor Joe Blatt, Ed.M.’77 Currently reading: I always have at least three books underway, usually a novel, a work of history, and a wild card. Right now the lineup is Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, in translation (please don’t tell my high school French teacher); Christopher Grey, Decoding Organization (an analysis of Bletchley Park, where the British broke the WWII German codes); and Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (historical fiction, so it fits neatly in between).

Last great read: Let me sneak in two! Amy Waldman’s The Submission, a novel in which a Muslim American architect wins the commission for a 9/11 memorial, and Adam Goodheart’s 1861: The Civil War Awakening, a wonderfully dense, almost day-to-day portrait of America coming apart.

I am ashamed to admit, I have never read… anything about economics. I know it’s a vitally important subject, and lots of very smart people go into it, but I can’t muster the discipline.

How you find the time: I can’t wait in line, ride a bus, or eat a solitary meal without a serious book in hand.

— Marin Jorgensen Harvard Graduate School of Education

jill anderson

Favorite book from childhood: There are two books I must have checked out 25 times each — so much that the librarian insisted my parents buy them for me: Visibility Unlimited, the memoirs of a barnstorming stunt pilot, and Mathematics in Everyday Things, a motley collection of questions and answers about numbers, statistics, physics, and more. You’d be hard pressed to spot anything in my grown-up life that’s like stunt piloting, but the fun of pursuing random intriguing questions has clearly influenced my work as a documentary producer.

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D

Us Plus Them

A Reason to Read

Todd Pittinsky

Eileen Landay and Kurt Wootton

diversity has undoubtedly bred hatred, prejudice, discrimina-

I

tion, and violence in some people over the course of history,

shifts in the use of the English language within different cultures.

says Senior Lecturer Todd Pittinsky in his new book, Us Plus

In their latest book, A Reason to Read, Eileen Landay, Ed.D.’94,

Them. However, Pittinsky argues that this negativity is only one

and Kurt Wootton address what they call “new literacy,” outlining

side of the story. Whereas scholars, social scientists, policy-

a vision for classroom education that incorporates the full range

makers, and even the media often focus on difference being a

of “multiliteracies” — texts and other art forms. This, they write,

catalyst for hate and anger, Pittinsky points out that there is a

allows students to develop a range of skills and knowledge they can

positive dimension as well: It is merely a matter of shifting our

use to succeed.

iversity — is it a blessing or a curse? Linked with a long history of religious and ethnic intolerance, racial and social inequality, and severe national tensions,

mindset from “us-versus-them” to “us-plus-them.”

standing and communicating simple messages with printed text. Not only has the way people communicate changed due

to both new technologies and multimedia, but there have also been

The book represents a culminating work of the ArtsLiteracy

Over seven chapters, Pittinsky does this, moving away from

Project, a project that develops curricula and professional develop-

the negativity and focusing on “allophillia,” a term he coined

ment practices based on the premise that linking literacy and the

to refer to “the positive reaction to difference.” Allophillia,

arts creates powerful learning opportunities for students both in

an unaddressed topic in social science literature, he says,

core academic subjects and in the arts. Founded in 1998 in the

describes the phenomenon in which people come together

education department at Brown University, the primary curricular

in their differences and actually find them to be “interesting,

framework of the ArtsLiteracy Project is the “performance cycle,” a

comfortable, or admirable.” Tapping into a positive us-plus-

flexible guiding structure for integrating arts and literacy practices

them approach not only allows two groups to coexist, Pittinsky

across all disciplines. Over the course of eight chapters, A Reason

says, but it actually makes them happy that they are together.

to Read outlines each component of the performance cycle: build-

In order to harness the possibilities of allophillia, Pittinsky

ing community, entering text, comprehending text, creating text,

turns to leaders of all kinds and asks the question: “What

rehearsing and revising text, performing text, and reflection. Each

if ordinary leaders at all levels … considered it their job to

chapter first describes how a particular element of the cycle can be

nurture allophillia and build on it?” Using this as a jumping-

applied in an educational environment and then concludes by pre-

off point, the book moves to start this conversation, not only

senting key activities that can be used in the classroom to demon-

addressing the current lack of positive leadership, but also

strate the concept and engage students. For example, for building

presenting ideas for how leaders could make changes and

community, students may engage in group or partner activities that

encourage the positive dimensions of intergroup relations. For

allow them to share background information, abilities, and interests,

Pittinsky, it is not the differences between two groups that

whereas comprehending text may include theater simulations or

create divisions, but merely the inability to celebrate them

Socratic seminars.

and recognize the positive power they can hold. Thus, moving

For more than a decade, Landay and Wootton have worked with

forward is not about “seeing past differences,” but instead

the ArtsLiteracy Project to explore the intersection of arts and

it is about celebrating these differences and recognizing the

literacy development and the possibilities it holds for deeper educa-

fact that groups can benefit tremendously

tion. This book serves to bring those findings to the classroom, with

from having different backgrounds, skills, talents, opinions, and points of view.

20

n our modern world, literacy goes far beyond merely under-

Ed.

• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

more online

practical chapters that paint a picture for teachers and show how they can use art forms to inspire the student learning experience.

appian way

Harvard education press Character Compass Scott Seider, Ed.M.’04, Ed.M.’08; Foreword by Professor Howard Gardner; 2012

Dream College

By Kpakpundu Ezeze

A

pplying to college neither begins nor ends with the college application itself. Instead, the college admissions process is a complex procedure, with

many materials to prepare, options to consider, and deci-

sions to make. As a former guidance counselor and an independent college advisor, Kpakpundu Ezeze, Ed.D.’83, knows this process inside and out. In his latest book, Dream College, he synthesizes three decades of academic advising to present readers with an extensive guide for making college dreams a reality.

Divided into eight chapters, Dream College addresses three principal areas: planning for college, applying to college, and graduating from college. Each chapter both begins and ends with a brief passage from either a former student or parent, allowing readers to learn from the experiences, mistakes, and triumphs of others. From start to finish, the

Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline Rachel Currie-Rubin, Ed.M.’05, Ed.D.’12, and doctoral candidates Sofia Bahena; North Cooc, Ed.M.’07; Paul Kuttner, Ed.M.’09; and Monica Ng, Ed.M.’08; 2012 The Futures of School Reform Assistant Professor Jal Mehta; Professor Robert Schwartz, C.A.S.’68; and Frederick Hess, Ed.M.’90; 2012 Helping Educators Grow Eleanor Drago-Severson, Ed.M.’89, Ed.D.’96; 2012 Instructional Rounds in Action John Roberts, Ed.M.’03, Ed.D.’12; Foreword by Professor Richard Murnane; 2012 Making Civics Count Associate Professor Meira Levinson; Frederick Hess, Ed.M.’90; and David Campbell; 2012 A Research Reader in Universal Design for Learning Gabrielle Rappolt-Schlichtmann, Ed.M.’00, Ed.D.’07; Samantha Daley, Ed.M.’05, Ed.D.’10; and Lecturer Todd Rose, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’07; Foreword

by Professor Chris Dede; 2012 The Resegregation of Suburban Schools Erica Frankenberg, Ed.M.’02, Ed.D.’08, and Gary Orfield; 2012

book not only demystifies the application process — explaining common terminology, policies, and procedure — but it also works to empower both parents and students to manage their relationships with school counselors and admissions officers. In addition to general advice targeted toward parents and students of all backgrounds, the book also contains specific sections aimed at more particular groups, including athletes, students with disabilities, students of color, and first-generation college students.

Never intended to be read cover to cover, Dream College is meant as a reference book that can be turned to at various stages of the application process. Filled with writing tips, fully analyzed admissions essays, calendars, checklists, self-evaluation tools, and scholarship resources, the book provides students and parents with advice and information for every step of the way. Representing the ultimate roadmap for the college admissions process, Dream College is a userfriendly guide that details the entire path — from freshman year in high school to senior year in college. ­— Briefs written by Rachael Apfel

other books Desert Roots: Journey of an Iranian Immigrant Family Mitra Shavarini, Ed.D.’01; 2012 The Future of Batterer Programs: Reassessing EvidenceBased Practice Edward Gondolf, Ed.M.’76; 2012 Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes Dvora Yanow, Ed.M.’76, and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea; 2012 Keeping the Immigrant Bargain Associate Professor Vivian Louie; 2012 The Literacy Cookbook: A Practical Guide to Effective Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening Instruction Sarah Tantillo, Ed.M.’91; 2012 Success on the Tenure Track: Five Keys to Faculty Job Satisfaction COACHE Research Associate Cathy Ann Trower; 2012 Women Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and On the Job Elizabeth Fideler, Ed.M.’86, Ed.D.’88; 2012 Harvard Graduate School of Education

21

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• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

T

he need to reform U.S. mathematics instruction dates back to the early 19th century, when cutting-edge educators railed against rote instruction and called for new teaching methods so students could better understand meaning in the complex system of quantitative reasoning.

Associate Professor Jon Star, E.d.M’93, says those calls for reform have surfaced each generation since, with the latest iteration in the Common Core State Standards — one that focuses on more in-depth study of fewer topics in a coherent national framework. Student understanding these days comes through knowledge of mathematical operations as well as the development of problem-solving strategies that get discussed in class and explained on tests.

“Each successive generation makes that claim, and everyone is after meaning,” says Star. “We’re getting better at articulating what we mean by meaning.”

Today, math educators have a full plate. Adoption of the Common Core Standards last fall has shifted the curricula across the nation to hone aptitudes in critical thinking and problem solving. Stiff high school graduation requirements have expanded math offerings and pressured educators to find ways to teach increasingly complex math concepts to a broader range of students. New teacher evaluation systems, meanwhile, judge educators on their students’ performance on statewide standardized tests, or the pre- and post-assessments they’ve devised to determine how much their students have learned that year in their classrooms.

“There’s so much going on, from the outside and on the local level,” said David Fleishman, Ed.M.’93, superintendent of schools in Newton, Mass. “We have new, rich problems developed for the Common Core and the new evaluation system, and the pressure on math teachers is significant, even if they are all good.”

J

ennifer Walsh, Ed.M.’03, who chairs the math department at Sleepy Hollow High School in New York City’s northern suburbs, had these issues on her mind one morning in early September during her first-period Fundamentals of Algebra class. It was designed for ninth-graders who had struggled through their eighthgrade math classes and were deemed at risk of failing the statewide math Regents exam, which is among the tests that must be passed to earn a high school diploma. Walsh’s Fundamentals course stretches over two years, instead of

24

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• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

one, to give her students enough time to master concepts that, she reminded her students, date back to 1800 B.C. That day, Walsh taught them about the order of operations, the rules that govern the order in which different calculations are made in a complex problem, such as 28/4 – 2(8–7) + 5(3). (See page 26 for answer.) It was a fast-moving class, with students proceeding at different paces.

Walsh needed the students to learn the nitty-gritty rules that govern how you solve such problems. But she also wanted them to talk freely about their mathematical reasoning, engaging them in lively discussions, and encouraging them to speak with each other to figure out how best to proceed.

To learn the right progression, Walsh suggested they use the acronym PEDMAS, which lays out the proper order: parenthesis first, then exponents, division, multiplication, addition, and, finally, subtraction. She warned, however, that the acronym wasn’t failsafe because when it came to multiplication and division, you had to carry out the function that came first in the problem.

“Math teaches you how to think, and that number sense is really crucial in daily life,” says Walsh, who that day also administered the course’s pre-assessment, the results of which will create a baseline for students, so the district can measure what she’s taught by year’s end. “It teaches you how to solve puzzles and figure things out. You might struggle, but when you start with a problem and figure out how to solve it, you feel good.”

The accountability movement and the standards movement have both placed math instruction near the top of the 21st century reform agenda, with math concepts now taught as early as preschool. No Child Left Behind has students tested statewide in math in grades three through eight. In many states, they must pass four years of high school math and an exit exam to graduate.

Recently, President Obama joined the math bandwagon. In July 2012, Obama proposed creating an elite corps of master teachers in a $1 billion program to reward teachers in the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and math. Teachers selected for the program, who commit to one of these fields for several years, would be eligible for a $20,000 annual stipend. The administration kicked off the program by making $100 million available immediately.

The development of online learning has added to the mix. Khan Academy in California has created thousands of 10-minute videos on math topics, tied to grade-level expectations, which have proved useful for both teachers and educators around the world.

“The flipped classroom is the way to make it happen,” says current Ed.L.D. student Karl Wendt, referring to in-

struction done online and homework done in the classroom.

Wendt is working at Khan’s campus in Mountain View, Calif., for his one-year residency. “It lets students at multiple levels get access to the content.”

Math and English stand at the center of the Common Core Standards, the set of policies developed by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the business group Achieve (run by Professor Robert Schwartz, C.A.S.’68, for five years), which has been adopted by 46 states and is expected to be reflected in the curricula of all states by 2015. It’s part of a drive to make all students “career and college-ready.”

Civil rights leader Bob Moses has called math literacy the key to 21st-century citizenship in our technology-based society. Math literacy is seen as the foundation for many 21st-century careers in the STEM fields. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment in STEM occupations will grow by 10 percent to 3.5 million in 2020.

“I truly believe that math is the path to power,” says Leba Heigham, Ed.M.’95, assistant principal of the Linden S.T.E.A.M. Academy, a K–8 school in Malden, Mass.,

and a former math coach. “Just look at the opportunities for students with a strong math background — computer software, financial applications, there are lots of burgeoning fields. The skills embedded in math instruction will be the 21st-century skills: They teach habits of mind, so you can use logic to build arguments.”

Mary Maxwell West, Ed.M.’74, Ed.D.’81, a senior research associate at the Program Evaluation and Research Group at Lesley University, says studies have established a connection between math mastery and college success.

A 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Education, for example, found that success in high school algebra, and algebra II in particular, was highly correlated with college attendance and graduation. The National Science Board in 2004 found that completion of rigorous math courses in high school was a predictor of college success, across race, ethnic, and socio-economic lines.

However, she says a 2004 study by Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters at Johns Hopkins University also found that many ninth-graders who fail algebra and are held back from entering tenth grade end up dropping out.

Something to Watch

In early 2010, Kentucky was the first state to adopt Common Core Standards in both math and reading. This past November, the state released its first-round test results. There were four levels of scores: novice, apprentice, proficient, and distinguished.

As the charts below show, proficient scores — the minimum level educators generally want every child to reach — dropped in math and reading at the elementary, middle, and high school grades. With only one state posting results, it’s probably too early to analyze what these results mean, not only for Kentucky, but for students in other states, as well. What do you think?

middle School

% proficient or better

76.0

73.0 48.0

High School

% proficient or better

70.0

40.4

2010–11 2011–12

2010–11 2011–12

Reading

MATH

% proficient or better

65.0

65.0 46.8

2010–11 2011–12

Reading

52.2 40.6

2010–11 2011–12

MATH

2010–11 2011–12

Reading

46.0

40.0

2010–11 2011–12

MATH

Harvard Graduate School of Education

E ducation Week , Kentucky Department of Education

Elementary School

25

Andrew Hacker, a professor of sociology at Queens College, in July 2012 published a provocative essay in The New York Times Sunday review section, questioning why all students need to attain such high levels of mathematics mastery to graduate from high school.

Hacker makes his claim in New York, where the state Board of Regents did its part to raise the bar in math by mandating a score of 65 to pass on the integrated algebra Regents exam required of students. But in a nod to just how hard it is to master algebra, the state put a curve on the test results so that students in 2012 had to answer just 30 percent of the answers correct to earn their 65, according to the state Education Department spokesman Jonathan Berman.

“Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not,” Hacker wrote. “But there is no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves. So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions?”

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But Star says cutting out rigorous math could consign many students to dead-end jobs in our increasingly quantitative world.

“It’s clear that not every student will need to know algebra in his or her future jobs,” he says. “But if you want kids to have an equal shot at getting those jobs, you need the algebra foundation. And people are solving for X more than they think.”

As states raise the bar on math, students are learning more complex subjects, earlier on in their educational lives.

This trend has presented particular problems for some elementary school teachers, whose pedagogy has typically centered around literacy.

S.T.E.A.M. Academy’s Heigham says some of these elementary-school generalists are stymied by all the changes. Her school is in the first year of a state innovation grant to focus instruction on five areas: science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.

“It used to be that instruction focused on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division,” says Heigham,

who has also served as a math coach and school principal. “Now there’s more geometry, patterning, and pre-algebraic skills” — in elementary school.

There’s more math, more often.

In the early 1980s, 25 percent of high schoolers didn’t take algebra, and students could earn a high school diploma after completing just two years of math. Today, 34 percent of eighthgraders take algebra classes, up from 11 percent in 1986, according to a recent report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

“If you have a penchant for math, you should be able to keep advancing, just like in music classes,” says Linnea O’Brien, Ed.M.’92, who teaches math at Kamiak High School in Mukilteo, Wash. “You just keep making it happen for those students.”

However, she acknowledges that managing a class of students of varying abilities presents huge challenges, especially when she faces classes of 32 to 34 students each day. She has solved that problem by encouraging students to help one another by developing what she calls a “culture of math chat,” in which students help each other to solve that day’s problems, with O’Brien moving around the classroom to help those with special issues.

“I give a new concept every day, teach them a new layer, give them a little warm-up, and they start buzzing,” she says. “They are engaging, thinking, talking, and putting their pencils to paper. I’m a catalyst as I walk around the room, but they are also catalysts to each other.”

Math didn’t reach the pinnacle of the U.S. education hierarchy until the late 1950s, following the flurry of action in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite. Star says that in colonial America, math wasn’t taught until students matriculated at college. Math was used by tradesmen, but not by the wealthy elite. By the early 1830s, he says, math reformers were making one of their first stands, arguing that educators needed to move away from rote learning, so they could better understand the meaning of math.

Wendt, Precisely

Doctoral student Karl Wendt, an industrial designer earlier in his career, says that mathematics is the foundation for how things work in the world. So when he gets his students involved in applied learning projects, they put to use the mathematical concepts they’ve learned in the classroom and gain a deeper appreciation for the discipline.

“With math, you can get precise,” says Wendt, who taught applied physics and engineering at High Tech High, a charter school in San Diego, Calif., before joining the Ed.L.D. Program. “Math allows you to be reliable and predictable.

It lets you know exactly what material your ‘bot’ should be made of. And if you produce tight specs and know what it can handle mathematically, you can optimize your product.”

Wendt is currently spending his third-year residency of the Ed.L.D. Program at Khan Academy, located in California’s Silicon Valley, where Harvard Business School graduate Sal Khan founded a nonprofit educational company to teach myriad subjects through mini-lectures that get posted online.

The academy grew out of Khan’s personal online tutorials on math that he’d created for his cousin and posted on YouTube. Khan Academy now has more than 3,000 online videos in subjects that range from math and biology to cosmology and microeconomics.

Last summer, Wendt taught weeklong workshops for middle school students that focused on the inner workings of consumer products, such as a DVD player, alarm clock, and hair dryer. He had students take apart the devices and then create new products out of the pieces. The classroom sessions gave the Khan Academy staff a chance to see students at work, so they could tweak the video presentations that have an international audience.

Wendt says that the hands-on experience creates mathematical problems that the students need to solve. One newly created product needed three different voltages for three different components. An audio chip ran on a circuit that needed 9 volts, the micro-controller ran on 5 volts, and the motors ran on 12 volts.

Students also need to understand how the circuits are laid out, which Wendt says is based on mathematical principals.

“The components in the project are all things that require math to work well together,” says Wendt. “With the device’s wheels, you need to calculate the coefficient of friction and figure out what materials increase or decrease that friction. Add more weight to the materials, and you have to make trade-offs. Students get invested more in these projects. They are creative, and online they learn.”

Harvard Graduate School of Education

27

Teachers Need Help, Too Professor Heather Hill sees much commonality among teachers teaching math and those instructing students in other disciplines. They have to manage their students, deal with the flow of classroom life, and engage students in discussion about the topic at hand.

But math is also a discipline with very specific practices needed to develop an aptitude for quantitative reasoning.

Over the past decade, Hill has developed an assessment tool called the Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI), which has shown promise in evaluating teaching performance and creating pathways for improvement.

Hill, who began developing the evaluation tool a decade ago while teaching at the University of Michigan, has continued to refine it at the Ed School. She’s currently conducting a study sponsored by the National Science Foundation that’s giving teachers in grades four and five in a suburban Boston school the tools to conduct self-evaluations through online videos that model effective math instruction.

“It’s a way to provide feedback on math teaching in ways that make sense,” says Hill, a political scientist by training.

“And now we are training teachers to rate their own instruction, and through that lens, teachers say it has changed the way they teach.”

Hill says the quality of math instruction varies widely, especially in elementary schools, where generalists typically teach all subjects, up through fourth or fifth grade.

“In elementary school we often find that the teachers aren’t teaching math,” says Hill. “They might have their students coloring or be involved in the logistics of the class, but there is very little math going on. I was just in a fourth-grade math class where there wasn’t any mathematical content for 20 minutes. Students were asked to write about what excited them about first-grade math.”

To rate a teacher, two MQI observers independently rate classroom segments on five elements and provide an overall score on the lesson. The five elements of mathematical pedagogy are: 1. how teachers work with students, 2. student participation in meaning-making and reasoning, 3. the richness of the mathematical material, 4. what errors or imprecision are conveyed by the teacher, and 5. how classroom work is connected to mathematics.

The material’s richness is shown through the attention that a teacher gives to the meaning of math facts and

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how a teacher engages students by using math practices and the language of math. To judge whether teachers are making meaning of the math, observers look at how teachers explain math ideas and draw connections among different mathematical concepts, such as fractions and ratios. Mathematical practices include such concepts as the presence of multiple solutions to a problem, and the use of specific problems to develop broader generalizations.

MQI focuses on whether teachers understand what their students are saying about math. Teachers get rated on how they respond to student errors.

“When they hear a kid talking and then see that the kid is wrong, the teacher needs to ask a series of questions to understand why they are wrong,” Hill says. “They need to get familiar with their kids, know how they talk about math, and help them find strategies to get them out of their misconception.”

One common misconception happens as children learn multiplication, Hill says. At first, they come to understand that multiplying numbers results in larger numbers. But then they multiply fractions, and suddenly the numbers get smaller.

“Teachers need to draw them into a space where they can get this understanding,” she says. “They need to understand that multiplying doesn’t always make numbers larger.”

Raters also look for major errors, which can reveal a lack of math knowledge by the teacher, imprecise language and notation, or a lack of clarity in the presentation of tasks the teacher wants students to perform.

In another recent observation, the teacher had taught the students that 0.5 percent equals one-half (not what it really equals: one-half of one percent).

“That’s what the teacher said,” says Hill. “That’s very common.”

Student engagement with mathematical content provides insight into whether a teacher’s lessons are getting through. Raters discern whether students provide mathematical explanations, either spontaneously or at their teacher’s urging. They also look at the cognitive requirements needed to carry out a certain mathematical task — finding patterns, drawing conclusions, or explaining how they got their answers.

“Our assessment tool gives teachers specific ideas about how to improve,” she says. “It helps them develop a better understanding of best practices.”

Such calls to move from rote learning to meaning have cropped up regularly ever since. That tension between drilling to understand math concepts and reasoning to understand what math means continues a century later.

The New Math movement from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, says Star, created new ways to think about teaching and learning math. Educators looked at big ideas and provided young students with exposure to important math concepts at an early age, devising experimental curricula that had kindergartners learning about sets, an abstract concept now taught much later.

“The idea was that even young children would have access to important mathematical concepts and jump right in,” he says. “But New Math met its demise in the late 1960s because the elementary school teachers had trouble teaching it. It wasn’t the way they had learned math. There was a perception that it was hard to teach, and then-President Richard Nixon pulled the plug on federal funding.”

The backlash to New Math brought a return to backto-basics, which held sway until 1989, with the publication of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which identified process standards that addressed not just what students should learn but also showed what good teaching looked like when math was taught properly. These standards, which stressed reasoning and communication, were in ascendency until the early 2000s, when states developed standards that were assessed through No Child Left Behind.

The Common Core Standards, which are now being phased in across the nation, aim to sharpen the focus of math instruction and bring more coherence to the practice. They come in response to criticism of U.S. math instruction as being far too broad without the kind of indepth instruction practiced in national school systems in Europe and Asia, where students often outperform their U.S. counterparts on tests like the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. The study has been carried out every four years since 1995 by a sampling of more than 400,000 students from 59 nations in grades four and eight. In 2007, the United States placed ninth in grade-

eight math, behind students in Asian and European nations. The 2011 test results were released in December.

For eighth-grade math, there was no significant difference in the score between 2007 (508) and 2011 (509).

Star says the Common Core will bring a greater coherence to the topics across states, on a national scale.

“Everyone will be doing the same thing,” he says.

“Critics had called our math programs fuzzy and illdefined. Now it’s scaled back, and the idea is that we will do a smaller set of things, really well.” The statewide standards, and now the Common Core, with its national scope and rigor, will, some say, bring more uniformity to the mixture of instruction that for so long characterized U.S. math pedagogy.

Of course, not everyone thinks this is all positive. Alice Capson, M.A.T.’72, of Overland Park, Kan., who retired from teaching in 2010 after 28 years in the classroom, recalls her first years, with teachers like herself having independence in her classroom, in which she covered a course’s topics at her pace and in the order she saw fit.

Almost three decades later, during her last years in the classroom, math instruction had become a team effort, with her school’s math instructors meeting often to discuss topics, sharing lesson plans, and developing common assessments to make sure everyone was on the same page.

“Everybody had to do the same thing, every class, from August through March,” she recalls. “We all had the same special quizzes. It was nice working together, but it kind of stifled creativity.”

Looming at year’s end was the state of Kansas’ annual assessment, which her students needed to pass. So every day, between 15 and 50 percent of her class time was spent having students do problems from old statewide tests and then going over the individual questions.

“We had to pay more attention to the slower kids; we couldn’t write them off,” she said. “I worked with them to show them that math was something they could do and get satisfaction from it. They’d come in prepared to work and with a positive attitude. And they’d realize they could do it.”

— David McKay Wilson’s last piece in Ed. focused on the use of data in education. Ed.

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Kathleen dooher

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Holding

Court Ed School graduate Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M.’69, talks about her early activism and life away from the bench.

By Lory Hough

W

hen you write a court decision that profoundly changes history,

it’s the first thing people ask about. It becomes the lead to nearly every profile of your life. But Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M.’69, wrote a decade ago in 2003, making Massachusetts the first state in the country to recognize gay marriage, is only one part of Marshall’s story. The rest of that story, the part that really started her belief — legal or otherwise — that no one should be treated as a second-class citizen, goes back much further, to a place that she once called home: Delaware.

The year was 1962, and Marshall was spending a year in Wilmington, Del., attending the Tatnall School as a high school exchange student. It’s here, she says, that her eyes were fully opened to what was going on in her own country, South Africa.

“You have to remember that my experience in South Africa was confined to my small village,” she says, referring to Newcastle, located on the eastern side of the country, where she grew up with a brother, a sister, and caring, but nonpolitical parents. She loved where she grew up, but it was sheltered and as a child she sometimes wondered about what she saw and heard.

Why, for example, did white South Africans change the unique African names of their servants to names like Jane or Mary? At church, why wasn’t everyone allowed to sit where they wanted?

“I was raised as an Anglican [Episcopalian]. It never made sense to me that black people had to sit in the back of the church,” she says. “It was not just Africans — it was Indians and other people of color. I was told it was because you couldn’t possibly have a white person drink from the communion cup after a black person: whites always came first. If you’re a child, you accept that as an explanation, but it still didn’t make sense to me.”

The questions were starting, but it wasn’t until she was in Delaware that she saw the full picture of what was going on in South Africa. In Delaware, she watched television for the first time and read books that were banned in South Africa, such as Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. In the process, she learned about her own country’s long struggle for freedom. As she told a Radcliffe audience in 2012, “the social arrangement of apartheid, the lens through which I had been taught to view all social relations, revealed itself as a distorting prism of terror and fear.”

While in Delaware, Marshall also watched major social changes unfolding in the United States. A Catholic was in the White House. Fair housing policies and the Cuban missile crisis were being debated. The University of Mississippi admitted its first black student, James Meredith. Student protests on college campuses were increasing.

Marshall couldn’t get enough.

“There was something about this country and its freedom that captivated me, just captivated me,” she says. “In Delaware,

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watching the civil rights movement gave me an understanding that one can question the social order, one can fight for what you believe in.”

It was also during this time that she saw the power of the courts. “I developed an incredible respect for democratic institutions, particularly the role that courts play in a democracy,” she told The Boston Globe in a 1991 interview. “No one in South Africa thought about going to the courts as a means of addressing an injustice. It just wasn’t done. Yet, in this country, there is this incredible respect for the institution as a place to resolve disputes. People would walk away accepting the decision.”

By the time Marshall went back to South Africa to enroll at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where Nelson Mandela briefly studied, she was wearing, as she has said in many interviews, “a new pair of glasses.” The blinders were off, and there was no putting them back on.

At Wits, as the university was known, Marshall joined the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS).

The organization, once centered on student-focused issues like helping to negotiate better prices at the bookstore, had moved to advocating on a national scale for racial equality.

“It was only in the 1960s that we became more deeply active in politics,” Marshall says. “That’s not a surprise — that was when the real boot of apartheid started crushing real opposition in the country. Leaders from the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan African Congress, the Communist Party, and other groups were all banned or their leaders arrested.” Mandela’s life imprisonment sentence was handed down a year into her studies.

It was during this time that the United States again touched Marshall in a profound way. In 1966, her senior year, NUSAS invited Martin Luther King Jr. and then Senator Robert Kennedy to South Africa to address students. The South African government denied King’s visa. Kennedy, the brother of the assassinated American president, was given a visa, but no security was provided for him during his five-day visit, Marshall remembers, and only Kennedy’s wife and two aides could join him. Visas for dozens of foreign reporters who had planned to cover the tour were denied; a U.S. News & World Report correspondent who was able to get to Johannesburg had to fly out of South Africa to file his story. Because of the invitation extended to Kennedy, Ian Robertson, Marshall’s colleague and the president of NUSAS, was confined to his apartment and unable to enter any university under the draconian so-called Suppression of Communism Act. Marshall, then serving as a NUSAS vice president, later took over the presidency after another student, John Daniel, completed Robertson’s term. As she said during a forum at the Kennedy Library in 2011, as nervous as she was to take on this key role, she later understood that “if you step out onto that high wire, and you somehow keep your balance, it provides such wonderful opportunity.” During Kennedy’s visit, she was one of the NUSAS delegation to meet him at the airport and travel with him around the country. She was there when Kennedy delivered his famous “ripple of hope” speech at the University of

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1. Listening to Robert Kennedy in Cape Town (1966) 2. Taking the oath as associate justice of the state Supreme Judicial Court, with Gov. William Weld (1996) 3. Meeting with Nelson Mandela for the first time (1990)

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4. Taking in a game at Fenway Park with husband, Tony photos courtesy of margaret H. marshall

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Cape Town, and greeted crowds of people of every color who flocked to see him as he traveled the country. As the influential Johannesburg-based Rand Daily News wrote at the time, “It is as if a window has been flung open and a gust of fresh air has swept in.” For Marshall, Kennedy’s words that evening, including the “ripple of hope” quotation later carved on his memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, made a huge impact.

“It was such an inspiring message; 1966, when he came to South Africa, was one of the worst times in our country,” she says. “There had been many difficult times, of course, but at that time, newspapers were being banned, hundreds of people were being arrested, faculty members had been fired and were being banished from campus.

“And so his message was extraordinarily important. It was, first, that the values that we were espousing were not Communist ideas, as the government said; we were not being controlled by Russia. These were deep, human values that were worthy of respect. We felt so alone at the time. So to have a United States senator, the brother of the president, come and speak to us in such plain, yet inspiring language was critical. He told us that any one person can make a difference; you don’t have to be the leader of a gigantic political movement to make a difference.

That was a very important message because we felt that what we were doing was so insignificant. It’s a message I now try to pass on to younger generations: You can make a difference.”

A year later, Marshall’s own message was loud and clear when she attended the funeral of Albert Luthuli, a former president-general of the outlawed ANC and winner of the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize, who had been banished by the South African government to a remote area of the country. She went, knowing that she would be one of the few whites attending.

“I remember it as if it were yesterday,” she said in an interview on Greater Boston with Emily Rooney. “The church was completely surrounded by security police. At first, when I arrived, there was almost nobody there. I thought, ‘This is terrible that this great man, one of Africa’s greatest leaders, would have a funeral attended by so few people.’ That taught me a big lesson.

People started coming, of course. But the only way you could get to the church in this remote area, if you weren’t white, was to walk.” Later, she also learned that many mourners — they would number in the thousands by the late afternoon — had first gone to his house to pay their respects. “It was an enormous tribute to Luthuli that so many people had come from so far.”

One memory from that day particularly stands out, Marshall says: Six pallbearers wearing the very recognizable uniform of the ANC brought in Luthuli’s coffin, draped in the ANC flag.

She was there with Steven Biko, another student activist who was later killed in police custody. “He turned to me — and I remember this, too, as if it were yesterday — and he said, ‘Margie, you see, the African National Congress is not dead.’”

Danger surrounded Marshall. Her activism was worrisome for her parents. She also worried about her safety.

“Other student leaders had been arrested,” she acknowledges. “But I had three things going for me. One, my race. Two, the fact that my parents were not political: the police could

not say, ‘She’s the daughter of a political activist.’ And three, my gender — a very important protective shield, ironically.”

Nearly all of the student activists at the time were men. (A few years later, the next female president of NUSAS would, in fact, get arrested. As Marshall jokes, “It takes a while for totalitarian governments to figure out who these uppity women are.

They finally figured it out.”)

Still, Marshall took precautions.

“When I traveled from town to town, I had an arrangement to call someone when I left and when I arrived at my destination,” she says, “so that if I disappeared someone would know immediately. My telephones were tapped. My letters were read. My parents weren’t opposed to my views, but they were opposed to my activities. It was so unusual for a woman to be involved in politics.”

The experience shaped who she would become. As Albie Sachs, a former South African activist who defended people charged under apartheid’s repressive laws, told Legal Affairs magazine in 2004, “The ex-NUSAS types are determined, mature, resolute,” he said. “The NUSAS experience toughened one up.

It wasn’t a lovely walk in the student park.”

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y the time

Marshall arrived

in Cambridge with a scholarship to study at Harvard, she says she was feeling “shell-shocked,” and started having nightmares about her experiences. She was also feeling uncertain about her future. The reason she came to Harvard — to get her Ph.D. in art history, a passion she discovered as a high school student in Delaware — no longer made sense.

“Art history seemed so far removed from what I had been living,” she says. She also realized that she was “an intellectual, not a scholar,” and that when you start a doctoral program at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, you have to finetune your studies. “You don’t just study art. You study art from a certain period and within that period a certain narrow focus on something really, really specific.”

She decided to transfer to the Ed School. It turned out to be exactly what she needed.

“It was the most restorative place I could be,” she says, a place to find her equilibrium. “I loved my time there. The school was in a period of great transformation, too. Unlike some parts of Harvard, the Ed School was reaching out to recruit minority students. It was also one of the most vibrant, active places on campus. Ted Sizer was a wonderful presence,” she says, referring to the school’s progressive, 30-something dean who favored bottom-up reform and deep learning. “It was a very turbulent time for college campuses, but at the same time, the Ed School was such an intellectually challenging place.”

She remembers inspiring lectures by famed educators, activists, and writers such as Robert Cole, Marian Wright Edelman, Jonathan Kozol, and Paulo Freire, who she says “had such an impact on my life” when he taught for a year in 1969. “In explicating his pedagogical theories, Paulo helped me to understand with clarity how education can be both liberating and oppressing.”

While she was a student, Marshall became active in the U.S.based anti-apartheid movement, demanding that universities and churches divest their holdings in companies doing business in apartheid South Africa and demanding that banks extend loans to the South African government. She knew her outspokenness meant going back to South Africa would likely land her in jail. So she stayed, traveling across the United States, speaking against apartheid, and talking about women’s rights and the Vietnam War. After seeing so many parts of the country beyond Cambridge, Marshall felt more certain about her future, and it meant something big: She would stay in the United States.

In 1973, she enrolled at Yale Law School. (It was the same year she met New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis at a party.

She and Lewis would marry in 1984.) Career-wise, she wasn’t sure about law, but she says, “I had never thought about having a career. Girls, women, didn’t have careers [in South Africa].”

It turned out to be the right decision. “The day I stepped into law school, I loved it. I just loved it,” she says. Initially she considered going into criminal law, defending those accused of crimes; it was all she knew about the practice of law. “Looking back, most of what I knew about law and the practice of law, I had gleaned from the Perry Mason show,” she joked in a Q&A with the Yale Undergraduate Law Review in 2012. She spent a summer working for a criminal defense attorney in Boston and decided that it wasn’t for her. From this experience, she learned an important lesson: “Keep moving. You will know when you have found the right place in which to work as a professional.”

For Marshall, that place included working at two Boston firms: Csaplar & Bok and Choate Hall & Stewart, focusing on civil litigation. She served as president of the Boston Bar Association, the oldest bar association in the United States, and as vice president and general counsel for Harvard in the early- to mid-1990s — the first woman to hold the job.

And then came the position that would, in some ways, make her a household name. In 1996, Massachusetts Governor William Weld needed to appoint an associate justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the highest court in the commonwealth. Marshall’s name was on the short list, but there was initial pushback: It wasn’t her turn. She wasn’t a minority, and no African American had served on the court. Marshall says she understood and respected the opposition and never took it personally. Weld appointed her despite the criticism. Three years later, his successor, Paul Cellucci, named her chief justice — the first woman to hold the position in the court’s more-than-300year history.

Marshall would go on to write more than 300 opinions, but it is Goodridge that has become her legacy. When asked by reporters about the case, especially as it threads back to her South Africa experience, Marshall doesn’t offer up as much as they often want. She insists the decision was based on the Massachusetts Constitution, not on a personal cause. She looked at facts, at precedent. As Legal Affairs wrote a couple of months after the Goodridge decision, “one of the strange things about judges is that even when they issue decisions that move the earth, they typically decline to explain how they arrived at

their conclusions, thinking their written opinions should speak for themselves.”

When asked about the effect the decision has had personally on people, Marshall again deflects.

“I would never presume to say that I had that effect on someone else,” she says. “I know that every case that I decided may have had a profound effect on a person or more than one, beginning with the litigants. In that respect, Goodridge is no different than the approximately 300 other cases in which I wrote an opinion, and many hundreds more in which I participated.”

Still, she’s happy to receive wedding programs sent to her by friends that include passages from Goodridge.

“It’s amazing that it’s not just Massachusetts; it’s everywhere,” she said on Greater Boston last year. “I know this will sound arrogant, but I think the wedding program I enjoyed the most is the one that listed the readings for the ceremony.” It included Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and her Goodridge opinion. “That’s fairly good company.”

Now retired from the court, the company Marshall keeps includes the young lawyers she mentors at Choate and the students she teaches at Harvard Law, both part time. There’s travel, including back to South Africa for her 50th high school reunion and to her longtime house on Martha’s Vineyard. And most importantly, there is more time with her husband, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few years ago. The couple is even able to continue a tradition they started after they married.

“We eat by candlelight every night that we have dinner together,” she says. “The lights go down, and the candles get lit. For families to find time to be quiet together is such an important part of staying connected. We have trouble just ‘being,’ but there’s real value to downtime. I don’t even want background music.”

For Marshall, being away from full-time work also means more time for sleep.

“Like many immigrants, I feel as if I’ve been working 80 hours a week since I came to the United States,” she jokes. She says people ask her all the time what’s changed the most in her life since she retired. She laughs. “One, I’m not awakened every morning by an alarm clock, and two, I don’t fall asleep during every concert.”

Does that mean Marshall was — maybe still is — a workaholic? Here she gets animated, moving from the back of the deep couch to the edge, leaning as she talks.

“I tell young people: Don’t do something you don’t love because if you love your work, you will always have the energy to do it, however demanding the hours,” she says. “At the Ed School, I had a chance to feel myself into what I could become.

I worry that young people no longer have the chance to really explore many options, as I did. I didn’t have to ask my parents to take a second mortgage on their home in order for me to go to college. Tuition at Yale Law at the time I was a student was so low that I left with only small loans.” Now, she says, college is so expensive. “The pressure on young people to take courses that will lead to a particular profession is enormous. I wish everybody could have the kind of education I received at the Ed School.” Ed. Harvard Graduate School of Education

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erin hayba

A refugee sits in a makeshift, outdoor school in the Ifo camp in Dadaab, Kenya.

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What happens to learning when a hurricane devastates your city or a civil war tears apart your country?

Conflicts interest Imagine a school in a refugee camp in one of the most desolate locations on earth. It has no roof, walls, desks; no chalkboards or books. There is just one teacher, but she is not paid, and she stands in front of 100 students who are traumatized, sick, and hungry. She herself barely finished primary school. She has no teaching materials. Many of her students are too distressed to learn, or they find school pointless when they’re worried about survival. Girls, especially, may face fierce opposition from their families or find school too frightening to attend.

By elaine mcARdle

F

Students in Ezo in South Sudan continue to study at a damaged school.

or Catie Corbin, Ed.M.’10, schools like this are an everyday experience.

Over the past five years, as an expert in “education in emergencies,” Corbin has visited schools in conflict zones from northern Uganda to Sudan, from Pakistan to Libya, trying to improve the educational experience for those in the direst of circumstances. Currently, in her work with an NGO called Creative Associates, she is in South Sudan, where decades of war and neglect by the former government means tens of thousands of school-aged children are on the brink of becoming a lost generation. And the immediate trouble isn’t even over.

“The border areas continue to be bombed,” Corbin explains, “which displaces our target beneficiaries again and moves them south into overcrowded city schools where there are already limited resources. Teacher-student ratios are as high as 300:1 in these areas. They have no textbooks, and they don’t even speak the same language.”

From refugee camps in Africa to abandoned schools in postKatrina New Orleans, the problems of educating children in post-conflict and post-disaster zones are daunting and urgent: school buildings damaged by disaster or commandeered as shelters, or no place for schoolrooms at all. No electricity, books, materials. No teachers, few teachers, undertrained teachers, teachers themselves traumatized by conflict or disaster. Children too emotionally damaged or terrified to learn.

Ongoing issues of physical safety, including unsafe buildings or routes to school that put teachers and children, particularly girls, in harm’s way.

Unfortunately, these situations aren’t unusual at all. Of the 75 million children worldwide who are out of school, more than half are living in situations of conflict and millions more live in areas affected by natural disasters, according to Faryal Khan, Ed.D.’05, who leads the education program for the Gulf states and Yemen for the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) located in

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Doha, Qatar. These situations are broadly termed as “education in emergencies,” a wide umbrella that refers to education for populations affected by wars, disease, displacement, natural disasters, and other catastrophic events.

Over the past decade or so, the prevalence of emergencyeducation scenarios — and the incredible challenges they present — has led to a new focus and commitment by the international community. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights posits education as a fundamental human right essential for the exercise of all other rights, and today, education is no longer seen (at least by major humanitarian organizations and most governments) as a secondary consideration in stabilizing populations after disaster, but a basic emergency service.

“Just like water, food, medicine, clothing, and shelter are lifesaving, we feel education is also lifesaving,” says Ann Horwitz, Ed.M.’09, who worked for UNESCO headquarters in Paris in the Education in Post-Conflict and Post-Disaster Situations section, along with Jane Kalista, Ed.M.’08, and Vimonmas (Pam) Vachatimanont, Ed.M.’09. “So, in addition to meeting those classic humanitarian needs, we were trying to create a space where people made sure education did not fall by the wayside.”

This new focus has been brewing since the 1990s. About 10 years ago, the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) was established. In 2004, INEE issued an influential set of guidelines, Minimum Standards for Education in Emergencies.

“Since then, there has been a recognition of education as part of core humanitarian work in emergencies,” says Vidur Chopra, a current doctoral student who is doing related research. With the standards in place, the work turns to advocacy.

Last year, a UNESCO annual report laid out the extent of the problem and emphasized the critical role that education plays in re-establishing order and normalcy in disaster zones.

And, last September, the UN secretary general announced the Education First Initiative, an unprecedented effort to get all children into school, including those in emergency situations.

An Afghan student sifts through books following a bombing at a school in Behsud, Nangarhar province.

An abandoned school after Hurricane Katrina.

revor Snapp/Corbis / APImages

ted jackson

“There’s a lot of high-powered energy behind this movement,” says Assistant Professor Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Ed.D.’09.

There is also rapidly growing interest among educators.

Many Ed School graduates are specializing in this niche and immersing themselves in the often dangerous but essential fieldwork that informs their research. Demand is so high among Ed School students that this spring, Dryden-Peterson started teaching a course on education in situations of armed conflict.

“There’s a pretty strong drive now in international development for disaster-preparedness education, and for helping administrators and teachers and students understand how to be prepared for risks,” says Horowitz, who is working on a related Ph.D. With UN agencies and other heavy hitters throwing their heft behind the issue, there is more help available than ever.

But there is much work to be done, unfortunately. She adds, “Some parts of the world are slower catching on than others.”

T

he profound importance of providing education to children in emergency situations is clear to those who’ve worked in the field. Some benefits are obvious: In addition to education, schools provide structure, stability, and, in the best cases, safety. Without adult supervision and a focus to their days, children in war zones can be vulnerable to recruitment as soldiers or prostitutes.

“A lot of the time, students have witnessed really horrific things, have lost family members,” Horowitz says. “One of the reasons we believe education is lifesaving is because it can restore a sense of normalcy and routine and community that can help students overcome that trauma — and not just students, but also teachers and administrators, where every person in the educational process has endured severe psychological trauma.”

In New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, the schools that opened first offered some students their only contact with caring adults.

“Many kids, especially the adolescents, their parents let them come back without them. They were wandering the streets. It was terribly important to get them back and scheduled,” recalls Barbara MacPhee, M.A.T.’68, founding principal of New Orleans Charter Science & Mathematics High School, one of the first schools to reopen after the hurricane.

In a strange way, a disaster can also be an opportunity to prioritize education in a way it has not been before. Yemen, which has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, has about 500,000 Yeminis displaced by social unrest and is hosting another 215,000 refugees from the Horn of Africa, Khan says.

AP Photo/Rahmat Gul

By reaching out-of-school children in Yemen, she says, “we can change world literacy rates.”

This can be very difficult, of course. Basic services like electricity and transportation are scarce. Security is a still a serious issue. Establishing educational systems can seem precipitous when people are simply trying to survive.

“People will say, ‘We don’t know what’s happening tomorrow, so why think about the long-term training of teachers?’” says Dryden-Peterson. Yet it’s very clear that establishing functional institutions, especially in education, is essential; for one thing, most conflict situations are not short-lived. “Refugees, on average, are in exile for 20 years,” she says. “Education needs to be thought of as part of the long-term plan as opposed to just an emergency endeavor. I think it’s easy from the outside to say, ‘How come you are thinking about education when people are starving and need medical care?’ But it’s not one without the other. It’s a holistic approach.”

In war zones, education is the linchpin to efforts in changing the culture that created the conflict in the first place, so that future wars are avoided. While there are many barriers to getting these children to school, they, and their parents, often are desperate for educational opportunities.

“The thing I hear over and over again from refugees is that education is one of the most important things for them in the camps,” Corbin says. “They can’t always carry things with them on their backs, but they say you can always carry things with you in your mind.” In situations where so little is predictable, that counts for a lot.

There is also great awareness that education means a chance to influence their futures when they can’t control the present. So important is education to the refugees in Uganda, Dryden-Peterson says, that they worked hard to convince UN agencies and other NGOs to increase teacher salaries, so they wouldn’t leave. Remarkably, refugees even donated their own food rations to the teachers “because it’s that important to the community that teachers stay and the children continue to have opportunities to study,” Dryden-Peterson says.

And some parents, even though desperately poor, are willing to pay for private school. Last summer, Chopra worked at a refugee camp on the border of Ethiopia and Somalia that held about 100,000 kids and 50,000 adults driven there by the drought in the Horn of Africa and instability in Somalia.

Only 30 percent of the children were in school. But many families were eager to see their kids become educated. Some even scraped together money to send their children to private learning centers. Since the private school teachers tend to have Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Reflections from the Field: Timor-Leste

Three students at a school in Suai in Timor-Leste struggle to share the only chair in their classroom.

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banned during the Indonesian occupation. As a result, those who came of age during the period, many of whom now make up the country’s teaching force, were schooled in Bahasa Indonesia.

Now, a large part of the current teaching force is learning Portuguese alongside the students they are teaching.

To mitigate some of these challenges, adopting mother tongue instruction is one of the topics of interest in Timor-Leste today.

Yet this too is a complicated matter. Research supports the idea that children learn best if initially taught in their mother tongue.

Recognizing this, Timor-Leste recently made the well-advised decision to pilot mother tongue instruction in its education system. This means that some children will start school learning in their indigenous languages. Introduction to Tetun will happen in the second grade, Portuguese in grade five.

But even this pilot has been met with much debate. Some in Timor-Leste worry, as one news story reported, that “mother-tongue instruction could jeopardize national unity.” Sadly, some even believe that mother tongue instruction is part of an effort to hold their children back. — Lisa Kaufman, Ed.M.’07, works for the World Bank.

a year or so more formal education than free schools provided

by NGOs, there is some community perception that they are better, although this may not be the case at all, he notes.

The question then becomes, how do you provide quality education in disaster situations? The INEE guidelines have been invaluable in setting basic standards that NGOs and governments can follow. Still, those who work in the field say that hands-on experience, flexibility, creativity, and cultural sensitivity, are irreplaceable in finding strategies that work in any given situation, since the needs vary depending on location, culture, and nature of the disaster. For example, in some situations of political conflict, parents often worry about the curriculum and the version of history that will be taught to their children. Outside groups may pressure or threaten parents not to send their kids to school. Indeed, over the past three years, the number of reported bombings and burnings of schools, and attacks on teachers and staff, has risen dramatically, Khan says.

“Sitting at a desk in D.C., you can theorize all you want about how this training will shape the mind of a teacher or how this intervention will encourage the children to learn something better,” says Corbin. “But until you can deeply understand the culture and the way people think in that particular context, you will constantly be shocked at the norms that are created after decades of conflict.”

rin Hayba, Ed.M.’09, is calling from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, on the Somalia border, the largest refugee camp in the world, where she works for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees. As a community services officer, her focus on education is in technology, girls, and children with disabilities. More than 20 years old, the camp has amassed nearly half a million residents, many there for their entire lives, as well as a group of more than 150,000 that arrived last year fleeing the famine in Somalia. Educating the more than 200,000 school-age children in the camp is an enormous undertaking: There are 27 primary schools, seven high schools, and four vocational schools, and great demand to build more, although the scarcity of land makes that a touchy subject within the host community.

The challenges are many, including basic safety. In the last year, terrorists kidnapped two groups of aid workers. Explosive devices have already claimed the lives of several, Hayba says.

Today, only 42 percent of the younger children and 8 percent of high school-age children attend school. Although the schools are free and most want to go, many remain out of school for various reasons.

“The majority of the refugees are Muslim, and their religious education is often valued more than formal learning,” she says. Getting girls to school is especially hard; with few female teachers and cultural barriers, school is seen as a male-domi-

Ed.

• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

AP Photo/Simon Thong

s I gaze out the window, the flight into Dili, Timor-Leste is idyllic; The sky is bright and mountains frame this capital city.

Once on the ground, things are more complicated. Youth roam the streets and United Nations vehicles dominate the city.

Timor-Leste, once known as East Timor, is only 10 years old.

The country was established in 2002 after three years of an interim, UN-sponsored transitional administration. Today the young nation presents a complex picture of development postconflict, an effort that includes rebuilding an education system that saw 95 percent of its schools torched and a mass exodus of teachers in 1999.

But perhaps more pressing than hiring teachers and building new schools are issues related to the language of instruction.

It is surprising to learn that Portuguese is one of Timor-Leste’s official languages, but a look back at history makes it easier to understand. While several countries have occupied the small island nation, the Portuguese arrived in the 1500s, and East Timor remained under Portuguese colonial rule until 1975 when the Indonesians invaded. Fast-forward through this brutal occupation to Timor’s independence 25 years later, and when drafting the constitution, the new government chose Portuguese and Tetun, a Portuguese creole lingua franca, as the two official languages.

(Legally, Indonesian and English are “working” languages.)

Issues of language are complex in Timor-Leste, but judgment aside, the decision to make Portuguese an official language — and the language of instruction — was made despite the fact that the majority of teachers in Timor-Leste do not speak Portuguese.

Portuguese, Tetun, and the other 15 indigenous languages were

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“I’ve gotten comments from some people — not refugees, but others — that the refugees need books and a place so sit, so why am I pushing computers and technology,” Hayba says. But even in such a location, everyone wants to connect to the Internet, and, moreover, there is enormous potential for e-learning in a refugee camp, where resources are hard to come by. Hayba also wants to provide training via the Internet and offer all refugees the chance to use the computers on weekends and evenings.

In that way, the disaster can actually be an impetus for educational progress, which was also the case for MacPhee at her school in New Orleans, which initially ran a half-day program to supplement other public schools. When the city was evacuated in August 2005 after Katrina, MacPhee’s faculty and students, primarily low-income, were flung throughout the United States.

MacPhee returned to New Orleans about a month later to find the first floor of the building flooded; she and some of her teachers salvaged equipment and found an elementary school that wasn’t planning to reopen. They pushed forward with applying for a full charter.

In January 2006, when the city was still a disaster zone, New Orleans Charter Science & Mathematics High School was the first high school to reopen on the damaged side of the river.

It held classes in the city zoo while its new building was being renovated, with six teachers and only 120 kids to start — many of them living in cars or sleeping on couches at friends’ houses.

By August 2006, the school was fully in its new building, with 350 students. MacPhee, now retired, looks back on the way the teachers, volunteers, the community, and students pulled together to make sure the school got back on its feet.

“The kids were amazingly resilient and patient,” more she says. “Why? Maybe they saw this as the anchor online in their lives.”

— Elaine McArdles’s last piece for Ed. looked at financial incentives. Ed.

AP Photo/David Goldman

nated environment. While this perspective is changing among girls who’ve grown up in the camp, “for the brand-new arrivals who’ve just came from isolated locations in Somalia, who’ve never been to school, who’ve grown up in a nomadic community, this is a new way of thinking.”

Hayba has been working on increasing female enrollment, and she points to strategies that work: One principal has been very successful by emphasizing that the Koran supports education and by getting parents to sign a pledge not to marry off their daughters until they finish high school. All elementary schoolchildren receive free lunch, she says, but girls who have an 80 percent or better attendance rate in a given month get an incentive: an extra sugar ration, a commodity in the camp.

One of the biggest problems is teacher quality, which, in Dadaab, has thorny political implications. Kenyan teachers are trained and certified, but they don’t typically speak the mother tongue of their students — a problem faced in other countries, Hayba says (see sidebar) — and they are much more expensive than teachers culled from the ranks of the Somalia refugees.

“Most of the refugee teachers went to school in the camps and as a result, often teachers have only have a little more education than their students,” she says.

Teacher training is all the more important because the children they are teaching often are deeply traumatized and need specialized strategies. There is little data on the effect of war on learning. Professor Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program, applied for a grant from the Templeton Foundation last year to study child soldiers and other children traumatized by conflict in Uganda, but it was not funded.

“It was a surprise,” Fischer says. “We thought it would be a very high priority research project.” Still, it’s clear that physiological changes in people under extreme stress, including elevated levels of cortisol, put such children at a huge disadvantage in school, he says. In a high-stress situation, “you go into a hormone-induced emergency reaction, which is not a good situation for learning — except to learn how to get away.”

While Adjunct Lecturer Gabrielle Rappolt-Schlichtmann, Ed.M.’07, hasn’t studied education in emergency contexts, she has done research on creating the best possible learning environment for kids under stress. It’s essential, she says, that teachers learn how to create an environment in which students feel safe, first, before they move onto to actual classwork.

However, because corporal punishment is a cultural norm in some conflict environments, teachers may react to disruptive kids by beating them, especially those who display their trauma by acting out violently, Corbin says. Unless teachers are trained with the psychosocial skills to engage traumatized children, they may not know how to deal with them appropriately.

Helping kids succeed under such circumstances takes creativity and perseverance. Hayba recently received a grant from Microsoft to put 20 computers in the Dadaab schools, but there is no electricity. The Kenyan Ministry of Energy then installed solar power in some of the high schools, so four of the seven are now ready for the computers. Hayba also worked with the parent-teacher association to get a community commitment to care for the computers. Not everyone is a fan.

T

he shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December happened just as Ed. magazine was about to go to press so we were unable to include it in this story on schooling and crisis, at least not in a way that would do justice to the 20 children and six educators who died. As the story points out, schools should provide structure, stability, and safety. And they usually do. Sadly, however, when it comes to the safety part, that is not always the case. Our hope is that someday, the educators and children who survived in Newtown, Conn., and in other places around the world, will find a way to move forward and once again see school as a structured, stable, and safe place — a place where the only concern is on learning, growing, and having fun.

v to share your thoughts, and to follow the ed school’s ongoing response to this tragedy, go to

www.gse.harvard.edu.

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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noteable Kwan Hansongkitpong Compared with the United States, the number of reported cases of autism in Thailand is low. Up to 10 times lower, in fact. But, according to Kwan Hansongkitpong, a clinical psychologist specializing in children with autism and other special needs, that doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue.

“Autism doesn’t discriminate. It happens in children and families all around the world, Thailand included,” she says.

“Autism prevalence here is increasing at an exponential rate.

It is becoming one of the prominent concerns for families and schools in affected communities.”

Despite the increase in documented cases in Thailand, autism awareness country-wide remains low. “Thailand is a developing country, and we have many competing issues that need awareness and support. Autism is only one of them,” Hansongkitpong says. “I wanted to bring it to the forefront.”

That’s why, in 2009, Hansongkitpong founded the nonprofit Autism Awareness Thailand. Through activities such as interactive games, films, and social media, the organization is trying to create a sense of responsibility and respect for the issue of autism in Thai children, adolescents, and young adults. This includes promoting an appreciation of diversity 42

Ed.

• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

courtesy of kwan hansongkitpong

Kwan Hansongkitpong, Ed.M.’10, lives in Bangkok, Thailand, where she is clinical director of the Little Sprouts Children’s Centre, president of Autism Awareness Thailand, and director of the Rainbow Room Foundation, a special needs awareness group. She was recently named by the Bangkok Post as one of the “66 Young Leaders Shaping Bangkok’s Future.”

Program: Mind, Brain, and Education Goal: To influence a positive change in Thai society

and encouraging inclusion. Hansongkitpong says changing perceptions about autism in some communities has been challenging, but she sees progress.

“Meeting like-minded people, seeing families overcoming their struggle to accept autism, watching children with autism playing alongside peers, seeing an inclusive classroom truly appreciating diversity it has been granted, [these are] things that keep me going,” she says.

Hansongkitpong also finds inspiration in a somewhat unlikely place: the small rural villages of Thailand that, as she says, have it all figured out. “They live together peacefully and collectively as one,” she says. “They respect each villager as an equal member of their community, regardless of who that person is, what condition he or she may have, or what he or she looks like.”

It is this attitude that Hansongkitpong and her nonprofit are encouraging other communities to emulate. “The underlying beauty of this is how it works out so simply,” she says.

“Seeing these villages reminds me that the key to creating awareness, acceptance, and understanding is rather simple: It is in the heart.” —Marin Jorgensen

alumni ne ws and notes 1956

1966

Hilda Appel Volkin, M.A.T., is a fine artist living in Albuquerque, N.M. Her exhibit, Lightworks, at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, ran through the beginning of January 2013.

Eleanor Roberts Lewis, M.A.T., spent five years teaching high school and 32 years practicing law in the fields of real estate finance and international commerce.

Since retiring in 2006, she has volunteered at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a Washington, D.C., charter high school with a law theme. She assists with law-related activities and curriculum development as well as coaching the school’s debate team.

1959 Alvin Granowsky, M.A.T., recently published the novel, Teacher Accused: When Homophobia Explodes in a Texas Town, which centers on a teacher whose efforts to protect a student from intense bullying make him a target of attack. Granowsky is a former director of reading and language arts for Dallas public schools and vice president of education for World Book Encyclopedia. His language arts/reading texts have been used in schools throughout North America.

1962 Stephen Quigley, M.A.T., with the help of a small team, has published online resources (www.citizensofeurope .org) for teachers in England in grades 7 through 10. The resources, which include detailed lesson plans, are for teaching the concepts of democracy and justice, rights and responsibilities, and identities and diversity, and for teaching the skills of critical thinking and enquiry, advocacy and representation, and taking informed and responsible action.

1968 Jonathan Daube, Ed.D., recently received an honorary doctorate from his first alma mater, the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. From 1978 to 1987, he was president of Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, Mass.; he then became president of Manchester Community College, Connecticut’s largest community college, and retired in 2008. A newly built, on-campus magnet high school bears his name. He spent the 2010–11 year as interim president of Middlesex Community College in Middletown, Conn.

1970 Nancy Shaw, M.A.T., had her picture book, Elena’s Story, published by Sleeping Bear Press. In it, Elena, who speaks the Mayan language Mam at her Guatemalan home, struggles with reading

and Spanish for school.

When she shares a picture book with her little brother, her mother gives Elena the job of being the reader.

1971 Leda Schubert, M.A.T., published her most recent picture book, Monsieur Marceau: Artist Without Words, in September. Illustrated by Gerard DuBois and published by FlashPoint/Porter/ Roaring Brook, the book received starred reviews in Kirkus and the School Library Journal.

1978 Laurence Stybel, Ed.D., published the article “Nine Factor Model for Decisions About Making Individual and Corporate Transitions” in the Psychologist Manager Journal. The nine factors refer to key economic, governance, and psychological variables individuals should factor before investing or joining corporations. Stybel is a psychologist and president of Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire, an Arbora Global Company.

1979 Ruth Nemzoff, C.A.S.’76, Ed.D., recently published Don’t Roll Your Eyes: Making In-Laws Into Family, a guide to improving relationships among new family units.

1968 Jonathan Daube and his wife, Linda.

1980 Nicki Mathis, Ed.M., is a jazz vocalist who performs all over the country with her band, Nicki Mathis’ Afrikan Amerikan Jazz. She recently performed at the MusicWomen Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

1981 Alfred Baptista, Ed.M., retired in July from the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families as a social work supervisor after 38 years in child welfare practice. In September, he began a position as a clinical social worker at St. Vincent’s Mental Health Clinic in Fall River, Mass. He continues as an adjunct professor of psychology and human services at Massasoit Community College, as well as in his consulting and training work at Baptista Consulting and Training.

John Sudarsky, Ed.D., is a senator in the Republic of Colombia Congress. His works focuses on the reform Harvard Graduate School of Education

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of the electoral system including the recently approved Law of Participation that regulates participatory mechanism and in the measurement of social capital. He also works in the sixth commission, which is in charge of education, science, and technology.

1983 Kpakpundu Ezeze, Ed.D., is president of Future Quest, Inc., a Washington, D.C.based consulting firm specializing in educational planning and college placement for first-generation college-bound youth. He has been recognized in major publications nationwide, including The Washington Post, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Business Week, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His book, Dream College, was recently published. (See page 21.)

1985 Sharon Nelson-Barber, Ed.M.’81, Ed.D., is chief executive officer and president at the Honolulu-based nonprofit, Pacific Resources for Education and Learning.

She recently received a contract from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to operate phase II of the Pacific Climate Change Education Partnership. This project is one of six phase II projects being funded through the NSF Climate Change Education Program, which was established through the Congressional

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appropriations process in fiscal year 2009.

1988 Elizabeth Fideler, Ed.M.’86, Ed.D., has published a new book, Women Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and On the Job. She is a research fellow at the Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College.

1989 Daniel Chazan, Ed.M.’82, Ed.D., with colleagues, recently published “Has the Doing of Word Problems in School Mathematics Changed?

Initial Indications from Teacher Study Groups” in Cognition and Instruction. In spring 2012, he was promoted to full professor and given the University of Maryland College of Education’s inaugural Excellence in Mentoring of Faculty award.

1991 Dorothea Gillim, Ed.M., is executive producer for Curious George on PBS.

1992 Jianping Wang, Ed.M., has been named vice president of academic affairs at Ocean County College in Toms River, N.J.

1993 Susan Mangels, Ed.M., was named vice president for institutional advancement

• Winter 2013 • www.gse.harvard.edu/ed

at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo. Prior to Lindenwood, Mangels served for 14 years as president of Lexington College in Chicago.

1995 Masahiko Minami, Ed.M.’88, Ed.D., directed the 2012 American Association of Teachers of Japanese Annual Spring Conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in March 2012. The conference was held in conjunction with the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies.

1997 William Callahan, Ed.M., was appointed to the finance committee for the town of North Andover, Mass., last summer. He is a senior business analyst and commercial real estate manager.

Albert Koo, Ed.M., was appointed director of the student services center at the College of Business at San Francisco State University, where he oversees academic advising, the scholarship program, study abroad, and other services to 5,000 undergraduate business students.

Douglas Luffborough, Ed.M., is school board president for the Chula Vista Elementary School District, the largest elementary school district in California. He

has served on the school board since 2009. He credits Professor Charles Willie’s Ed School class on school board governance with his interest.

Kelly (Langan) Petitt, Ed.M., married her partner of four years, Jon Petitt, on June 16, 2012, in Acton, Mass. After a wonderful honeymoon in Italy, they settled in Somerville, Mass.

She is in her 11th year as a classroom teacher, teaching third grade at the Martin Luther King, Jr. School in Cambridge.

1998 Katherine Blass Asaro, Ed.M., graduated with a J.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Law in May 2012 and passed the North Carolina Bar over the summer. She is now a staff attorney at the North Carolina School Boards Association in Raleigh, N.C., and feels extremely fortunate to work in a field that combines her education and legal backgrounds. She has lived in Chapel Hill, N.C., with her husband and children since her graduation from the Ed School. She writes, “We miss Cambridge and hope to visit soon.”

Michael Galland, Ed.M., was named assistant principal at Columbus Elementary School in New Rochelle, N.Y.

1999 Jill Yoshikawa, Ed.M., partner in the educational group Creative Marbles Consultancy, recently launched a blog at www.creativemarbles.com, sharing expertise ranging from financial aid and college admissions to K–12 academic issues. She says the experience of teaching high school prepared her for the challenge of growing her company, starting in 2003.

2000 Amika Kemmler-Ernst, Ed.D., officially retired from her position as a new teacher developer with the Boston Public Schools in 2009.

Since then, she has been traveling, volunteering, and producing a regular photo essay titled “We’re Learning Here” for the Boston Teachers Union. The essay features a different Boston school each month. Check it out at www.btu.org.

Joanne Marshall, Ed.M.’96, Ed.D., is the editor of a new series on work-life balance from Information Age Publishing.

The first book in the series, Juggling Flaming Chain Saws: Academics in Educational Leadership Try to Balance Work and Family, was published in August 2012.

2001 Billie Gastic, Ed.M., was appointed to the Professional Standards

and Practices Board for Teaching by the New York State Board of Regents.

John Jackson, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D., was elected director of the Harvard Alumni Association, to serve a three-year term. He is president and CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education.

2002 Stuart Albright, Ed.M., published his novel, Bull City, last spring. He teaches English and creative writing at Jordan High School in Durham, N.C., where he also coaches football.

Seth Andrew, Ed.M., is founder of Democracy Prep Public Schools.

In September, the U.S. Department of Education awarded a $9.1 million expansion grant to Democracy Prep to open and turnaround 15 new schools across Harlem, N.Y.; Camden, N.J.; and other high-need communities.

Jennifer Garvey Berger, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D., had her first book, Changing on the Job; Developing Leaders for a Complex World, published by Stanford University Press. She works in leadership development and lives in New Zealand.

Kristin Gornick, Ed.M., is acting principal at Sassarini Elementary School in Sonoma, Calif.

Emilie (Schnitman) Liebhoff, Ed.M., cofounded the nonprofit Invest in Girls, which provides a girls-only financial education program to schools through workshops, industry exposure trips, and one-to-one mentoring relationships.

The organization has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, and LearnVest.

To learn more, visit Invest in Girls at www.investgirls.org or www.facebook.com/investgirls.

director of residential life at Bowdoin College.

2003

Giorgi Zedginidze, Ed.M., was appointed by the president of Georgia to be that country’s minister of the environment. He is the youngest minister in the president’s cabinet.

Keishia Kemp, Ed.M., became the new face of Nutrisystem, recently appearing in large-scale marketing campaigns that include television commercials, print and magazine ads, website placement, and feature stories. She juggles this “surprising” spokesperson career, she says, while serving as a full-time program director for KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) in Los Angeles and teaching four Zumba fitness classes around the Los Angeles metro area each week.

Jean Ah Lee, Ed.M., has joined La Jolla (Calif.)

Country Day as an upper school mathematics teacher.

She previously taught mathematics in New York City, Guatemala City, and San Diego.

Kimberly Pacelli, Ed.M., was recently named associate director of student life at Harvard. She was previously

2005 Dorinda Carter Andrews, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D., was promoted to associate professor with tenure in July 2012 at Michigan State University. She is a faculty member in the teacher education department.

2006

2007

Heidi Shin, Ed.M., is program director at One Hen, a nonprofit that encourages kids to become social entrepreneurs who make a difference for themselves and the world.

2008 Katherine Merseth, Ed.M., is working in Amman, Jordan, on a USAID-funded education project that supports Jordan’s Ministry of Education. She is responsible for programs related to early childhood education and youth, including one that helps disadvantaged kids living in remote areas without access to kindergarten prepare for first grade.

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2009

Matt Weber, Ed.M.’11, happy to have in hand his newly published first book, Fearing the Stigmata.

Prachi Agarwal, Ed.M., is cofounder of Chalk and Chuckles, a line of developmental and educational toys and games based in New Delhi, India. The company has recently expanded to include the country’s Hyderabad market.

2010

jill anderson

Matt Crellin, Ed.M., wrote an article about increasing college attainment that was featured on the cover of the July/August 2012 issue of Change magazine. He is presently a research associate at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.

Kwan Hansongkitpong, Ed.M., lives in Bangkok, Thailand, where she is clinical director of the Little Sprouts Children’s Centre, president of Autism Awareness Thailand, and director of the Rainbow Room Foundation, a special needs awareness group. She was recently

named by the Bangkok Post as one of the “66 Young Leaders Shaping Bangkok’s Future.” (See page 42.)

2011 Anushka Fernando-Goonetilleke, Ed.M., was selected by Start-up Chile to work on www.Knowrom.com, the company she cofounded with her husband that allows students to share information on educational institutions worldwide. They moved to Santiago, Chile, in October.

Allison Lennox Willis, Ed.M., married Alexander “Sasha” Holley in Ogunquit, Maine, last summer. She is principal of KIPP Infinity Charter School in New York.

2012 Katie Clarke, Ed.M., is currently teaching sixth- and eighth-grade Spanish at Oak Hill Middle School in Newton, Mass.

v send updates and photos to classnotes@gse.harvard.edu.

inmemor y Francis Craig, GSE’41

Lawrence Emerson Tuttle, Ed.M.’59

Allan MacDougall, M.A.T.’67

Elaine Fraser Loomis, Ed.M.’41

Robert Grinder, Ed.M.’56, Ed.D.’60

Judith Walker, Ed.M.’67

Harold Sawler, Ed.M.’46

William St. John, Ed.M.’60

Lauriston Ward, GSE’67

Elbert Fretwell Jr., M.A.T.’48

Peter Seybolt, M.A.T.’60

Donald Moore, M.A.T.’66, Ed.D.’71

William Prouty, M.A.T.’48

Harris Siegel, M.A.T.’60

Barbara Hill Powers, Ed.M.’71

Harriet Hyde Sands, Ed.M.’49

Richard Warren Jr., Ed.M.’60

Elizabeth Bledsoe, C.A.S.’73

Lewis Kimball Jr., M.A.T.’53

John Stocking, M.A.T.’61

John Williams, C.A.S.’76

John Schmitt, M.A.T.’53

David Mitchell, Ed.M.’62

David Crimmin, Ed.M.’78

Tillie Kyle, GSE’54

Wade Madison Robinson, Ed.D.’62

Henrietta Attles, GSE’82

Robert Mossman, GSE’55

John Lombard, Ed.M.’63

Elizabeth Alling Sewall, Ed.M.’90

Talma Anita Perry, Ed.M.’55

Paul McWhinnie, Ed.M.’63

Nancy Whitcomb, Ed.M.’92

William Biddle, M.A.T.’56

Susan Putnam, Ed.M.’63

Ruthann Kelley, Ed.M.’93

Theodore Myers Hesser Jr., M.A.T.’57

Janet Safanda, M.A.T.’64

Helen Klassen, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’96

Robert Andreotti, Ed.M.’58

Alan White, Ed.M.’64

Marlene Murray, Ed.M.’58

Marian Cameron Korbet, Ed.M.’65

michael tallman

B D

C

Where’s Ed.?

E Where’s Ed.?

In this issue, Ed. sees sunny skies, sunny faces, and sunny stars.

Don’t you want to shine, too? Email high-resolution images with background information to classnotes@gse.harvard.edu. to right) Catching up in Vietnam are Linda Duevel, B (left Ed.M.’91, head of the International School of Stavanger in Norway; Ellen Deitsch Stern, head of Saigon South International School; and Len Duevel, Ed.M.’91, principal of the International School of Stavanger.

Parker Smith, son of Heidi McDonald Smith, C One-year-old Ed.M.’98, in St. Maarten.

Raymond Frost, Ed.M.’11, and Marisabel Ruiz RayD Abigail mond, Ed.M.’77, on Lake Otsego in Cooperstown, N.Y. General Colin Powell proudly poses after a Harvard E Retired EdCast and Askwith lecture in May.

F

June, EdCast and Ed. also caught up with Harlem ChilF In dren’s Zone president and CEO Geoffrey Canada, Ed.M.’75.

r eces s Who’s the Boss?

When Sloan Wilson set out to write his second book, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, he likely took the advice often given to novelists: Write what you know. Not only did the 1955 novel include things Wilson knew well, like war and money woes and struggles with conforming to expectations, but it also featured a boss patterned after someone well known not only to him, but also to the Ed School: Roy Larsen, a longtime visiting committee member and building namesake.

As it turns out, just before Wilson wrote the novel, he handled public relations for Larsen, who was the powerful head of Time-Life Publishing in New York. Larsen didn’t realize it at the time, but Wilson was studying him. Wilson told the Harvard Crimson in a 1992 interview, “Initially, I couldn’t figure out what made this man rich and powerful.” It’s the same puzzle that Tom Rath, the main character of the novel (and Wilson’s alter ego), tried to solve about his boss, Ralph Hopkins. Hopkins was president of a fictional Manhattan-based television company.

And like Larsen, he was also civic-minded.

“We people in the business of communications have a fundamental responsibility to bring key issues to the attention of the public,” Hopkins says to Rath in the novel. The way he did this was by starting a national commission on mental health, with Rath writing press releases and helping to stir up buzz. In real life, Larsen also wanted to bring a key issue to the public’s attention: reforming education at the local level. In 1949, he took charge of the newly created National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools, which, by the end of the 1950s, helped spur the creation of more than 15,000 citizen groups focused on working with local district officials to improve local school problems. Larsen asked Wilson to join the commission to help write press releases and position papers, just as Rath did for Hopkins’ commission in the novel. In 1955, the same year The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit came out (and became a bestseller and eventually a movie starring Gregory Peck), Larsen once again recruited Wilson, this time to be part of the planning committee for that year’s White House Conference on Education.

It’s unclear if Wilson (or Rath) ever completely figured out his boss, but there’s no doubt that Larsen was content with how he was loosely portrayed. Once described in a Massachusetts Historical Society publication as a generous man “with a genuine flair for business and promotion, yet always with instinctive conviction about what was right and honest,” Larsen never tried to meddle with Wilson’s words. After Wilson showed Larsen an early draft of the novel and asked if wanted to change anything, Larsen simply wrote back, “Say anything about me except I changed a good book.” — Lory Hough

The Hollywood Roy Larsen

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martha stewart

in v es ti n g

At home with their children — Katie, Christopher, and the furry one, Leo.

Forget the Debt

Longtime leadership supporters of the HGSE Fund, Ellie Loughlin, Ed.M.’06, C.A.S.’07, and her husband, Harvard Business School graduate Phil Loughlin, believe deeply in the potential of education to transform lives. “We love the idea of access to a great education for everyone,” says Ellie, an admission associate at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge.

Over the past year, Ellie has gotten an up-close look at the Ed School by serving as cochair of the HGSE Alumni Council. She recently answered a few questions about her time on Appian Way and the family’s support of the school.

What brought you to the Ed School?

lead national reform, they will all count on what they learned at HGSE and the people they met there to succeed.

I wanted to get certified as a guidance counselor and liked that I could do it in a developmentally based program that offered a broader sense of education and had an urban focus. Why do you support the school each year as leadership

donors to the HGSE Fund?

What were your biggest takeaways?

I left wanting to change so many things and give more to different environments than I possibly could. HGSE still inspires me to be better at my job and better to kids every day.

How do you think the Ed School is contributing to education reform?

HGSE is creating great education leaders. Whether they lead schools, develop new programs, become superintendents, or

I don’t think many people start at HGSE because they’re hoping to make a lot of money. The idea of the people who are changing lives being saddled with loads of debt gets to me all the time. Thanks to the HGSE Fund, the Ed School is able to offer more financial aid, and, as a result, I hope that will enable talented people to choose to be educators regardless of their financial status. That is the only way we’ll get the best minds working in education.

— Mark Robertson, Ed.M.’08

Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Where’s Ed.?

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

jill anderson

What’s an inquisitive monkey to do when in Harvard Square? Browse through the only store in the world named after him while reading Ed. magazine, of course.

Out of curiosity, while taking his photo this past December, we asked the monkey what he thought of the last issue. His response? He didn’t respond — he’s a monkey. But we suspect he was thinking, “By George, I like it!”