Ed. Magazine, Summer 2010

the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education summer 2010 | vol. Liii, no. 3

Also China’s first generation of only children comes of age.

Slackers. Superheroes. Players.

How boyhood is being packaged.

Outside Chance

They’ve traded the streets, drug addiction, juvenile hall, and prison for a college classroom.

With the support of Noel Gomez, Ed.M.’06 — and each other — they just might make it.

Ed.

The Magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education | Summer 2010 | vol. lIIi, no. 3

features

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Outside Chance Some have been incarcerated, others are one strike shy of life in prison. College was the last place any of them expected to end up. But it’s the one place that Noel Gomez, Ed.M.’06, wants to keep them.

One and Only?

As only children, China’s first generation born under the country’s one-child policy has come of age. A look at the burden of expectations and how this generation is choosing to parent.

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Boy, oh Boy! There’s a narrow version of boyhood that is being sold to us, say three alumni authors, and while parents and teachers can’t fully protect boys from the marketers, they can help them identify — and hopefully question — what’s going on.

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departments 3 Dean’s Perspective

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4 Letters 6 The Appian Way

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34 In the Media 40 Investing in Education 42 Alumni News and Notes 48 Recess

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Stay plugged in

stories and links found only online

Tom kates

Tom kates

www.gse.harvard.edu Is a picture really worth a thousand words? With the debut of our new video series, Stories from Appian Way, you can decide for yourself.

Go to the News & Events section of the school’s website to watch the first few videos.

This past semester, students in Assistant Professor Jal Mehta’s Introduction to Educational Policy class found themselves in the world of wikis — websites created and used collectively by a group around a common topic. What they discovered was that wikis are complex, labor intensive, and incredibly practical.

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events

Conferences. Askwiths. Deadlines. Don’t miss a thing. www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/events

twitter

We tweet. You follow. So simple. www.twitter.com/hgse

facebook We’re the Facebook friend approved by your boss. www.facebook.com/HarvardEducation

youtube Yup, we have a YouTube channel! www.youtube.com/HarvardEducation

flickr Photos that capture the school. www.flickr.com/photos/harvardeducation Ed.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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Ed. The Magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

PULLING BACK THE COVER

senior writer/editor Lory Hough lory_hough@harvard.edu production manager/editor Marin Jorgensen marin_jorgensen@harvard.edu designer Paula Telch Cooney paula_telch@harvard.edu Director of Communications Michael Rodman michael_rodman@harvard.edu Communications intern Jazmin Brooks contributing writers Jazmin Brooks David Clark, Ed.M.’05 Samantha Cleaver Tricia Hurley Gina Piccalo Mary Tamer photographers Jill Anderson Ed Carreón Ed Malitsky Mark Morelli Tanit Sakakini Martha Stewart illustrators Jeff Hopkins, Ed.M.’05 Leigh Wells copyeditor Abigail Mieko Vargus © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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

This issue is No. 3 of Vol. LIII, Summer 2010. Third-class postage paid at Burlington, VT and additional offices.

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

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Class Act As Noel Gomez, Ed.M.’06, points out in Ed. magazine’s first multimedia slideshow that photographer Ed Carreón created to accompany this issue’s cover story, many of the students in his Transitions program look intimidating, but as the other students in class soon learn, “behind those tattoos and that image is a human being.”

To view the slideshow and to hear Gomez in his own words, go to www.gse.harvard.edu/ed.

dean’s perspective Dear Friends: As I read the feature stories in this issue of Ed. magazine — three narratives that are very different in many ways — I was struck by a common thread that runs through each of them: pressure.

In “Outside Chance,” our cover story, we learn about students who are transitioning from life in prison, or one leading in that direction, to life in college.

Many find the draw of their old lives to be a barrier to their academic success as they struggle to adapt to the stark contrast between a college campus and the criminal justice system.

In “One and Only?” our story about Associate Professor Vanessa Fong’s research in China, we begin to appreciate the weight shouldered by the nation’s first generation under the one-child policy. These children must not only perform exceptionally well in school, but also act as their family’s social safety net.

jonesfoto

And in “Boy, oh Boy!” three alumni authors warn us that starting at an early age, boys are bombarded with messages telling them who they are and who they should be: sports-loving, rough-and-tumble risktakers who think school isn’t cool.

These stories illustrate ways that young people, parents, and educators can resist pressures as they struggle to cope with the challenges in their lives. Students with a history of incarceration have found support in Noel Gomez, Ed.M.’06, and the Transitions re-entry program he runs at Santa Barbara City College. In China, this first generation is just starting to become parents, and some say they will try to ease the pressure on their own children. And when it comes to raising and teaching boys, the authors say parents still have a great deal of influence on their children — more than they probably realize.

I found myself ruminating on Senior Lecturer Ron Ferguson’s words in “Outside Chance.” “The ego can get in the way of being fully receptive to someone trying to help you,” he says. We, as educators, need to identify learners experiencing pressure and strive to help them develop coping strategies both in and out of school.

Sincerely,

Kathleen McCartney March 2010

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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letters Family Way Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez’s story, “The Family Way” (winter 2010), was inspiring and reminds us that early parenthood does not doom one to a life of missed chances.

But like Mancilla-Martinez, who had the support of her family, teen parents can’t do it alone. As teen pregnancy is the primary reason girls drop out of school, and a major reason boys drop out, the education community must focus on policies that help teen parents stay in school and reach their academic potential. We already know what works: in-school supports, flexible scheduling options, innovative credit accumulation policies, and adults advising teen parents of their options and rights.

(For example, that it is illegal to be fired for being pregnant, as Mancilla-Martinez was.) The lesson we should draw from her story should not be that one person can beat the odds, but that when adults provide the proper supports and opportunities, we increase the odds for all teen parents to achieve academic success.

Erica Fletcher, Ed.M.’04 Prevention Program Director, Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy

The article was well written. I enjoyed reading … of Professor [Jeannette] Mancilla-Martinez’s family strengths and her determination as a teenage mother.

With supportive families, hard work, role models, and opportunities, much is possible. You make us proud, professor! I was the first in my family to attend college and graduate school. I have graduate degrees from Harvard and UCLA. I could not have accomplished my dreams and goals

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without my family’s support, guidance, and love.

Laura Telles, Ed.M.’82

Withering Glare Just wanted to give you the heads up about what looks to be a major typo or a daring bit of poetic license in the title of the article, “Wither High School?” (winter 2010). I believe you might have meant whither (with an “h”), meaning “to where in the future,” rather than “wither” (without an “h”), meaning “to become shriveled.” While it is an artistically interesting image — a shriveling high school — the title’s usage would still be incorrect as “wither” is an intransitive verb and one cannot “wither a high school” any more than one can “sleep a baby.” Except perhaps with a withering glare.

Enid Madaras, Ed.M.’91, Ed.D.’99

Editor’s Note: “Wither” without the “h” was our unsuccessful attempt — based on the number of letters we received about this — at a play on words, indicating fading away or losing freshness. As Enid Madaras playfully wrote in the subject line of her letter, “Oh, deer!”

High School It’s astonishing that in 2010 we are still writing articles about the reform of high schools without discussing their most important problem — namely that such a large portion of those who arrive at their doors are not prepared to do high school– level work. … As a society, our much higher priority must be to make the deep changes needed to ensure that nearly all children obtain not only the academic skills and knowledge, but the confidence and pleasure in their own learning ability, and the learning habits and discipline needed to undertake and achieve a good high school education. Even at these younger ages we may have to provide more pathways to reach this goal, and we should certainly provide more pathways for those who don’t reach it, and for those who do but want various types of secondary-level schooling.

David Seeley, Ed.D.’70

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

Teacher Pay I was deeply disappointed that Elaine McArdle in “Right on the Money?” (winter 2010) failed to consult or to interview any classroom teachers. The article contained some thoughtful insights regarding teacher compensation. Yet over and over again the “experts” consulted were those who were engaged in observing the teachers’ experience, rather than those of us who have devoted our professional lives to being in the classroom. As an elementary educator for the past 25 years, I think that McArdle would have been pleasantly surprised with the insights she would have gained by talking with experienced classroom teachers. If you had asked teachers about compensation, I think most of us would argue, rightly, against being paid based on the narrow standard of standardized test scores.

Emily Hayden, Ed.M.’91

I have known a few truly brilliant teachers, several great teachers, and a large number of competent teachers. All these over a career that included years of public school teaching, as a department head, superintendent of schools, and headmaster of both boarding schools and independent day schools. As a teacher, I valued principals who valued my work and supported me. As a department head, I valued a superintendent who met with me and other department heads regularly and sought our advice, even if not always following it. In the best schools we enjoyed a camaraderie that occasionally involved breaking rules, events that our superiors would chide us for but generally (and genially) tolerate. In none of these schools

was there any formal or effective system of evaluation or reward. The reward lay in being able to do our thing with minimal restraint. Forget trying to reward individual teachers with money, reduced workloads, or whatever. The best teachers thrive with a loose rein. Trust them.

Randolph Brown, M.A.T.’56

In the article, “Right on the Money?”

Elaine McArdle … disappointingly gave short shrift to the other side of this controversial issue. Teacher compensation based on years in the classroom and graduate degrees must change and written evaluations conducted by school administrators are not the answer. In recent decades, these subjective assessments of a teacher’s work have proven to be nothing short of an embarrassment to the profession. Teachers are frequently warned in advance [that] the principal will be in to observe. This allows them time to rehearse and perfect their lesson for this single observation while future lessons can prove to be completely different. These essentially meaningless observations often leave teachers with useless feedback on their actual classroom performance and thereby no basis for how to improve their practice.

Paul Hoss, C.A.S.’83

Boiling Point Reading your article

by Tim O’Brien (“A to B,” winter 2010) is making my blood boil.

Tim obviously has no honor or integrity. What he says is typical of the attitude toward teaching today. Everything is the fault of the teacher and the students bear no responsibility. If the students are not “engaged,” it is the fault of the teacher.

The student has no responsibility to pay attention. If the students do not learn, it is the fault of the teacher. The student has no responsibility to study hard, pay attention,

or do his homework. In my day, we were taught values and morals from the time we were born. If parents are not doing this today, these things should be taught starting in preschool. Take a page from the Boy Scouts. I wonder if the Ed School agrees with Tim O’Brien that cheating is the fault of the teachers, not the students. If so, I am very disappointed. However, to end this letter on a positive note, I think David Dixon is wonderful!

Judy Pierce Livingstone, M.A.T.’61

Tim O’Brien has found a very powerful way to make a most significant statement to educators, that students deserve challenging and meaningful academic experiences in the classroom. Speaking from his own experience added passion to his story.

Dolores Pesek

Complete, Not Compete Having taught in public school for more than 40 years, I was saddened by the comments in Lory Hough’s piece, “No Strength in Numbers.” “Competitors” and “competing” are not words that I use to describe the actions of students. Students should not be competing with each other.

They are team members who should want all the students in their classes to be the “best they can be.” I suggest that we study the motivation of the thousands of people who run in the New York and Boston marathons. Less than 50 runners run in these races to win, to compete. Thousands just want to complete the race, to finish, to be the “best that they can be.” This is the spirit we need to build in our children.

Students must be completers, not competitors.

Louis DeFreitas Sr., Ed.M.’71

So Fresh Love the exciting new design! Fresh and very 2010. I’m glad to see that the look of Ed. is as forward-thinking as the school.

School Building It has brightened my Sunday morning to read about others doing what I’ve been doing — starting up a school to run counter to the educational establishment; in my case, going up against the behemoth of Korean education and its lack of critical thinking and worse, the devaluation of the student as an individual. Chutzpah and being obdurate … pfft! That’s only the tip of the iceberg in getting these schools to reach critical mass. It’s more like being obsessed to the point where Captain Ahab might ring you up and say, “Dude, maybe you should seek some counseling.”

Toby Yim

I appreciate how the individuals mentioned in this article demonstrated the difficulties that an individual can go through when opening a new school. I entered HGSE after having opened a school, and still today I ask myself how do you tie everything together so that it works to the benefit of the children? This article demonstrated that many of us have gone through the same process.

Maria Fondeur, Ed.M.’10

Ed. magazine welcomes correspondence from all of its readers.

Send letters to:

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

Evelyn Fine, Ed.M.’72

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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mark morelli

the appian way

NameS: Chris Dede and Jon Star TitleS: professor and assistant professor Focus: motivating students through mathematics

“We want both to interest a wider variety of students in taking algebra and to help those students succeed through better ways of teaching algebra.”

It Stems from Algebra

By Lory Hough

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

What motivates students to become interested in working in science, technology, engineering, or math fields, referred to in the academic world as STEM careers? Although there have been numerous studies looking at student motivation, most have used just one type of activity to engage students. In their new research project, Professor Chris Dede and Assistant Professor Jon Star are using three technology-based activities, all rooted in algebra, once called the “new civil right” by one algebra advocate. The study, which started in January and will end in three years, is classroom-based and is expected to involve about 5,000 students in grades five to nine. For four days, the students will be presented with a real problem and will then learn how algebra concepts can ultimately help them solve the problem. In January, Dede and Star jointly answered questions about why a study like this is necessary, why framing it in algebra made the most sense, and how movies like Star Wars and E.T. may help.

Is there a reason to be concerned about student interest in STEM careers? Is the STEM pipeline in trouble?

Job prospects in the United States have changed both because of the shift to a global economy and because of a change in this country from an industrial economy to a knowledge and services economy. Many blue-collar and low-level white-collar jobs have disappeared. To have quality lifestyles, students need to graduate with more sophisticated skills than they did historically. Also, to compete globally, the United States needs to increase its STEM jobs to aid with knowledge production.

For all these reasons, there is a crisis in how many students are interested in and competent in mathematics.

Why algebra?

Algebra is a “gatekeeper” subject; students who don’t do well in this course or who don’t take it have precluded their career options in a variety of jobs related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We want both to interest a wider variety of students in taking algebra and to help those students succeed through better ways of teaching algebra.

Why do students find algebra so difficult?

Some students struggle in algebra because they lack important prerequisite skills, including facility with and understanding of fractions and fluency with basic number operations. For others, algebra itself is inherently difficult, in that it is a significant leap in abstraction from the arithmetic that is taught in elementary school. For these and other reasons, too many students struggle in algebra.

You mentioned that success in algebra is widely recognized as critical to students’ future success. In what way?

There have been a variety of studies that have linked success in algebra to future educational and career opportunities.

For example, completing a course beyond Algebra II in high school more than doubles the odds that a student who enters college will complete a bachelor’s degree. Another study found more than three-quarters of students who took Algebra I and Geometry went on to college within two years of high school graduation, while only one-third of students who did not take Algebra I and Geometry courses did so.

Your study starts with a one-day “induction” activity. Students will either watch a traditional video, become a STEM professional in an online, multiuser video environment, or watch as a teacher describes the problem. Why three different formats?

We are contrasting different types of motivation to see which is effective with various types of students. That is, we don’t expect to find one approach universally better than the others, but rather a complex pattern of effectiveness that may vary by age, by gender, by ethnicity, and by academic achievement.

The problem students will solve involves space exploration. Was this to hook them in?

Space science is a field that interests students of many ages.

Both boys and girls find space exploration interesting, and the entertainment industry has provided many engaging backstories, such as Star Trek, Star Wars, and E.T. Many issues in space science are related to the types of mathematics that underlie algebra.

What kind of space-related problem will they be solving?

It is more accurate to imagine that students in a particular grade will solve multiple problems that emerge from a single situation. For example, interplanetary explorers may encounter trouble on their spaceship; math, and algebra in particular, will enable students to investigate the explorers’ troubles and help generate solutions.

Is algebra really a “new civil right”?

This strong statement is attributed to civil rights activist Bob Moses. Moses founded the Algebra Project, a widely influential mathematics literacy intervention focusing on low-income students and students of color. With this statement, Moses was stressing the critical importance of success in algebra to students’ ability to fully participate in today’s society.

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the appian way

By Lory Hough

When Daniel Beaupré, Ed.M.’99, was teaching history and English at an independent school in Middlebury, Vt., he would project maps onto the wall, enlarge them, and have his students trace the lines. Students loved the process and the size made learning fun. When Beaupré left the classroom after seven years and eventually began working at the National Geographic Society, the big maps were still on his mind. He wondered: If he could blow maps up even larger, perhaps enough to cover a gymnasium floor, would teachers be interested in renting them to help supplement their geography lessons?

Based on his classroom experience, he sensed they would, but pitching the idea to his new bosses would need to be done at the right time. “At National Geographic, great ideas are walking through the door every day,” he says.

And then the right time came. It was September 2005 and National Geographic had just devoted an entire issue to one subject: Africa — a rarity for the magazine that has been published since 1888. Inserted in the issue was a fold-out map of the continent.

“That’s when I seized the moment,” Beaupré says. “The stars were aligned.” National Geographic decided to produce the first map, a 25’ x 36’ recreation of Africa, which was eventually trucked in a gigantic black plastic tube to a school in Northern Wisconsin. Five years later, there are now 10 vinyl maps of Africa, Asia, and North America, with the biggest stretching 31’ x 41’. Each weighs, on average, about 145 pounds. Beaupré believes they are the biggest portable maps in the world.

Eventually he wants to add other continents and also produce even larger maps that could be used in major public spaces like football stadiums.

As he had hoped, teachers and students love using them.

“The maps make geography an event, something much more dynamic than a standard study in a classroom,” he says.

“A map makes it physical. Plus the ephemeral nature of it adds to its value — it’s a moment.”

There is definitely a buzz that is created once the map arrives at a school, Beaupré says. Initially the teacher who orders the map will assume it will be used only with his or her students. But once the other teachers and students see the map unrolled on the gym floor, they all want to use it.

“I’m not exaggerating this,” Beaupré says. “[The map] has a powerful effect on people. It arrests them.”

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

trent campbell

Map Quest

Daniel Beaupré with students from the Mary Hogan Elementary School, Middlebury, Vt.

And it’s not just the visual wow factor that makes the maps popular: They are also surprisingly interactive.

“Not only are people permitted to walk on the maps, they are asked to walk, run, roll,” Beaupré says. “We want this to be as much a physical experience as a mental experience.” Giant props such as oversized dice, colored cones, and stacking bricks are also included for use with the activities, which are tied to curriculum.

“There’s a certain Barnum & Bailey aspect to this,” Beaupré admits, “but I’ve been careful in how the maps are portrayed.

They are fun, but also content-driven and educational.”

For example, students may spend time in class learning about where crops are grown across the United States. Later, moving to the map, the teacher will place hula hoops on different regions to test what they’ve learned. He or she holds up oversized food props such as carrots or bananas and students throw a bean bag into the hoop where they think the crop is grown. Students rack up points for being correct and for simply hitting the target.

An important force behind the activities is that they get participants moving. “We don’t want kids sitting on the sideline listening to a teacher lecture,” Beaupré says. Nor do they want adults being passive. Although schools primarily rent the maps, museums and festivals sometimes use them, too. Recently, the National Guard of Wyoming rented the Asia map to help local children better understand where their mothers and fathers were deployed.

Beaupré says the shelf life for each map, which is given a nickname, is about three years. The first map, “Beverly,” was recently retired and is in the process of being donated to the Nairobi National Museum in Kenya with the help of fellow Harvard Graduate School of Education alum, Joseph Lekuton, Ed.M.’03, a member of the Kenyan parliament.

To learn more, go to http://events.nationalgeographic. com/events/special-events/giant-traveling-maps.

Public Service on the Map Speaking of maps, in April, Harvard launched a new, interactive website that allows members of the Harvard community to share their public service stories. Every day, all over the world, thousands of students, faculty, staff, and alumni are involved in public service. An alum may be starting a new medical clinic in a hard-hit area of Haiti as a Peace Corps volunteer. A group of undergraduates might be holding a fundraiser for a local arts-based afterschool program. Or maybe a professor is taking a group of students to Washington, D.C., to help write a policy brief for a member of Congress. The site, administered by the Harvard Alumni Association, is user driven: Every member of the Harvard community can enter and edit his or her own information, and can set privacy settings. The interactive map is searchable and color-coded by alumni, student, faculty, staff, and organization. A Facebook friend network and news feed will be available to users who log in using Facebook Connect.

Visit http://onthemap.harvard.edu to learn more and to register.

Jennifer and Sam

When Jennifer Anderson, Ed.M.’09, was about seven years old, she would sit on the floor of her bedroom in Brookline, Mass., with a row of toys and stuffed animals facing her little brother, Sam, who was four years younger. Patiently she would watch. And wait. And then he’d make his move.

“I’d go running into the living room and report to my parents, ‘He chose the blue one!’” Anderson says.

It was her way of recreating the many observational studies that both she and her brother had been a part of at Harvard while her father, Donald, was getting his Ph.D. in clinical psychology and her mother, Betsy, was working as a research assistant in the psychology department. There was even a study done by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that Anderson was reminded of last June at commencement.

“After the ceremony, I was having dinner with my family and friends when my mom pulled out a letter,” Anderson says. It was dated September 10, 1974, and thanked her parents for allowing the research team to follow Anderson at the Harvard Law School Child Care Center for a year.

“How funny to look at the stationery and see the words Larsen Hall at the top of the page,” she says. “It was a nice way of capping off my year back in Cambridge. It felt like I had come full circle.”

betsy anderson

Observant Student By Lory Hough

Now living in Indonesia with her husband and two children, ages three and seven, Anderson wonders how much that experience of being involved in studies and growing up in an educationrich environment has influenced what she has done with her life.

A glance at her resume speaks volumes: She’s worked, both in the United States and abroad, at child development centers, schools, universities, and volunteer teaching programs. A few years ago, she cofounded a bilingual school in Bali, Indonesia.

“I feel lucky to have had these early educational experiences and to have grown up in the Boston area,” she says. “I realize that’s what fueled my interest in a good education for everyone. I’ve seen what a great school can look like.”

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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the appian way

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Reasons to Know ...

Five graduating Ed.M. students

Lana Asfour

International Education Policy

Growing up in the United Arab Emirates, Lana Asfour knows how education can impact economic development. Driven to become an advanced knowledge-based society, the area has heavily courted American universities to start satellite campuses, including the one created by her employer, the Qatar Foundation. When she returns, she will continue helping the American admissions offices recruit local students and guide public schools with the often-unknown college admissions process.

Jeff Layton

tanit sakakini

Technology, Innovation, and Education

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It started by chance. Working as a substitute teacher while pursuing acting, Jeff Layton was unimpressed with the “educational” videos left behind by the teachers for him to show. He decided to produce his own, including the latest about the gold rush that won best educational short at the Kids First!

Film Festival. While at Harvard, he interned at PBS and with a unit of Scholastic that creates educational software for schools.

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

Briget Ganske Arts in Education

A congressman’s daughter, Briget Ganske realized early on the importance of telling stories. Now a documentary photographer, she once led an afterschool photo program in Harlem and worked with female journalists on a South African newspaper. While at the Ed School, she helped run a film workshop for teenagers in Boston, and through the student-created Learning Through Libraries Program, taught children in one El Salvadoran community how to use cameras.

Kim Snodgrass Risk and Prevention

Her early schooling was sporadic, bouncing back and forth between foster care and her mother. As a child, she lived alone with her younger siblings in the mountains. Since then, she’s become a staunch advocate for traumatized youth and interned at several related Boston nonprofits. The author of two books on foster children, including I Am a Foster Child and That’s Okay with Me, her goal is to start a residential school for foster children.

Chike Aguh

Education Policy and Management

His parents came from a small village in Nigeria.

His father, now a physician, returns every year to provide free medical care. This public service ethos inspired Chike Aguh to help troubled teens stay in school in New York City and teach in Thailand as a Fulbright scholar. Next fall, he’ll start MPA and MBA programs at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

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

The long holiday weekend began with ominous news for me of a cancer diagnosis and ended with a more detailed confirmation.

Tuesday morning questions and uncertainties swirled about in my mind as I trudged back to school; the concerns of the 120 16- and 17-year-olds I work with each day as a public high school American history teacher were far from a priority.

Seven hours later, at the end of the day, I had been transformed. No students knew my diagnosis, yet the excitement, exuberance, and energy of my classes of adolescents lifted me. I felt upbeat just being around these young people.

But a dilemma came with that diagnosis: Do I keep this to myself? Do I tell no one at school?

My building principal and union president knew and were supportive, but I had asked them to respect my privacy. What about my students?

I resisted sharing my diagnosis. Images flashed through my mind of a rough chemotherapy leaving me exhausted and with little dignity. Would the “whatever generation” even notice, or care, as they passed through my class?

A month after the diagnosis, with my chemotherapy treatments about to begin, I obliquely mentioned, just before the bell rang, that I would be missing one day a week for a while for what I referred to as “treatment for a medical condition.”

That was my description of my chemotherapy schedule. As I expected, most students appeared not to notice.

However, one girl, I’ll call her Stephanie, lingered after class and asked to speak with me. I knew that she had traveled extensively with her father in search of treatment for his leukemia. A cancer diagnosis is very isolating for the person receiving the diagnosis and his or her family. No one else can quite fit into your shoes. For Stephanie, my intentionally bland description — “treatment for a medical condition” — was more than words. It was tangible pain for someone close to her and fear for herself. With tears in her eyes, she said to me, “Mr. Clark, are you going to be all right?” I was touched by her concern and strengthened by her tears. I was also honest in response: “I am not sure.”

Since that day, Stephanie and her parents have been a source of support and encouragement, from cookies baked

by Stephanie quietly left on my desk at the end of the day, to a Livestrong bracelet from her mother, to a short written note of encouragement and comradeship from her father.

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

jeff Hopkins, ed.m.’05

Lean on Me By David Clark, Ed.M.’85

More important, Stephanie and her parents taught me to reach outside myself a bit. I soon found refuge in a Friday afternoon yoga class with a small group of teachers held in my school building. I enjoyed the irony; a huge edifice of steel and glass offering a place for quiet. My colleagues in the class were not aware of my diagnosis, but the opportunity for physical rejuvenation while in a sort of meditative cocoon gave me strength.

Now, almost 10 months since the diagnosis, I continue to pursue the chemotherapy prescribed by my oncologist as well as less traditional paths such as acupuncture and yoga. Did an empathetic student help me medically? All I can say is that as I write this in December 2009, my cancer, while not curable, is treatable, and I am again teaching a full course load in a large public high school — my 40th year in teaching.

I have continued to reach out in ways that have been beneficial. My adult son visited in order to be at my side while I was going through a session of chemotherapy. I have connected with former colleagues I hadn’t seen in so long they really did seem to be from another life.

My teaching elucidates benchmarks toward adulthood for a generation of young people. In the case of an adult benchmark of my own, a cancer diagnosis, the young student, Stephanie, helped me that day much more than I have helped her.

— David Clark, Ed.M.’85, teaches high school American history to all ability levels, including Advanced Placement, in West Chester, Penn.

Victims of the Haitian earthquake recovering at a church in Cange, Haiti, under the care of Partners In Health.

Andrew Marx courtesy of PIH

Help for Haiti

By Lory Hough

Marvin Figueroa, Ed.M.’10, had seen it — and experienced it — before. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch struck part of the Caribbean, including Honduras, his native country, leaving more than 20,000 dead or missing. Millions more were left homeless. The experience made him want to do his part when an earthquake devastated Haiti this past January.

“My village was wiped out and I lost friends and family,” Figueroa says of his experience in 1998. “Those who lived were able to survive thanks to the generosity of the international community. The experience taught me that caring individuals, regardless of their location, could provide hope even in situations that are filled with despair. It’s a lesson I carry with me.”

So despite the fact that a new, busy semester was just starting, Figueroa and a group of Ed School students decided to start a fundraising campaign with proceeds going to Partners In Health, a Boston-based nonprofit that provides medical care around the world. With a collection table set up in the lobby of Gutman and a special donation page created online, the students set an ambitious goal for the Ed School community: $5,000 in one week.

Asked if she thought the amount was too ambitious, Rhonda Baylor, Ed.M.’10, co-chair of the campaign along with Figueroa, says, “With collective economics, I thought that the goal was easily attainable.”

Figueroa says that individuals, if properly motivated, are extremely compassionate and generous.

“We knew this going into the campaign,” he says. “The group understood the challenges — many of our colleagues had already

donated to other organizations and others had limited student budgets. However, we knew there wasn’t a limit to what a community can achieve together.”

And the community did achieve — more than expected. Three days before the fundraiser even officially started, the group raised nearly $2,000. By the end of the week, they had surpassed the goal, raising $6,665. Motivated to do more, the students decided to keep the donation page posted online and to collaborate with the school’s Alumni of Color Conference, held at the end of February. At the time the magazine went to press, the group had collected a few hundred dollars more.

Baylor admits that despite the hard work that went into the campaign, it was something she, and other students, had to do.

“Seeing the images on television reminding me of what happened, or did not happen, after Hurricane Katrina — there was never an option for me not to do anything,” she says. “I believe that we all get opportunities to do something that matters to others; something beyond our own self-gratification. It would have been less time-consuming for me to write a check, but I thought that I should instead live up to my highest good. The easy road is well traveled.”

To make a donation, go to http://act.pih.org and type “education” in keyword.

Also, to watch a video about a student fundraiser for Chile, go to the Ed School’s YouTube page at www.youtube.com/ HarvardEducation.

Ed.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • Summer 2010

13

the appian way Separate Ways

By Lory Hough

The landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education didn’t end segregation in schools.

What did change, says Erica Frankenberg, Ed.M.’02, Ed.D.’08, in her new study, “Splintering School Districts: Understanding the Link Between Segregation and Fragmentation,” is the nature of segregation, especially in the South.

Using one county in Alabama as her case study, Frankenberg, the research and policy director of the Initiative on School Integration at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, found that in the aftermath of the Brown case, segregation was primarily within districts; today it is primarily between districts, with individual cities and towns pulling away from larger countywide school districts that had once been a factor in increasing integration, to form their own smaller — and often not integrated — school districts.

“I first became aware of this process of fragmentation — the creation of entirely separate school districts — when one community in the county I grew up in, Mobile County, started to propose this,” she says. “I did some reading and realized how easy this is to do in Alabama.” Any city in the state with 5,000 residents is allowed to form a separate school district with just a vote of the residents.

The result is that segregation increases as more school districts are created. In Jefferson County, Alabama’s most densely populated county and the focus of her case study, which began as her qualifying paper while she was a doctoral student, there were only a few districts when the Brown case said that separate could not be equal. Using Census and other educational data, Frankenberg found that just a few years later, starting in 1959, residents in predominantly white communities began to leave the county’s school system, despite Jefferson County being under a desegregation order. Today there are 12 separate school districts. As these new, smaller districts formed, the number of white students in the larger Jefferson County district decreased. For example, in 1968, 60 percent of students in the county were white. By 2005, the figure had dropped to 43 percent, while cities like Trussville and Vestavia Hills, once part of the larger district but now separate, were each more than 80 percent white. Other breakaway cities were initially largely white but have since transitioned, some quite rapidly, to become overwhelmingly minority districts.

Frankenberg says that those who propose redrawing district lines never explicitly say it’s about race or class, of

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

course, but instead often use the phrase “local control” to defend their case.

“Traditionally, in a lot of the historical research that I did, the vague notion of wanting control over the students is not surprising,” she says. “Historically, ‘local control’ is one of the arguments for segregation in general.”

She adds, “The rhetoric of local control obscures separate and unequal conditions that have resulted jeff Hopkins, ed.m.’05 when small, new school systems form that are racially identifiable. In the creation of separate districts, local control has the same effect of maintaining segregation — to a large extent — of black and white students.”

In an article about Frankenberg’s study that was published in The Birmingham News in December, U.W. Clemon, a retired U.S. district court judge who was involved in desegregation cases in the 1960s, said that as a result of fragmentation, the schools in Jefferson County are “resegregated” today, and not by accident.

“In my view,” he said, “it was very clear that the reason for the creation of those new school systems was to avoid the obligation to desegregate.”

This pattern of fragmenting districts is not unique to Jefferson County or Alabama, Frankenberg says, which is why it’s critical that we “fully understand the longterm consequences of this process in newly created districts.” In addition to affecting housing and population patterns, she says numerous studies show that there are both academic and socialization benefits in attending integrated schools and that highquality teachers tend to leave racially isolated minority schools (but not overwhelmingly white schools) at higher rates.

Frankenberg’s interest in these issues isn’t simply academic.

Murphy High, the school she attended in Mobile, was one of the first in Alabama to begin integrating black and white students in 1963, despite public protests by the state’s then-governor, George Wallace, who famously said during his inaugural address that same year, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Although she attended the school three decades later, its legacy made a lasting impression.

“It was a remarkable experience,” she says, “and certainly informed what I do now.”

CAMPUS BRIEFS

The launch of the Ed School’s new doctoral program in educational leadership clearly struck a chord in the national press.

A segment on CBS Evening News highlighted the program as a solution to the problems in education, and Bob Herbert dedicated a New York Times column to the degree saying, “The idea is to develop dynamic new leaders who will offer the creativity, intellectual rigor and professionalism that is needed to help transform public education in the U.S.”

martha stewart

Ed.L.D. Press

Ed Head On February 26, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke at the school on a variety of topics including the administration’s plans for revamping No Child Left Behind, the challenge of evaluating teachers, and the importance of focusing on higher education attainment.

To watch the speech, visit our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/HarvardEducation.

Poster Child

The Forbes 14 (Not the Fortune 500)

Speakers at the Askwith Forums are usually the ones that make news. But on April 22, the speaker had to share the spotlight with the poster. Eric Carle, best known as the author and illustrator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, created original artwork for the poster advertising his talk, “The Education of a Good Picture Writer.”

Forbes recently named 14 educators — including six members of the HGSE community — “revolutionary educators” who are “shaking up how we educate our most disadvantaged kids.” Ed School folks included: Academic Dean Robert Schwartz, C.A.S.’68; Harlem Children’s Zone President and CEO Geoffrey Canada, Ed.M.’75; Posse Foundation President and Founder Deborah Bial, Ed.M.’96, Ed.D.’04; New Leaders for New Schools CEO and cofounder Jon Schnur, GSE’00; former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Mike Smith, Ed.M.’63, Ed.D.’70; and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a former HGSE visiting committee member.

Data Strategies

eric carle

Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, based at the Ed School, has launched a new initiative to help school districts and state leaders increase student achievement and attainment through data-informed decisionmaking.

The Strategic Data Project will help states and districts assemble and analyze their student and teacher data, providing policymakers with information about trends on student graduation and collegegoing, the effectiveness of teachers and schools, and human capital management.

Ed.

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

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

15

Outside Chance

After years in and around the criminal justice system, students find that their best hope for staying off the streets and in school is to get support, especially from other students who are making the same transition.

By gina piccalo Photography by ed carre贸n

He’s a community college counselor

who specializes in students more conventionally known as “lost causes.” They come from the streets, from drug addiction, from juvenile halls, and prisons. And, like Noel Gomez, Ed.M.’06, their lives started in poverty in communities that share more in common with war-torn developing nations than most people’s notions of America. Some of them are one strike shy of life in prison. Others have never known an adult life outside the criminal justice system. College was the last place any of them expected to end up.

Yet there they were on a cloudless day in January in a conference room with the hint of an ocean view on the campus of Santa Barbara City College (SBCC), swapping heartbreaking stories but still laughing, still inspired to move forward.

Gomez is one of the key reasons these people showed up at all. A native of Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, he grew up in the gang capital of America in the turbulent early 1990s.

His cousins were members of one of largest, most powerful gangs in the region. But Gomez, 26, had to cross two turfs to get to school.

“If I’d pled allegiance to any of these gangs, I would have been dead in two or three days,” he says.

So he stayed out, got through high school, and against the advice of a school counselor, applied — and got accepted — to the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“I just wanted to get out,” he says, wiping away the tears, “but at the same time, solve all these problems.”

He can still hardly believe he got into Harvard, let alone graduated with a master’s. But Gomez’s journey is what inspired these students to take what for them was a terrifying leap of faith and join SBCC’s six-week summer program called Transitions.

There, Gomez and others teach them how to navigate the campus, how to write essays, and read a syllabus, but also how to build trust, how to stay out of trouble, how to believe in themselves.

“A lot of these students were individuals the school system failed years ago,” he says. So he doesn’t chide them if they slip back into their old habits, get arrested, or disappear. Instead, when they do show up, Gomez tells them, “As long as you’re still here, that’s all that matters.”

In its first two years, Transitions has proven a spectacular success. Nearly all the students who participated in the summer enrolled in the fall semester and about half continued into the spring. They say they come back for the relationships they forged and the extraordinary sense of achievement that every day on campus brings them. Most striking, though, is the fact that they all graduate from Transitions with more hope than any of them have known in their lives.

“I rely on this program like it’s my life,” says one of Gomez’s students, Tia Macias, a recovering addict now studying to be a drug and alcohol counselor. “It is my life.”

Transitions is modest as so-called “re-entry” programs go. But its success is an especially marked achievement for a population whose chances of returning to prison are stagger-

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ingly high. Of the 700,000 people released from U.S. prisons each year, two-thirds will be rearrested within three years.

(The United States has the world’s highest prison population: 2.3 million. That’s a 500 percent increase over the last 30 years, despite a relatively stable crime rate.) The reasons why are myriad. This group is wrestling with substance abuse, posttraumatic stress disorder, poverty, and the lure of their old lives. Keeping them in college demands constant peer support, state and federal financial aid, an open-minded college board, and the willingness to let these students take three steps backward for every one they take forward. As Gomez admits, “It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be successful just because they’ve been through the program.”

It’s a big commitment on all sides. But as cash-strapped states seek to cut costs by reducing prison populations, it is heartening to know models like this one work.

Educating people who have spent years behind bars is just as much about compassion and humanity as it is about effective study habits and good test scores, say their counselors and teachers. People who have served time say they are dropped back into the world with shattered identities, better prepared to resume their criminal careers than they are to live healthy lives.

They say it takes them years to heal the dehumanizing experience of prison, where every day is a test of stamina, an exercise in humiliation, where people learn to sign a Department of Corrections ID number instead of their given names because they are the property of the government.

Even before prison, though, people who have been incarcerated say they often endured early lives that were virtually bereft of compassion. Many of Gomez’s students, for example, had indifferent teachers who taught them in underfunded and neglected schools. Many of them never reached the ninth grade.

They learned that crime paid better. So their criminal records became their resumes on the streets and a source of enormous respect among their peers. Leaving that world for the so-called “legitimate” life typically demands years of delayed gratification and long-shot odds.

“I’m working at McDonald’s now,” says Transitions student Ismael Hernandez, 19, who left his last probation camp last year and is now earning a 3.5 GPA. “I could easily make more money slinging dope. I could make $400 quickly. I don’t want to do that.”

Cesar Oyervides-Cisneros, Ed.M.’07, knows this story well.

He and another alum, Ariela Friedman, Ed.M.’07, work at the Manhattan-based nonprofit The Door, helping teenagers leave gangs and the street life by showing them options.

“It takes some work to convince young people that this is the more beneficial route,” says Oyervides-Cisneros. “We conduct classes and workshops where they discuss openly the different ways people make money. We talk about drug dealing, risk factors, benefits, how long can you be in this type of job, what you need to be aware of, and the risks and benefits of legitimate employment.”

The greatest challenge for this group, though, can be the willingness to reach out for help.

Ismael Hernandez

Tia Macias

“The ego can get in the way of being fully receptive to someone trying to help you,” says Senior Lecturer Ronald Ferguson, director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative. “There’s the fear that they won’t be able to understand the help. They’re afraid somebody’s going to try to explain something to them and they’re not going to understand. There’s a fear of being overwhelmed by the help.”

One of the student founders of the Transitions program, Martin Leyva, took that chance. Now 37, he left prison for the last time three years ago. He landed at Santa Barbara City College in 2008 after his felony record got in the way of a series of jobs. For him, education was the only chance he had of earning a legal, livable wage. After a few lonely weeks on campus, he recognized a lot of the faces in his classes from the probation office. He knew that, like him, they were living in isolation, members of the same group of refugees. On one hand, he found an odd sense of comfort in that loneliness. As Leyva put it, “I’d rather exile myself from society because I’m already used to society exiling me, putting me in jails, prisons, and other institutions.” On the other, Leyva realized that his best hope of success was to build a network of like-minded people.

So in the spring of 2008, Leyva started a support group for people on parole on campus as part of the school’s statefunded, federally mandated Extended Opportunity Programs and Services department, which aids the low-income and otherwise disadvantaged students. That led the department’s director, Marsha Wright, to establish Transitions and select Gomez to advise the group and recruit new students each month at the county’s monthly parole board check-ins. There, Gomez often starts conversations with the question: “What do you need to succeed?” The answers are always the same: “I

need to find motivation to succeed at school. I need to know how to read, how to study.”

The “tough on crime” legislation of the

last 30 years has, according to prison education advocates, created a sort of lost generation. These are the people Gomez seeks out, the ones who, like 30-year-old Transitions student Phillip Silva, describe their experience of school this way: “You sit in a corner and you don’t feel like you’re worth nothing.” Gomez says many of his students were labeled as troublesome by middle school and sent to so-called “continuation schools” that “have this approach of educating them as criminals. Somehow the administrators have this assumption that these kids are done.”

From there, Gomez and his students say, it’s just a short step to prison. That’s because people who are essentially raised in prison-like environments become more comfortable inside them than they are in society. Once they’re released, they’re often socially stunted. Gomez recalled his first face-to-face meeting with a middle-aged man who’d been imprisoned since age 13 and was eager to join Transitions. First, though, he had to get used to close human contact again.

“He says, ‘This is uncomfortable because there’s nothing dividing me and you,’” Gomez recalls the student saying as they sat in his office. “‘I’m not used to that. I haven’t had physical contact with an individual for such a long time.’”

Today, one of every 31 adult Americans is in jail, prison, or on probation. Prison populations have ballooned to catastrophic proportions. California, for instance, has been ordered by a three-judge federal panel to release more than 40,000 people from prison by December 2011 because it Ed.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

19

Martin Leyva

Phillip Silva

simply cannot provide them proper healthcare. That order came just two weeks after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger cut $1.2 billion from the state’s prison budget. (The court put its order on hold in January, pending further review.)

Despite the mammoth problem of overcrowding, the federal government still denies funding for the one service that people coming out of prison rank at the top of their “needs” list and that research repeatedly has shown dramatically reduces recidivism: a college education. (Notably, only one of California’s 33 prisons has an on-site college program.) The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 prohibited students with felony records from receiving Pell Grants, ending 350 prison education programs overnight, despite the fact that prison education accounted for less than 1 percent of the Pell Grant budget.

“It was devastating,” recalls Kaia Stern, director of Pathways Home and the Prison Studies Project at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.

“People who had worked for decades getting books into prison libraries were suddenly shipping them out.”

People in prison, she says, are often seen as undeserving of education. She points out that society is largely ignorant of the fact that about two-thirds of all people behind bars are serving time for nonviolent offenses, so taxpayers wonder why “the murderer” is getting a “free ride.”

“Yes, too many law-abiding Americans are struggling to pay back their student loans, but what’s up with the myth that there’s not enough education to go around?” asks Stern.

“Kerala, in South India, has a 91 percent literacy rate. We’re doing something gravely wrong in the United States. And the resistance to education behind bars speaks to a larger issue of access to quality post-secondary education for low- and mid-

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

income people. It’s a real class issue. What better population to demonize than the people with a criminal record?”

But the political will is shifting. Federal agencies, governors, and lawmakers are focusing unprecedented attention on helping people on parole integrate into society and stay out of prison. The passage of the Second Chance Act of 2008 signaled this about-face, granting $165 million per year to help state and local governments and community groups provide education, drug treatment, housing, jobs, and counseling. The law also mandated that the Justice Department increase research on reentry issues. That same year, the department, and others, set guidelines to help state governments and community organizations work together to support ex-prisoners.

Much of this renewed interest is motivated by the nation’s worst financial crisis in 80 years. It costs exponentially more to imprison people — an estimated $50 billion a year — than it does to educate them. Whatever the real motivator for the change, though, research shows that society will benefit as a result. There’s a well-proven correlation between education and lower crime rates, reduced recidivism, and healthier communities, Stern reminds us.

“And people are pushing now to figure out how to use this knowledge as momentum,” she says. “People are starting to think creatively.”

In New Jersey this year, the legislature is considering a $12 million package of bills that would not only mandate education and job training in prisons, but also make people on parole eligible for food stamps and other welfare programs.

Naturally, the academic community, though seriously thwarted by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, hasn’t given up on this population. Long-standing programs such as San Francisco State University’s Project

Rebound, the Bard Prison Initiative, the Inside-Out PrisonExchange Program at Temple University, Boston University’s Prison Education Program, and the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, to name a few, are still proving the benefits of higher education in prison.

Their results lead others to help. In 2003, Alabama Prison Arts and Education took root at Auburn University and is now creating libraries and teaching arts at 18 prisons in the state. In Boston, Bunker Hill Community College has for the last two years funded classes for about a dozen people with criminal records. After they graduate, the students are required to give back to the community by volunteering at approved nonprofits.

Last fall, Wesleyan University launched its privately funded, two-year pilot program, the Center for Prison Education, which offers a liberal arts education to inmates at Cheshire Correctional Institute.

And in September 2008, Stern and Bruce Western, director of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, launched the Prison Studies Project, which developed a four-year partnership with Boston University’s Prison Education Program and the Massachusetts Department of Correction. The program allows Harvard students to take college courses inside prisons alongside students admitted to Boston University as full students while incarcerated. Stern has co-taught two courses at MCI Norfolk and a third course at MCI Framingham, the oldest women’s prison in the United States.

At one of Stern’s so-called “inside/out” classes, Harvard students gather each week inside the prison’s school building for a three-hour “urban sociology” seminar with the incarcerated Boston University students. Everyone works together throughout the semester to find solutions to problems of race, poverty, crime, and gang violence. Initially, the contrast is striking between the incarcerated and the nonincarcerated students. But over time, they become powerful collaborators.

For the students who don’t leave the prison after class, this is an invaluable dose of humanity.

“People who are mistreated know they’re mistreated and know that our justice system is broken,” says Stern. “Students in prison have historically been excluded from educational opportunity and they can’t learn when they’re being objectified.

They may not be able to articulate dehumanization but they can feel it. And when they’re in a classroom space, which can be a kind of sacred space, being listened to, where no questions are stupid, it resonates that this is a real learning environment and education is deeply transformative.”

A large Aztec sun stone hangs on one wall

of Noel Gomez’s tiny office. It is here that parolees get their first taste of college life. The vibrant colors of two Mexican zarapes brighten the small space. But a visitor’s eye is immediately drawn to the dozens of black and white photos depicting East Los Angeles gang life. These are haunting images shot by documentary photographer Joseph Rodriguez of guns and

tattoos and barefoot children playing at the feet of brooding gangbangers.

“Every time I look at those,” Gomez says, pointing to one photo in the background in which stands his late uncle, barely discernible, “it reminds me of home.”

Gomez shares more with the Transitions students than he did with his fellow Harvard classmates or any of the other SBCC students milling around campus. Some of his most formative experiences were with heroin addicts and ex-cons. By age 10, Gomez had seen his first drive-by shooting, watching as a young man fell bleeding. Even his middle school basketball practice was interrupted by gunfire.

From this vantage point, it’s no surprise that Gomez considered Harvard “unobtainable.” But unlike the students he mentors, Gomez wasn’t burdened with a criminal record. He had just enough moxie to get beyond his disadvantages. Even so, his first semester at UC-Santa Barbara was still tough.

“Professors were expecting me to write 10- and 12-page papers,” he says. “I didn’t know what a midterm was. I didn’t know how to study for a midterm. It blew me away. I remember passing one or two classes that quarter.” Ultimately, he buckled down. He lived in the library. He used the tutors. “I totally disconnected myself from everything,” he says, “and said, ‘This is my opportunity.’”

Gomez hopes to instill a similar sense of confidence and drive in his Transitions students. He teaches a personal development class covering everything from test-taking and money management to self-defeating behaviors and learning styles.

Guest speakers — experts on prison abolitionism, cultural history, and gang intervention, as well as people who have left gang life to achieve extraordinary academic success — help augment the lesson. He also leads a mandatory weekly support group to give students a chance to vent, forge friendships, and cultivate a sense of belonging. Every Friday, the group takes a field trip to places like the Museum of Tolerance, Dodger Stadium, or to Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the nation’s largest gang intervention and re-entry program.

For Leyva, Transitions helped underscore his own commitment to change. He is now a certified substance abuse counselor and sociology major who mentors young people and won’t be satisfied until he earns a master’s degree from Stanford University. By his own admission, this is a profound evolution for a guy raised by drug-addicted convicts, who by age 10 considered himself tough enough to survive the streets, and by adulthood was an expert carjacker handy with a 9 mm.

“I learned so much about myself, my history, why I am the way I am,” he says. “I’ve learned acceptance and I’ve learned to give it on to the next person.”

— Gina Piccalo is a freelance writer based in California. This is her first piece in Ed. magazine. Ed. To view the multimedia slideshow that accompanies this story, go to www.gse.harvard.edu/ed.

Ed.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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and

illustrations by leigh wells

one

only?

Now that China’s first generation under the one-child policy has come of age, was modernization worth the price?

by lory hough

T

hey started out as just one part of China’s ambitious and controversial social experiment to modernize the country by reducing the population. As only children, they were to reap the rewards of a smaller nation and, in turn, smaller families, to become a super-educated, perfect generation.

Now grown and starting to have children of their own, China’s first generation under the state-mandated one-child policy that began in 1979 has become so much more. As Associate Professor Vanessa Fong reveals in her ongoing study of China’s singletons, as they are often called, this group of young people have unintentionally become the nation’s social safety net. On top of that already crushing burden, they have become their parents’ one and only hope.

Modernization This wasn’t the policy’s intended outcome. Initially, the decision during the late 1970s by the ruling Communist Party to set a baby quota for each couple was meant to counter the population boom that had occurred following the nation’s official independence as the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In the 1950s, the thinking was: more people = more production.

“A larger population means greater manpower,” said Hu Yaobang, an official of the Communist Youth League, at a national conference of youth worker representatives in 1958.

“The force of 600 million liberated people is tens of thousands of times stronger than a nuclear explosion.”

However, before long, this force of liberated people started to put a strain on the growing country, particularly its dwindling food supply. In an effort to rapidly convert the country from a peasant agrarian society to a modern industrial one, Chairman Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward had pulled millions of people away from farms to build roads, canals, railroads, and steel plants. From about 1958 to 1961, an estimated 30 million people died from starvation. Fong says government officials have avoided saying that overpopulation caused the famine, which they actually refer to as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters,” but nevertheless, they reversed course and started pushing for a smaller population.

Part of this new push included promoting the idea that fewer people would lead to a better standard of living, and higher quality, or suzhi, for everyone. As Fong writes in her 2004 book, Only Hope, fewer people would give each person a larger share of national resources: jobs, housing, food, water, and land. It would also allow the country to continue moving toward a modern economy but without the heavy strain encountered earlier. Fong says that in order to achieve equality with dominant, capitalistic countries like the United States, officials also pushed the idea that the country needed to become a center of finance and technology — not just provide cheap labor, as it had been doing. This meant more highly educated professionals, not more farmers or factory workers.

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

In order to do this, families would need to devote everything to their singleton, which they could easily do, they were told, since they only had one to worry about.

“Singletons who had family resources all to themselves would be healthier, wealthier, and better educated than siblings who had to compete with each other for parental investment,” Fong says the theory went.

At first, fertility limitation was voluntary, with slogans like “Late, Long, and Few.” Families were allowed two children, Fong writes, and the policy was not rigorously enforced.

Stricter enforcement began in 1979 when the government cut the number to one child for urban couples. (Exceptions were made in some areas for rural couples, ethnic minorities, and parents without siblings.) The government also set a total population goal of no more than 1.2 billion by the year 2000. At the time, China’s population was about 975 million.

(In 2000 they came close: that year, population reached 1.27 billion. China’s population today is 1.33 billion with India not far behind at 1.17 billion. In third is the United States at 308 million.) After the policy was implemented, those who did not comply were fined, stripped of jobs, and denied rations for the prohibited baby. Those who signed a pledge and followed the one-child rule were rewarded with a longer maternity leave, a health care allowance, priority for nursery school, and preferential housing. Contraceptives, abortions, and sterilization procedures are subsidized in the country.

Great Expectations Proponents argue that the government’s efforts to curb population — China makes up one-fifth of the world’s entire population — seem, at least from a numbers standpoint, sensible. Chinese authorities claim that the policy has prevented about 250 to 300 million births. However, since one-child was set in motion, critics have called the policy “draconian,” “crude,” “horrid,” “drastic” — an intrusive policy that allows the state to strip individuals of the most intimate of human rights: the decision to have a baby. Fueled by stories of forced sterilizations, infanticide, child abandonment, and high rates of abortion (especially when the fetus is female), critics also say the policy has unfairly favored boys. A 2009 study in the British Medical Journal found that China had 32 million more boys than girls under the age of 20. In rural areas where two children are allowed, there were 143 boys for 100 girls among children born second.

Critics also say the one-child policy is harsh because it unfairly unloads a huge burden on only children. Fong saw this firsthand when living in Dalian, a seaport city of about 6 million in northeastern China, while working on her dissertation during the late 1990s as an anthropology doctoral student at Harvard. In exchange for being allowed to observe students at home and in class, she took an unpaid job as an English tutor

at three schools: vocational, junior high school, and college prep. Her goal was to learn as much as she could about China’s singletons born after 1979.

What she found is that while most followed the rules — they studied hard, invested in education, and sought high-paying careers — following the rules came at a price. This first generation is under enormous pressure to succeed, not only for the country, but also for the family. As she points out in her book, quoting sociologist Viviana Zelizer, by the end of the 20th century, American children were “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.” In contrast, only children in China, while also emotionally priceless, have become economically valuable.

In many Asian cultures with long histories of filial duty, children have always taken care of parents and extended family.

A saying Fong often heard from Dalian parents was: yang er fang lao, or you raise a child to prepare for old age. And the government has used this sense of family duty to its advantage.

“The cultural model of filial duty remained one of the most salient aspects of China’s Confucian legacy,” Fong says.

“Chinese leaders continued to promote this cultural model because it allowed the state to devote its resources to promoting economic growth instead of social security.”

Today, however, there’s a big difference. With previous generations, families had many children. One — most often a son — might go on to college or a professional career while siblings worked in lower-paying but respectable factory jobs.

All of the children would take care of the extended family: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins; poorer siblings could rely on the more successful ones for support during difficult times.

That’s no longer the case and it will continue to get worse.

As The New York Times reported last July, by the year 2050, China will have 1.6 working-age adults to support every person over 60, compared with 7.7 in 1975.

“In the United States, there are pressures for only children — you may be your parents’ pride and joy,” Fong says, “but most families here have retirement funds, social security, health care, Medicare, Medicaid, and so on. In China, there isn’t a social safety net. No social security, no pensions, no widespread health insurance. In the past, the whole family was the safety net. Now this generation of singletons is the safety net.”

This is particularly difficult as parents and grandparents start to age. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reported last spring that by 2050, China would have more than 438 million people over the age of 60, with more than 100 million above 80. According to the World Bank, 71 percent of Chinese had access to state health facilities in 1981. A dozen years later, the figure dropped to 21 percent. Last October, The Washington Post reported that about 300 million people in China do not have any health insurance and that in 2005, out-of-pocket expenses for health care were more than 100 times what they were in 1980. Though the Chinese government

is currently trying to expand health insurance and pension programs for its citizens, it faces challenges given the rising cost of living and health care.

The paradox, Fong says, is that advanced medical procedures and medications are now readily available for people in China, but only if singletons can afford to pay the costs. The message being sent loud and clear to this generation, she says, is that, “You can buy years of your parents’ lives if you do well in life. Or you can not get that good job and not save your parents’ lives. It literally makes the stakes life and death.”

And parents fully recognize this. Parents “were painfully aware that their family had only one shot at a good future,” Fong writes in her book. “Therefore, they did everything they could to make that shot a good one.” During her time living in Dalian, she constantly witnessed parents and grandparents sacrificing — depleting savings to pay for tutoring, sleeping on the floor while the singleton got a bed, and skipping meals so that the child could have more. This has added to the singleton’s deep sense of pressure to do well in school, get an elite job, and be successful. They feel they must pay back the investment their families have made for all of their futures.

Learning Matters One area that has especially affected China’s singletons — in positive and not so positive ways — is education. As author Ann Hulbert wrote in a New York Times Magazine article about the pressure Chinese students face, a child’s education is a family endeavor.

“Parents whose own schooling was curtailed by the Cultural Revolution have been avid to realize their educational ambitions — the Confucian key to social and moral advancement — in the paths they chart for their ‘little emperors,’” she wrote.

The number of families sending children abroad for college, not just graduate school, has sharply increased. The New York Times reported last November that China sent 98,510 students to American universities last year, a 21 percent increase since 2007. Guidebooks about how to get into prestigious Ivy League schools have become instant bestsellers in the country, with the authors and subjects becoming household names, such as Yiting Liu, whose parents wrote Harvard Girl in 2000. (The book, among other things, described how Liu’s parents had her hold ice in her hands until they turned purple in order to improve her stamina.)

Fong says that even students from the three nonelite schools in Dalian where she observed and taught went abroad — at least a third. “It’s powerful,” she says.

On a day-to-day basis, studying has become life for China’s singletons. Few contribute to household labor, which had once been the norm, especially for girls, because it is seen as taking away from valuable study time. One father told Fong that he would shuttle snacks and drinks to his son while he studied so Ed.

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that he didn’t have to waste time walking to the refrigerator. A mother put paste on her son’s toothbrush every morning before he woke so that he could focus entirely on his lessons.

Fong says, “From 6:30 a.m. until 8 p.m., students might be in school.” High school students also attend on weekends and for part of the summer. “The culture really says all kids should be in school at all times. It’s a lot of pressure.”

Part of that has to do with the country’s rigorous and all-important exams, the first given in junior high to determine what kind of high school you’ll go to. Dalian’s junior high exam in 1999 tested students on Chinese, math, a foreign language, physics, and chemistry.

“As a 15-year-old, how well you do on that exam determines your future socioeconomic life,” Fong says. “And it’s cumulative. Every bit of knowledge you’ve accumulated since birth is going to be tested.”

Students take another high-stakes exam in high school, similar to the SAT, called gao kao, or high test, because it’s so important. Fong says that just before exam time, talk of the test is heard everywhere — on the streets, in houses, and in shops. Students who do well get into the country’s top universities and colleges. Fong found that 66 percent of the teenagers she surveyed had been tutored in a foreign language in preparation for the exam, while 88 percent had been privately tutored or had taken private afterschool classes.

In an effort to keep students focused, Fong says distracting romances between students are widely discouraged and extracurricular activities are minimal. Few students play afterschool sports or join clubs like the student newspaper or drama. As one Dalian parent told his daughter who had just been accepted to a college prep high school, “Think of yourself as having entered a jail. From now on, you must focus entirely on your studies. Like a prisoner, you will not have any freedom to do the things you enjoy.”

Girl Support Despite this, Fong says the emphasis on advanced learning has brought some positives to this generation. For starters, limited free time and tight supervision, while stressful, also means children tend to be less involved in negative activities; drug use among this age group is minimal and gangs are uncommon. Few have cars. Every child in China is also raised to value education, no matter where he or she comes from, poverty or wealth. Everyone has the potential to do better than the previous generation.

“There isn’t this thinking that if your parents are poor, you’re destined to be poor,” she says. “The lower classes feel they can go up, especially if they invest a lot in their one child. The entire society is supposed to be upwardly mobile.”

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Another unintended benefit, perhaps one that Westerners would be the most surprised by, is that the one-child policy has allowed more girls to get a quality education.

“Urban daughters born under China’s one-child policy have benefited from the demographic pattern produced by that policy,” Fong writes in her 2002 paper, “China’s One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters.” Although she acknowledges the “devastating effect of gender norms on daughters” who were born before 1979, and that China’s social structure still has gender inequality, the absence of brothers has actually allowed girls to push the limits of the glass ceiling.

“Prior to the one-child policy, most girls were raised to be losers,” she writes in her book. Males were favored because they passed on the family name and got better jobs that could better support the family; parents had little incentive to invest in daughters.

However, since one-child went into effect, singleton daughters have enjoyed unprecedented parental support because they do not have to compete.

“Low fertility enabled mothers to get paid work, and thus gain the ability to demonstrate their filiality by providing their own parents with financial support,” Fong says. “Because their mothers have already proven that daughters can provide their parents with old age support, and because singletons have no brothers for their parents to favor, daughters have more power than ever before to defy disadvantageous gender norms while using equivocal ones to their own advantage.”

Singleton Futures More than 12 years after she started her research on the teenagers of Dalian, “Teacher Fong,” as she became known, continues to track where they are and how the policy has affected them. Almost every summer since she left in 1999, she has gone back for a reunion. The gatherings are partly social, a way to reconnect with old friends, but also a chance to continue observing her subjects, now in their 20s, and to expand on her original research. As an anthropologist, this has become a gold mine for Fong; she now has a deep catalog of information about this first generation. Initially, in addition to observing, she also conducted a survey of 2,273 teenagers in 1999 (average age 16 at the time), which focused on their attitudes, educational histories, family structures, socioeconomic backgrounds, and interactions with parents. She has since compiled updated information from about 1,000 of the original group — what their college experiences were like, where they work, how their original choices affected their education, and so on. Eventually she hopes to get updates from all 2,273.

“A longitudinal study can uncover things that you can’t when you do a shorter study one time,” Fong says. “I actually have data on the decisions these young people made 10 years ago. It’s great not to have to rely on just their memories.”

One new area that currently interests Fong is how this first generation of singletons is choosing to parent. She has starting tracking their children and will continue to do so every two years starting at age two. Currently, the oldest is about four. This second generation under the policy will eventually be given the same survey that their parents got when they were teenagers.

“A lot of the kids, when they were kids, would say they’d never pressure their own children the way they were pressured,” she says. “They would let their kids play and sleep more, not study 20 hours a day. They often told me these fantasies about how they would raise their children differently.”

But she’s finding that many are ambivalent — a feeling that reflects the nation’s overall feelings about the policy three decades later.

“Some say they were lonely as only children,” Fong says.

“Some of the students from poorer families say that with limited resources, they are glad they didn’t have a sibling and now they don’t want their child to go without. Some who initially resisted say, ‘My parents meant well,’ and they appreciate them.”

Others are starting to follow the same patterns — but even earlier.

“Some in this generation of ‘perfect children’ now want to be ‘perfect parents,’” she says. “Some mothers can get their two-year-olds to recite the entire English alphabet, count to 100, read more than 100 Chinese characters, speak more than 60 words in English, recite 10 Tang-era Chinese poems, and recite the multiplication table up to 9x9.”

Moving forward, Fong’s research could help officials in China as they struggle with the decision to end, or at least alter, the one-child policy, as has been widely reported in the media recently. In addition to nervousness about an aging population and no safety net, there are also labor concerns. Factories are reporting a shortage in the number of young people willing or able to work. There are also not enough white-collar jobs for every young person as they assumed there would be after studying and sacrificing hard their whole lives.

In February, the China Daily reported that Zhao Baige, deputy director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said the policy would “remain unaltered.”

In some ways, says Harvard Professor James Watson, a China scholar and Fong’s dissertation advisor, the government’s decision is almost irrelevant at this point.

“The Chinese government is resisting the obvious need to relax or stop the single-child policy, but it doesn’t really matter what the government does,” he says. “Urbanites are not interested in large families and the biggest problem facing China, as well as Korea and Japan, is a general decline of fertility, especially among the professional classes. Taiwan and Hong Kong, two Chinese territories without birth regulation policies, have the lowest fertility rates in the world. The single-child family policy is a relic of the Cold War and when it finally ends, no one will even notice.”

More than 30 years after the policy was implemented, Fong says one child is now part of the culture in China.

“Many singletons will not want to even have one child, or certainly not more than one or two,” she says. “They tell me about how expensive it was for their parents, especially education. There is virtually no financial aid in China and lots of people feel they need to hire tutors and extra help. In addition, long years of schooling delay marriage and childbearing, Fong points out, especially for women, and not just in China.

“The government is watching this generation carefully,” she says. “Once they see that this generation isn’t going to start having a lot of children, they will let the policy go. It costs them a lot of bad press.” Ed. Ed.

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BOY Oh

BOY! A new book by three alumni details how media perpetuates the myth of hyper-masculinity

By MARY TAMER

I

t is rare for me to gain an assignment as a result of maternal profiling, but this was one such occasion.

As the mother of two boys, would I be willing to write about a new book produced by three Harvard Graduate School of Education alumni — Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D.’89, Sharon Lamb, Ed.M.’80, Ed.D.’88, and Mark Tappan, Ed.D.’87 — called Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons from Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes?

Without hesitation, I signed on, with the hope of emerging from the process with a new, media-savvy skill set that would help me navigate my 9- and 11-year-old sons through boyhood intact. Still, as my list of questions for the authors grew, so too did my own queries surrounding whether my husband and I had instilled enough of the right messages in our children to counteract the growing tsunami of all the others around them. Would they remain kind to their friends and committed to their schoolwork, as we hoped, or move toward a more stereotypically masculine model that has been craftily — and expensively — manufactured and marketed to young men?

In pursuit of the truth, and armed with the book’s key points, I posed the first of many questions to my nine-yearold regarding whether he thought it was OK for boys to be considered “smart” in school.

“It’s OK for now,” he said, “but once boys get to high school, it’s not OK anymore.”

Before counting all of the ways in which I may have gotten lost on the parenting pipeline, my eyes were now fully opened to the fact that my own son was not immune to the multitude of external messages swirling around him. Whether they had been delivered by books, TV shows, or simply peer contact, I didn’t know, but it was clear to me that Brown, Lamb, and Tappan did, based, in great part, on what they culled from their survey of more than 600 boys from around the country on how they perceive their path to manhood as well as what may influence them along the way. As the authors note in their book, and despite the best intentions of parents and teachers, the influences of media and marketing are “far more pervasive and insidious” than most of us would ever expect.

“They are bombarded by a million different things,” says Lamb, a psychotherapist and professor of mental health at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, as well as the mother of two sons. “I’d rather say there isn’t one thing you are going to show your son that is really bad, but the inescapability of this is that the messages are all around them. There is a cumulative effect versus one seriously bad, problematic thing.”

Unfortunately for boys everywhere, that cumulative effect may be leaving its mark. While some experts, educators, and writers dispute the existence of an alleged “boy crisis,” calling it a myth at best, other experts and indicators tell a different tale, one that includes compelling statistics pointing

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to a downward, multiyear trend in young male achievement.

Today, girls perform better in school, graduate at higher rates, and earn more college degrees. Boys, on the other hand, have a greater likelihood of being diagnosed with learning disorders and placed in special education classrooms. They like school less and drop out more.

Without question, the root causes of all the aforementioned issues have a multitude of factors and theories behind them, as educators and experts point to issues of race, socioeconomic background, and male brain structure. But what about the role media plays?

“In general, our culture has taken a laissez-faire attitude about boys, thinking that what they are watching and seeing isn’t going to hurt them,” says Tappan, a professor at Colby College in Maine and director of its education program, “but there’s a wider concern. Most people let their boys play video games, watch World Wrestling on TV, and don’t give it a second thought. Our feeling is they should give it a second thought.”

The Making of Boyhood Interestingly, the birth of Packaging Boyhood was a direct result of an earlier publication by Brown and Lamb called Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes, which was released in 2006.

As the two authors promoted their award-winning book about girls at separate speaking engagements around the country, both found themselves facing the same question time and time again: “What about the boys?”

“I’d get frustrated and think, ‘Why am I supposed to be an expert on boys?’” says Lamb, who, like Brown, had worked as a graduate student with former Ed School professor and noted gender studies author Carol Gilligan. “In some ways it was the other side of the coin” and in some ways, it wasn’t.

Brown, a professor of education at Colby College and parent (together with Tappan) to a 14-year-old daughter, says she has mixed reactions about the expectation.

“But I understood because it was the natural question and it made a lot of sense,” she says. “Even when we were writing the first book, it seemed that the media had so commercialized gender. When you watch TV and see the ads, there are rarely any products that cross gender lines. It’s all pink for girls, and all speed and control and power for boys. Even in doing the research for girls we were struck by the fact that there was a different set of messages for boys.”

Given their long history of focusing on girls, however, Brown says their initial reaction was, “Can you just let us focus on girls? So much had already been done on boys, so this reaction was very familiar and we were almost irritated by it, but, having done the girl book, it piqued our interest enough that we wanted to go back to it.”

So they did, this time with a third party in tow, fellow Ed School alum Mark Tappan, a developmental psychologist who has also been Brown’s husband since graduate school.

Tappan’s expertise in boys’ development and education, as well as media cultural analysis, was a perfect fit, as was his work with the Maine Boys Network, an outreach organization committed to the positive emotional and academic growth of young men.

As Tappan explains, Brown and Lamb invited him to join the project to “tackle this issue of how media and marketers shape the messages they send, and how these messages inform the broader culture conversation about boys, their academic achievement, and the other issues in their lives.” Data was drawn from an online survey developed by the authors and virally distributed — via teachers, former students, colleagues, and parents — to a nonscientific sample of boys attending schools throughout the United States.

“We tried to get as many boys as we could, or parents of younger boys,” says Tappan. “We asked them about the clothes they like to wear, the music they like to hear, the

books they read, the TV shows they watch. That was a way for us to identify the things we needed to look at more closely.”

Tappan also had some students from one of his Colby classes conduct media analysis, sending them to toy stores for observational research to help provide what he calls “starting points.”

“We knew we wouldn’t be able to cover everything,” says Tappan. “We missed a lot of music and we didn’t cover the whole range, but we tried to cover whole genres. In any category, there are things we didn’t look at closely, but we looked at the most popular video games or the most popular books.”

Among the books closely reviewed are some found in my family’s home library, including the bestselling Harry Potter series — widely considered excellent for the role models and positive messages — as well as the wildly popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid collection, which features Greg, the young “slacker” protagonist who is bullied by his older brother, Roderick, among others. According to my nine-year-old, Greg “stinks at school and sports and only has one friend.” Not exactly a figure to emulate in his mind, yet the stories clearly resonate with others. To date, the series of four books by author Jeff Kinney has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, and his website receives more than 100,000 hits per day. In March, the movie version of the series was released nationwide.

Tappan says they aren’t telling people not to read books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, but to be cognizant of how images are being marketed to boys and can send the message that boys aren’t interested in school.

Slackers, for example, are extremely popular in movies and television shows now. While lovable, these couch potato goofs often hate school and have “I don’t care about anything” attitudes.

“It’s another example of how the slacker image has become more and more pervasive,” he says. “In our book, we looked at how pervasive the media is in general, and that is a concern. In all of these examples, our approach as parents is that you can’t forbid your kid to encounter these things, but you can use them as a basis for conversations. Many parents aren’t having these conversations with their boys about media.”

And here’s why they should. As Packaging Boyhood states in its introduction, the media’s portrayal of young men is a story in which those with the most power often have the wrong kind of power.

“They are the bullies, narcissistic athletes, ‘dogs,’ or ‘players’ — the ones who call the shots and get the scantily clad, booty-jiggling, music video girls,” reads the introduction. “It’s a story that teaches boys that they need to avoid humiliation at all costs, seek revenge if wronged, dress to impress and intimidate, be tech savvy, show wealth, and take risks, all while pretending they don’t care about any of it. This is the media’s version of boy power.”

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Stereotypes As the authors discovered, boys are not marginalized or “left out” by the media in the same way girls are. Both are told that power is important, but for boys, this means being strong and powerful; for girls, it means having the power to shop or look sexy. All one has to do is walk down a cereal aisle, or peruse movie theater offerings, to see who really is king at the box office or on the cereal box. Yet boys are still being put in a defined box, pegged as rough-and-tumble risktakers who embrace a slacker, I-don’t-care lifestyle.

“Boys are complex, interesting, and hard to pin down,” write the authors. “But the way popular culture defines what it means to be a boy has become narrower and narrower.”

Tappan, Lamb, and Brown also say that boys and girls, while different, are not as vastly dissimilar as media would suggest. All girls, for example, are not boy-crazy, shopaholic divas, nor are all boys aggression-loving, powerhungry players.

But how early do these stereotypical messages begin to seep in and what can counteract them? For parents who follow the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics of no TV prior to the age of two, where do these messages begin?

And, for those of us who purchased dolls and kitchen sets for our sons along with Legos and Tonka toys, where did we go wrong?

“Studies show that boys and girls, as infants, are handled and treated differently by gender, and that speaks to the way we all . . . interact with kids,” says Brown. “I think the media impacts children almost immediately because of the way we interact with them, but when children start to really identify around gender and class and race is around three years old. Little girls who have a lot of media influences begin to naturally assume they should like pink and princesses, and the same is true for boys, who believe that they should like dark colors and trucks. Boys are also told that real boys don’t cry and big boys don’t act this way.

“In terms of play, there’s a little more gender bending for girls allowed; girls can do sports, play with trucks, and be tomboys,” continues Brown. “While this is outside of my experience, my inclination is that fantasy is a really important part of kids coming to know who they are, and being able to cross gender boundaries is a healthy exploration. A boy is not going to become a girl because he dresses in girl’s clothing, for example, but in this culture, because there is so much anxiety around masculinity, there is pressure for fathers not only to be masculine themselves but to raise ‘real’ boys.”

Nor is a boy going to become a bad guy, say the authors, because he reads some of the books, watches some of the shows, or listens to types of music that portray males as less than exemplary role models.

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photos: Istockphoto.com

“One of our messages in the end is there are still really important conversations parents and teachers can have with boys about the narrow stereotypes that are not benign but could have an effect on their propensity for violence or their performance in school or how they treat girls,” says Tappan.

“At Colby, there is an ongoing concern about the drinking culture, and by and large the most serious offenders are men.

It’s easy to take a ‘boys will be boys’ attitude, but I think there could be more conversations with boys growing up about those kinds of messages.”

Continuing the Conversation Lamb, the mother of two sons, aged 17 and 23, says she was fortunate to have live research subjects at home, even if they were not always willing participants — a problem I also encountered when my previously quoted nine-year-old saw his name, since removed, in this article.

“I’d go see the macho movies and they wouldn’t want to watch them with me,” says Lamb, who subjected herself to violent, action-based films as part of her study. “I’d go out to movies alone most of the time.”

What her boys did do, however, was clue her in to some disturbing websites, raising the issue that TV alone is not the enemy in perpetuating gender stereotypes toward children and young adults.

“If your children are watching TV, co-viewing with them as much as you can and talking to them about what they are watching is optimal,” says Lamb. “I think we also have to get parents in the mindset that TV is not the villain. Once a child is over five or six they are bombarded with media, from other kids, the Internet, and movies. Adolescents are watching TV less and less, and they are on the computer more. Over time, we won’t have the same access to what they see, so we need to teach them to be critical viewers.”

And we, as parents, need to be critical viewers as well, able to offer our children commentary and constructive feedback as to what they see, hear, and read in a world that offers a limited view on the true making of a man, as the authors of Packaging Boyhood clearly show.

We also need to listen, regardless of how uncomfortable the content of the conversation may be.

“I think the most important thing always, if we are talking to boys or girls, is getting our own stuff together as adults,” says Brown. “We asked them on the survey, ‘How would you like adults to talk to you about this?’ The response was ‘tell them calmly’ and ‘stop overreacting.’ We have to get our own stuff together and deal with our own strong feelings so we can have a genuine conversation. . . . You can’t have a conversation if you are not willing to listen.”

— Mary Tamer is a Boston-based freelance writer. Her most recent stories in Ed. looked at spaced education and the new presidents program. Ed. Go to www.packagingboyhood.com to learn more about the book, resources, and media literacy sites.

You can also read a Q & A with the authors.

Introducing the S-Word As soon as he’s old enough to be sorting out gender and asking what makes a boy a boy and a girl a girl — ages three, four, and five — you can introduce the S-word: stereotype. Maybe not even the word at this young age, but the idea. He’ll be getting messages everywhere in the media that as a boy he should love all those other S-words like superheroes, speed, and sports. He’ll get the message that boys are hyper, tough, and over-the-top, that emotions (other than aggression and anger) are for girls, and that he should enjoy grossing people out with farts and burps. Because these expectations are so pervasive in media, you can begin this conversation pretty much anytime and anywhere. We recommend you start with the next trip to the toy store. Thanks to all those pesky marketers, all you’ll need for a lively conversation has been carefully planned and laid out for you in the pink and blue/black aisles of Toys “R” Us or Wal-Mart.

You have one very big thing in your favor with little boys: They love you openly. They want you around. They think you know everything worth knowing. They’re much more likely to believe you than a 30-second commercial or even a row of action figures. So jump in. You might think that distracting him from media images is the best approach at this age, but trust us, it won’t work for long.

Stereotypes are so pervasive and marketers are so clever about grabbing his attention, that the best approach is a direct one. You are inoculating him, in a sense, by giving him what he needs to fight and resist the toxic messages that will, in time, discourage him from toys, activities, and people that nurture all sides of his personality and provide him with the social and emotional intelligence so important for a rich and full life.

An excerpt from Packaging Boyhood, pages 271–272.

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in the media Your early books were parents’ guides. How did you get into picture books for children?

My first book, Learning Through Play in 1972, was for parents and teachers.

My second book, Close Your Eyes, came six years later and was for children. In between, Scholastic had hired me to be the editor of Let’s Find Out, a kindergarten magazine. I worked with a super art director, Carol Devine Carson, and with fantastic illustrators, one of which was Susan Jeffers. One day I showed Susan a poem that I had written when my first child was born. She liked it, and her publisher bought it. That was Close Your Eyes.

with

Jean Marzollo

Jean Marzollo, M.A.T.’65, considers herself lucky that she graduated from the Ed School at the time that she did. “It was the late ’60s, a boom time for early childhood education,” she says, citing the creation of both Head Start (1965) and Sesame Street (1969) as examples. During this time of national interest and investment in education, Marzollo — after stints teaching English at Arlington [Mass.] High School and working with Harvard’s Upward Bound Program (for disadvantaged teens who were in danger of dropping out) — was inspired to change gears. When former Ed School dean Francis Keppel started a company to develop educational materials, Marzollo packed her bags for New York City and began work at Keppel’s General Learning Corporation (GLC), concentrating on new research in early childhood education. “It didn’t seem to matter to GLC, or to me for that matter, that I wasn’t trained for the field. There was important work to do!” she remembers.

It was work she took to quickly. In fact, in time, Marzollo realized that, rather than shepherd through materials of outside developers, she wanted to create them herself. And so she did. First as writer and editor of several parents’ guides and children’s periodicals, and then as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, including the successful I SPY series.

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Tom DiMauro

oneonone

No. My work is like the work I happily gave myself in third grade when I was obsessed with making doll clothes.

I never ran out of ideas then, and I don’t now. I love to make things!

I love to visit schools and talk with kids in grades PreK–3. Kids are interesting, creative, smart, funny, and eager to learn.

I worry that, because of all testing today in schools, kids will value facts over ideas and creative thinking. I’m glad that when I was young, no one ever made me fear my ideas. My father always said, “It’s fine to be different.”

What are your school visits like?

I was very nervous the first time I spoke in front of an auditorium packed with kids. I was more or less a natural teacher, but I’m not a natural speaker. In time I learned to speak in front of a big audience. I have a slide show to keep me on track. In classrooms I like to watch kids use my interactive online books.

images: istockphoto.com

Did it surprise you how many stories you had in you…

130 and counting?

They can be projected onto a SMART Board, and kids can come up to “turn pages” and play the educational games at the end.

How did I SPY — your series of books of picture riddles — come about?

Odds & Ends (original) ©1982 Walter Wick

When I was editor of Let’s Find Out, I went into the office one day and found in my mailbox a promotional picture by a photographer named Walter Wick. I did not know him, but I loved his photograph of small hardware store-type objects.

It was perfect for kindergarten because it was beautiful, clear, and interesting.

Carol and I asked Walter to make a big poster called “Fasteners” of zippers, buttons, shoelaces, nails, and so on. Walter did a fabulous job, and we hired him again to make a “Welcome to School” poster of kindergarten blocks and toys.

Even though he had never done work for young children before, his photography was perfect for them. Eventually, Cartwheel Books at Scholastic asked if Carol, Walter, and I would like to create a book. We all said yes.

Are you surprised by its continued popularity?

Even before it was a printed book, the first proofs caused a buzz at Scholastic.

In the office, people were looking at it

and playing the game. So Scholastic knew it was going to be a hit with kids and their parents, too. The official publication date was [set for] April 1992, but Scholastic rushed I SPY into the stores for the 1991 Christmas season. In 2011, it will be 20 years old! I am grateful for its success and all the people at Scholastic who continue to make it happen.

Why write in what you call “rhythm and rhyme?”

My mother, father, and grandmother recited poems by heart. All the poems I heard and loved had rhythm and rhyme.

To me, it’s like music without a tune, and it comes naturally to me, just the way rap does to many children today. Do you know that you can rap every I SPY book? Fifth-graders in Miami told me that. It works!

Who is I SPY’s target reader?

The child of any age who likes to go on a hunt! As I SPY continues, we need to be mindful of its kindergarten roots. I SPY books do not depend on kids understanding abstractions, such as the word “Canada.” If I call for “CANADA,” I call for a word spelled in uppercase letters that match. Nor does I SPY depend on kids having a knowledge base. Instead of calling for “the 16th president of the United States,” I call for a penny or a coin or a face. To play, all kids of any age need are a reasonable vocabulary of familiar objects and visual discrimination skills.

For this reason, the I SPY target reader includes the child learning English as a second language and the child with special needs.

Ed.

You’ve recently started illustrating some of your books. Why? I started painting in 2000 during a stressful time. I found that painting took my brain to a peaceful place where it couldn’t be bothered with worrying. I was too busy thinking about the next color and shape. Watercolor inspires me to be free and open to whatever happens on the paper. Also, I can listen to music while painting! Can’t do that when writing. At first, I was just going to paint for fun, but then I tried illustrating. And guess what? It was as much fun as making doll clothes.

The books that you illustrate have a soft, classic feel to them, in contrast to the modern sleekness of the I SPY books. Was this conscious?

Thank you. The paint on good watercolor paper comes out soft for me. It just seems to happen that way, and I like it. I learned Photoshop and was able to put my painted pieces together like — you guessed it — sewing. I did sew most of my clothes when I was in high school and college. Now when I am illustrating my books and listening to music, I feel like a teenager again.

And now a question from a fan, my three-yearold daughter. She asks: Will you come to our house?

Sure! I have a sister who lives in Somerville, and next time I visit her, I’ll come to your house.

Better yet, I’ll come to her school.

— Marin Jorgensen

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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in the media Educating Democratic Citizens in Troubled Times: Qualitative Studies of Current Efforts

Pierre the Penguin: A True Story

Edited by Janet Bixby and Judith Pace

Sleeping Bear Press, 2010

John Carfora and Arnold Shore

SUNY Press, 2008

SAGE, 2010

This book offers a groundbreaking examination of citizenship education programs that serve contemporary youth in schools and communities across the United States. These programs include social studies classes and curricula, school governance, and community-based education efforts. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the experiences and perspectives of educators and youth involved in these civic education efforts. The contributors offer analyses of how mainstream and alternative programs are envisioned and enacted, and of the most important factors that shape them. A variety of theoretical lenses and qualitative methodologies are used, including ethnography, focus group interviews, and content analyses of textbooks. Janet Bixby, Ed.M.’89, is associate professor of education at Lewis and Clark College.

Judith Pace, Ed.D.’98, is associate professor of education at the University of San Francisco.

This children’s book tells the brave story of Pierre, an African penguin at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who, in 2006, began to go bald. As he lost the feathers that kept him warm and made him identifiable to other penguins, he began to get picked on and stopped swimming in the cold water.

Aquatic biologists worked quickly to find a solution. They designed a neoprene vest that acted as a wet suit and allowed Pierre to move his wings and flippers. Within six weeks his feathers began to grow back.

Jean Marzollo, M.A.T.’65, has written more than 130 books and resides in upstate New York (see page 34).

Books The Art of Funding and Implementing Ideas

This resource provides a stepby-step approach to turning a research idea into a proposal worthy of funding. The authors present a proven approach to the development of research ideas alongside a systematic treatment of proposals sectionby-section and project management function-by-function. Highly accessible, this book gives examples for each aspect of the proposal development and works through sketches of ideas to fully developed proposal sections. John Carfora, Ed.M.’93, is executive director for Research Advancement and Compliance at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School Rubén GaztambideFernández Harvard University Press, 2009

The Best of the Best attempts to unmask the often elite world of preparatory boarding schools by examining the educational experiences of a group of students attending a prestigious New England boarding school.

Gaztambide-Fernández spent two years researching the day-to-day lives of several students to document “the cultural practices through which they internalize elite status and convince themselves they deserve what they get.” The book ventures down a path not often covered by educational research: abundance, elite opportunity, and the most privileged of educational settings. Rubén GaztambideFernández, Ed.M.’00, Ed.D.’06, is assistant professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

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The Graduate Student James Polster

Stay Thirsty Press, 2009

When anthropology graduate student Blackwell James returns from the Amazon jungle with a trunk full of hallucinogenic vines, but no research notes, his life suddenly becomes a wild tale of adventure, suspense, and intrigue.

In an attempt to help Blackwell finish his Ph.D., his professor secures a job for him in Los Angeles, a place he has never been, to work on a primate experiment.

Caught up in the secret ambitions of his employers, James enters a world of movies and movie stars, murder, money, a secret society, a ghost town, and several shamanistic drug-induced journeys.

James Polster, Ed.M.’82, is an awardwinning novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and producer.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

Jean Marzollo

Strike Zone: The Games of Baseball & Money S.L. Hudson

Self-published, 2009

A desire to educate young people on the inner workings of finance and personal financial management spurred Hudson to write Strike Zone, a sports-themed novel following high school freshman Dan Martin’s quest to fund a trip to his baseball team’s championship game.

The author introduces readers to concepts of negotiation, interest rates, budgeting, and decisionmaking. The book is intended to encourage middle- and high-school-aged children to get involved in finance early in life through an accessible and user-friendly format. S.L. Hudson, Ed.M.’78., lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with her husband John.

Trophy Wives Don’t Need Advanced Physics: Dubious Words of Wisdom from Physics Students Boris Korsunsky Pi Press, 2009

Korsunsky, a physics teacher for decades, discovered the quotes collected in Trophy Wives over the years

ON MY BOOKSHELF: Lecturer Shari Tishman, director of Project Zero Currently reading: I’m almost finished with The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.

much away, but I can say that, so far, the book is very, very good.

First impressions: Kingsolver is a wonder- Last great read: Two books come to mind:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz and Waiting by Ha Jin. On the surface, these books couldn’t be more different in tone. The Díaz book is manic and intense, linguistically and emotionally bursting at the seams, while Waiting is quiet, ironic, slow-paced, and wistful. But in their very different ways, both books tell fascinating stories about yearning, youth, and hope.

Favorite spot to curl up with a good book: One spot I like is a chair by a picture window in my living room that looks out onto a birdfeeder in the backyard. But the truth is

Noneducation genre of choice: Fiction mainly, but not exclusively. To be honest, I love to read, and I enjoy good books in almost any area. My reading-for-pleasure philosophy has always been “top of the genre.”

How you find the time: If there’s a good book at hand, time finds me.

tanit sakakini

ful writer. I’m more of a maximalist than a minimalist in my reading tastes, and I like the great sweep of her books (anyone who has read The Poisonwood Bible knows what I mean). I also like her clarity and her compassion. The main character in the book is a young man whose unusual childhood is spent partly in the United States and partly in Mexico… . The boy eventually finds work in the household of [artists] Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the same time as Trotsky and his entourage came to stay. I don’t want to give too

that I do most of my reading for pleasure in bed at night before falling asleep. Many years ago I read a quote from a writer that said something to the effect that there is no better feeling to carry you through the day than the comfort of knowing there’s a good book waiting on your night table. I haven’t been able to find the source of the quote — but it is so true!

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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in the media in various tests, lab reports, papers, and notes. The book serves as comic relief for any physics teacher or student, but can also be used in the classroom as a serious conversation-starter in discussions about the quality of student writing.

The book can be previewed at www. funstudentquotes.com. Boris Korsunsky, Ed.D.’03, is a physics teacher at Weston High School in Massachusetts.

Women’s Rights, Racial Integration, and Education from 1850–1920: The Case of Sarah Raymond, the First Female Superintendent Monica Noraian

Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Although she held an important position of educational leadership for 18 years, Sarah Raymond’s story has been largely overlooked. This historical biography

of Raymond examines her abolitionist roots growing up on a stop of the Underground Railroad; her training at a “normal school;” and her tenures as teacher, principal, and the nation’s first female city school superintendent. Being the first woman in the country to serve as superintendent of a city school system, she signaled a fundamental shift in how communities understood leaders and

harvard education Press

Key Elements of Observing Practice: A Data Wise DVD and Facilitator’s Guide

A Policy Reader in Universal Design for Learning

Kathryn Parker

Harvard Education

Boudett,

Press, 2009

Elizabeth City, and Marcia Russell

A Policy Reader comprises a collection of noteworthy articles that address the challenges and opportunities policymakers are faced with as they consider the federal, state, and local policy implications of universal design for learning principles in action.

The book provides an examination of how these principles might inform crucial contemporary dialogue about accountability and access to curriculum and an overall discussion about the education field as a whole. It concludes by reflecting on current assessments of student learning and teacher effectiveness and points to how they might be improved through the implementation of universal design for learning practices.

Laura Shifter, Ed.M.’07, is a doctoral student at the Ed School and works at the Center for Applied Special Technology.

Harvard Education Press, 2010

This DVD and facilitator’s guide, a follow-up to the book Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning, offer further support and tools for developing teachers’ capacity to learn from their own practice. The DVD includes a 20-minute film that follows members of one school team as they apply the five key elements of observing instruction and videos that offer closer investigation of each element. The facilitator’s guide provides meeting agendas, protocols, and discussion questions to help principals, teachers, academic counselors, and other professionals in education use the video segments to structure their conversations with colleagues about observing practice. Kathryn Parker Boudett is the director of the Data Wise Project at the Ed School. Elizabeth City, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D.’07, is executive director of the Doctor of Education Leadership Program at the Ed School. Marcia Russell, Ed.M.’09, is a doctoral student at the Ed School.

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Edited by David

Gordon, Jenna Gravel, and Laura Shifter

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

Strategic Priorities for School Improvement

Edited by Caroline Chauncey Harvard Education Press, 2010

Organized around the four key areas outlined in the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top program, this volume presents a

collection of seminal articles on standards and assessment; using data to improve learning; recruiting and retaining great teachers and leaders; and turning around failing school. Caroline Chauncey is the editor of the Harvard Education Letter.

What Next?

Educational Innovation and Philadelphia’s School of the Future Edited by Mary Cullinane and Frederick Hess Harvard Education Press, 2010

In 2006 the school district of Philadelphia teamed up with the Microsoft Corporation to redesign the American high school.

The result was the School of the Future, where technology played a crucial role in redesigning and rethinking the models for teaching and learning.

The school’s trademark framework for decisionmaking, the “6 Is” — introspection, investigation, inclusion, innovation, implementation, and, again, introspection — is now being used by organizations in more than 15 countries. The book offers a detailed study of the school’s first three years, revealing what the School of the Future can teach us about high school redesign, public-private partnerships, and the use of technology in school reform.

Frederick Hess, Ed.M.’90, is director of educational policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

leadership. Monica Noraian, Ed.M.’91, is director of the History–Social Sciences Education Program at Illinois State University, where she also serves as an assistant professor.

teaching hospital in Boston and runs a small health counseling practice, La Manzanita Homestead.

Blogs and More

Adi Flesher

Building Understanding www.dennisharter.com/blog Dennis Harter

Harter’s blog focuses on education, technology, leadership, and learning.

Harter, an educator in international schools for more than 16 years, writes about how schools are preparing students for success in their futures.

With understanding at the heart of real learning, he advocates that students must construct their own meaning based on their learning experiences.

Education must also foster tolerance and appreciation for all cultures. Building Understanding looks at the obstacles schools face and how technology, learning leadership, and curricular shifts can ensure that students are getting the knowledge, tools, and skills they need to be the kind of people needed for the future. Dennis Harter, Ed.M.’97, is the high school technology and learning coordinator at International School Bangkok in Thailand.

La Manzanita Health Counseling www.manzanitahomestead.blogspot.com Laura Zanini

Zanini’s blog, as well as her business, La Manzanita Homestead, revolves around her passion for unprocessed food that comes from plants and humanely raised animals, not the highly processed contents of prepackaged food. Her goal is to support human health and to help people better manage their lives through food and healthy lifestyle choices. She works with individuals, couples, and employers who support the health and well-being of their teams. Laura Zanini, Ed.M.’93, is a health educator at a

Mind and Brain Interest Committee http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/ flesher/home The Mind and Brain Interest Committee was created by Flesher, a graduate student at the Ed School studying in the Mind, Brain, and Education Program, with a group of high school students from Brookline High School’s School within a School. The goal of the committee is to explore the nature of minds and brains in a hope of imagining ways this topic can be taught and explored in school settings.

Adi Flesher, Ed.M.’10, is a master’s student at the Ed School.

use of adaptive technology to increase student achievement. Dockterman is a regular contributing author for the blog’s site. Academics and experts are invited to enhance the conversation by submitting their own comments. David Dockterman, Ed.D.’88, is adjunct lecturer on education in the Technology, Innovation, and Education Program at the Ed School and is vice president and chief academic officer at Tom Snyder Productions, where for more than 20 years he has developed award-winning educational software for the classroom.

Spaghetti for Breakfast www.betsybowman.blogspot.com Betsy Bowman

Since August of 2009, Bowman has been a volunteer teacher for The Haitian Project, a Catholic Mission which supports and operates L’ouverture Cleary School, a tuition-free, Catholic, co-educational secondary boarding school for economically underprivileged Haitian children. This is Bowman’s daily blog detailing her life in Haiti, her interactions with students, and the current struggles and accomplishments after the devastating earthquake that ravaged Haiti in January 2010. Betsy Bowman, Ed.M.’02, will be in Haiti for the remainder of the 2009–2010 academic calendar, continuing with her volunteer teaching position. (For a Q&A with Bowman conducted just weeks after the earthquake, visit www.gse.harvard.edu/ news_events.)

The Math Hub http://blog.tomsnyder.com/ math-hub/?Tag=David+Dockterman David Dockterman

The Math Hub is a place for sharing expertise on math education and the

Ed.

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

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

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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investing in education The Principal Pipeline By 2006, Nikki Huvelle Milberg, Ed.M.’09, had come to realize the importance of having effective school principals. By then, she had already worked as a Teach For America teacher in Newark, N.J.; helped found a charter school in Washington, D.C.; and was earning a master’s degree in business at Yale. While at Yale, Milberg interned with Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) Office for Principal Leadership and Development, working with incoming principals. The experience “really started making me question what you can do [in education] without having good leaders,” she remembers. “I saw a huge need for better principals and leadership.”

After graduating in 2007, Milberg returned to Chicago to work with the CPS Renaissance Schools Fund, a nonprofit collaborative between CPS and the Chicago business community. But she missed the day-to-day work with kids and families and kept returning to the idea that strong school leadership was vital to developing best practices in schools.

Realizing that she wanted to become a principal, she decided to apply to the of the Principal Leadership Development Program, a collaboration between the Ed School, Teach For America, Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Public Education Fund, and the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation.

The goal of the program was to identify and train former Teach For America teachers to become principals in Chicago public schools. In planning the program, the need for a new principal pipeline stood out. It is projected that, of the 600 schools in the Chicago district, more than 200 will have principal vacancies in the next two years. But according to David Vitale, former CPS chief administrative officer and current chair of the Academy for Urban School Leadership, it’s more than just filling positions.

“Part of the issue is that the demand is great,” he says.

“And part of that is the recognition of the need for a new kind of leadership.”

A New Kind of Pipeline In Chicago, principals traditionally were recruited from the classroom into management and eventually administration.

But being a principal isn’t just a management job anymore.

Today, Vitale says, principals need to manage the daily tasks

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

jeff Hopkins, ed.m.’05

By Samantha Cleaver

and be instructional leaders. They need to have community relation skills, data analysis and communication abilities, human capital leadership, and financial know-how. And they need to be able to create an environment where teachers are collaborating, not working independently.

For schools that are failing and need to change course, a principal is even more important.

“The research shows that schools rarely, if ever, make significant improvements without a highly skilled principal,” says Penny Pritzker, a Chicago business executive and chair of the Chicago Public Education Fund. That principal, she says, “not

only can manage organizational details, but also can create a supportive, intellectual environment in which learning can take place.”

The Principal Development Program is set up specifically to address this new demand. The candidates sign on for a six-year commitment; one year studying at the Ed School, one year working with a current Chicago principal, and four years in a leadership role at a school in Chicago. They receive full tuition at the Ed School, and are paid as CPS employees once they start working at their schools. In addition, candidates can participate in the Ed School’s WIDE World distance learning classes and Programs in Professional Education institutes.

“What makes the program unique, and [the reason it] has been successful, is the marriage between the theoretical and the practical,” Pritzker says. “The Harvard classroom provides a rigorous intellectual framework, then the Chicago school experience provides a real world application of that framework.”

Now in its third year, the cohort has grown from two to eight principal candidates.

Creating Leaders Who Will Create Change The collaboration with the Ed School was a natural extension of the relationship CPS already had with Harvard.

“The expectation is that people with backgrounds that the Teach For America people have,” says Vitale, “[combined] with the kind of training that they get at Harvard, would be excellent [principal] replacements.”

More than just taking classes at the Ed School, principal candidates are encouraged to take courses around the university. Adam Parrott-Sheffer, Ed.M.’09, a member of the second cohort, took courses at the Kennedy School, the Law School, and the Business School.

“I saw lots of perspectives about education and how we define leadership,” he says. In a law school course about community organizing, Parrott-Sheffer gained new ideas about leadership. The course, he remembers, “was about what it means to lead people and work with groups that you are not inherently a part of, which is the hard work of a principal.”

Learning about leadership from multiple perspectives is something that Elizabeth Swanson, executive director of the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation, sees as a benefit in the long run. “The strong collaboration between the different Harvard schools to support principal development in a holistic way seemed like the right fit for what we needed in Chicago Public Schools, for our principal leaders to come out highly trained and highly qualified,” she says.

Of course, the main goal at the Ed School is to prepare principal candidates to develop skills that they’ll use immediately in their schools as instructional leaders.

“A lot of us came from schools where the leadership wasn’t instructional leadership,” says Milberg, who now works at

John Fiske Elementary on Chicago’s south side. Courses that address developing a professional learning community and using data provide candidates with the basics for leadership for change.

Putting Theory into Practice When principal candidates are placed in Chicago schools for their one-year practicum, the goal is to place them with leaders who will challenge them and who have succeeded in changing their own schools.

“We want them to see what it means to move a school forward,” says Vitale, “because most of the schools that we hope they become principals in are going to require leadership for change.”

It also helps principal candidates get a feel for the job itself so they aren’t overwhelmed.

“There’s nothing like serving under a quality, experienced principal for a year,” says Vitale. “The practicum is incredibly valuable in their ability to observe how a really good principal deals with all this.”

Once in their internships, each principal candidate develops and implements a schoolwide project. Parrott-Sheffer, currently a resident principal at Bret Harte Elementary in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, focused on data-driven decisionmaking. At the start of the year, he used an independent test to evaluate students and used that data to design specific small-group and extracurricular reading intervention programs that have paid off. The midterm results showed that kids who were involved in the literacy push grew twice as fast as the other students. The exciting part, says Parrott-Sheffer, is knowing that the intervention program worked across the board and that teachers bought into it and made it happen.

In the end, the Principal Development Program is all about providing students knowledge and opportunities to practice and hone their skills before they take over their own schools.

The combination of working with a principal and taking on their own development projects creates the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned at the Ed School.

“Leadership is about the application and about doing,” said Parrott-Sheffer. “You really can’t learn too much from [just] watching other people.”

It’s too early to measure the large-scale effects of the program, but as it develops, Vitale sees success in simply attracting a talented pool of leaders into Chicago Public Schools.

“We’ve attracted some very talented people into the enterprise to take leadership positions,” he says. “They wouldn’t be there otherwise.”

— Samantha Cleaver is a freelance writer from Chicago whose last piece for Ed. was a profile of Brock Putnam, Ed.M.’87.

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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alumni news and notes 1957

Geraldine Zetzel, Ed.M., teaches poetry and meditation and is currently leading a course at Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement. Her book of poetry, Mapping the Sands, was published this year.

1961

Richard Clark, Ed.M., died peacefully at home on August 11, 2009, after a courageous yearlong battle with lung cancer.

1963

Phyllis Chin, M.A.T., has been honored by the Association for Women in Mathematics with the 20th Annual Louise Hay Award in recognition of her contributions to mathematics education at all levels. She is a professor of mathematics at Humboldt State University and was the first woman tenured in the department.

1964

Thomas Klein, M.A.T., recently returned from Chiang Mai,

Thailand, where he was a visiting professor at Payap University. Accounts and pictures of his work at the university and in city schools can be viewed at chiangmaitrek.blogspot.com.

He now volunteers as a courtappointed special advocate for abused and neglected children, teaches classes in interfaith understanding, and makes glass jewelry.

Joe Lapchick, Ed.D., just finished appearing in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, his ninth show for the May River Theatre in Hilton Head, S.C.

His novel In Good Faith has sold out and is out of print.

1966

David Halperin, M.A.T, hosted an alumni dinner in Hong Kong on November 17, 2009, to celebrate the Ed School’s 90th anniversary. The event took place at the Hong Kong Club and included alumni in Hong Kong and surrounding areas in addition to former HGSE visiting professor Kai-Ming Cheng.

Nancy Hohmann works with an 11-year-old girl at Riding to the Top Therapeutic Riding Center in Windham, Maine.

PROFILE

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

to point out that it is the students who truly make their own success. “Mostly, I just get out of the way and let the magic happen,” she says.

An example of this magic occurred with a young epileptic rider whose severe learning disabilities in math were causing her problems in learning certain rhythms and routines. “One lesson, I suggested she bring some music and we would work out a freestyle program she could ride to the music,” Hohmann says. “She arrived the next week, put a song in the CD player, and proceeded to ride a perfectly choreographed program, stopping in the center of the arena precisely as the music ended. I have never figured out how she did that.”

Despite her many success stories, Hohmann reacted with “total disbelief” when she learned that she had been named the 2009 National Instructor of the Year by NARHA. “Winning the regional award was a pretty big surprise, but winning the national was amazing,” she says. “It is both humbling and gratifying to know I am making a difference.” courtesy of laura lees

Nancy Hohmann, M.A.T.’70, remembers fondly the two summers she spent working as a horseback-riding counselor at a nowclosed Vermont camp for special needs children.

“Those summers had a deep influence on me,” she says. So deep, in fact, that decades later, after a long career as a foreign language teacher, Hohmann finds herself working in a remarkably similar setting. She discovered Riding to the Top, a therapeutic riding center in Windham, Maine, in 2004 when researching volunteer opportunities in her area. “I was seeking a worthwhile retirement career,” she says. After volunteering for two years, she became certified by the North American Riding for the Handicapped Asscociation (NARHA), just a couple of months prior to her retirement.

The transition from teaching to therapeutic riding is a natural one for Hohmann, seeing as the latter combines her love of teaching with her lifelong love of horses. And her past career comes into play often.

“In every facet of teaching at Riding to the Top, I am aided by my public school experience,” she says. “Every public school teacher needs a plan A and a kit with plans B, C, D, and sometimes E at the ready. … With horses, volunteers, and weather conditions affecting the challenged rider/learner at all times, a toolkit of alternative things to do and the flexibility to respond immediately are extremely important.”

Riding to the Top welcomes riders with various conditions — including epilepsy, Asperger syndrome, physical abnormalities, and emotional issues, to name a few — and Hohmann approaches each with a unique plan and perspective. For all riders she writes behavioral goals and develops lesson plans that will help her to challenge them to meet their potentials. But she is quick

— Marin Jorgensen

Phyllis Graber Jensen / Bates College

Nancy Hohmann, M.A.T.’70, is out riding her horse.

PROFILE

Steven Johnson, Ed.M.’96, Steven Johnson, Ed.M.’96, has lived his personal and professional life by one code: respect. As a beat cop in Boston for 26 years, Johnson tirelessly fought to protect his community from violence, drug abuse, and the hopelessness felt by its youth. Early in his career as a police officer, he learned that one crucial way to resurrect a broken neighborhood was to go into it as a police officer and not only demand respect of the community, but offer his respect right back.

After a few years on the force, Johnson decided to take on another integral role in his community and began teaching a film course at a high school in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. While teaching, he says he was able to build a rapport with kids that he couldn’t attain as a police officer.

“They didn’t trust the police,” he explains, noting that some had experienced poverty and violence. “They were afraid and distrustful of them.”

As a teacher, however, his students saw him as a person who cared about their education and potential instead of as “some intimidating enforcer.” At the encouragement of colleagues, Johnson applied to the Ed School to pursue a master’s degree in teaching. Once accepted, he took a year off from the police force and worked to create a program to train police officers how to teach non-law enforcement–related classes in high schools. He purposely focused on a curriculum distant from law enforcement so that the kids could see officers as educators and mentors in addition to protectors.

While at the Ed School, Johnson taught history at a high school and focused his program on underprivileged, inner-city schools

courtesy of Steven johnson

is walking to his own beat.

that were dominated by impoverished minority students. After graduating, Johnson returned to the police force and introduced his project to several local high schools through afterschool programs. Taught exclusively by police officers, the lessons ranged from subjects like history to programs in self-esteem building and problem-solving.

Now retired from the force, Johnson’s spirit for teaching has not waned, and he regularly tutors neighborhood children in his Roxbury community on the intricacies of chess. “The philosophy [of chess] is that when you play, nobody loses,” he says. “You just learn from the mistake you made and to [try] not to repeat it.”

He says the great result of learning chess is individual confidence and self-respect; the game holds no merit to a competitor’s size or status — all the potential to succeed relies on one’s own determination. This lesson — that possibility exists beyond circumstance — is one Johnson hopes will be passed on through each of the kids he has taught over the decades.

— Jazmin Brooks

Bill Lewers, M.A.T., recently published his book, Six Decades of Baseball: A Personal Narrative, a celebration of a lifetime of baseball fandom.

Representative Diane Watson of Los Angeles. Visit the website www.louiebellson.com for more information or to contact Wright Bellson.

Actions Council for Minorities in Engineering, Inc. He previously served as executive vice president and COO at the council.

Mass. She has worked for more than 14 years as a teacher, from preschool to high school. She has also served as a college instructor and researcher.

1970

Nancy Hohmann, M.A.T., was awarded the prestigious 2009 National Instructor of the Year

by NARHA (North American Riding for the Handicapped Association), the accrediting body of therapeutic riding centers in North America (see page 42).

Haile Menkerios, Ed.M., was appointed special representative of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to head the United Nations Mission in Sudan.

Menkerios joined the UN in 2002.

1976

Francine Wright Bellson, M.A.T., suffered the loss of her drummer/composer husband, Louie Bellson, in February.

Having served as his manager and CD producer, she will especially miss presenting their frequent joint career talk, “The Physicist & the Percussionist.”

In October, she accepted his posthumous Congressional honor through the office of U.S.

1971

Irving Pressley McPhail, M.A.T., was named the president and CEO of the National

1975

Jane Haltiwanger, Ed.M., has started a new position as the teacher for eighth-grade special education inclusion in Everett, Ed.

Major Morris, Ed.M., published Nurture Their Dreams, a book focused on urban children in and around various Boston and Philadelphia neighborhoods.

The book can be previewed at www.blurb.com/bookstore/ detail/647214.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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alumni news and notes 1982

Julie Lineberger, Ed.M., received the Excellence in Architecture award for her firm’s design of Bank Park in Wilmington, Vt. Lineberger founded LineSync Architecture in 1988.

1983

Peggy Williams, Ed.D., was honored by Ithaca College with the new Peggy Ryan Williams Center, a 58,000-square-foot building designed to achieve the highest principles of sustainable design. More than 50 percent of the building’s energy comes from renewable sources. Williams was the college’s seventh president and now serves as president emerita.

1984

David Grady, Ed.M., was named associate vice president and dean of students for the University of Iowa.

1987

Pamela Gutlon, Ed.M., left her position at Duke University and opened a gallery in Durham, N.C., focusing on Southern outsider art. She welcomes other Harvard folks in the area to stop by and say hello.

David Wilson, Ed.M.’84, Ed.D., has been named the 12th president of Morgan State University.

Wilson had been serving as

chancellor for the University of Wisconsin Colleges and the University of Wisconsin-Extension.

1990

Paul Karofsky, Ed.M., recently formed Transition Consulting Group, Ltd, with his son David.

They look forward to growing the next generation of TCG, working together as a father and son team. They invite all to check out their new website at www.ForTCG.com.

1991

Jane McDonnell Coder, Ed.M., was awarded a grant for residency to the Vermont Studio Center, the largest international artists’ and writers’ residency program in the United States, hosting 50 visual artists and writers each month from across the country and around the world.

1995

William Michaud, C.A.S., graduated in May from the University of Maine School of Law and was recently admitted to the Maine Bar. He worked in Maine’s public schools for 28 years as a teacher, principal, and, most recently, superintendent of the Scarborough School Department. Michaud plans to practice in the areas of mediation and school law, and as a court-appointed guardian ad litem.

Gerard Robinson, Ed.M., was named secretary of education for the state of Virginia this past January.

Center in Los Angeles, where she is currently the employment policy director. Moran brings more than 12 years of immigrant rights advocacy experience to her new responsibilities.

1996

Maria Broderick, Ed.M.’87, Ed.D., was appointed to the clinical faculty at the New England School of Acupuncture, where she will be supervising interns at the Boston Medical Center’s in-patient pediatric clinic and outpatient adolescent clinic.

She directs Reservoir Family Wellness, LLC in Acton, Mass., where she practices pediatric Chinese medicine, specializing in the integrative treatment of neuropsychological disorders.

Cynthia Smith Forrest, Ed.M.’90, Ed.D., has been named the vice president of student affairs and dean of students at the University of New England in Maine. She assumed her new duties on January 15.

Nita Sturiale Taibi, Ed.M., received tenure at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and was promoted to chair the Studio for Interrelated Media.

1999

Kevin Bolan, Ed.M., was promoted to partner at the international law firm McDermott Will & Emery LLP. He is a member of the firm’s trial department and focuses his practice in complex commercial litigation and arbitration, antitrust, intellectual property, professional liability, and white-collar defense.

2001

Carole Joy Mahoney, Ed.M., has been working on a collaborative project between Kennebunkport Consolidated School and the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust called Trust in Our Children. This is a comprehensive K–5 program with teacher guides and student field books where classes visit the local trust properties to learn about their own environment and history. Science and math activities are also incorporated creating a genuine multidisciplinary experience for the students. For information, visit www.kporttrust.org.

1997

Dennis Holtschneider, Ed.D., was elected to a two-year term as chair of the board of directors of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. As board chair, he will preside over an organization of more than 200 national and international Catholic institutions.

Tyler Moran, Ed.M., was selected to oversee all of the policy operations for the National Immigration Law

Joseph Ricca Paul and David Karofsky

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Jane McDonnell Coder

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

Joe Ricca and students at the East Hanover Middle School

Wenli Jen

Razia Raghavji, Ed.M., married Karim Velji on August 30, 2008.

They welcomed their son, Aidan Velji, on May 20, 2009.

Danielle Reyes, Ed.M., serves as the program officer for the Eugene and Agnes Myer Foundation. In her role, Reyes assesses the nonprofit organizations that apply to the foundation for funding (considering their programs, services, vision, and sustainability). Reyes’ accomplishments were recently profiled by Rosetta Thurman, a nonprofit sector blogger.

2002

Alexander Dippold, Ed.M., and his wife, Jean Marie, welcomed their first child on October 17, 2009. Genevieve Fenlon Dippold is the first girl in the Dippold family in two generations. She will be referred to as Eve as a tribute to the first woman.

2003

Sue Stuebner Gaylor, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D., was promoted to vice president for administration and planning at Lycoming College, a liberal arts college in Williamsport, Pa. She will retain her roles in the creation of the annual budget models, the development of other budget-related projections, and the leadership of the college’s long-range planning efforts. She will oversee the business office, food service, bookstore, human resources, physical plant, and

athletics, and will also continue to serve as the cochair of the committee preparing for the college’s upcoming reaccreditation visit.

Joseph Ricca, Ed.M., was named superintendent of schools of the East Hanover Township Public Schools in East Hanover, N.J. He was a Geraldine R. Dodge Fellow in 2009 and participated in the Ed School’s Art of Leadership Institute in July.

2006

Wenli Jen, coordinated the recent San Gabriel Valley Youth Summit at the Asian Pacific Family Center in Rosemead, Calif. More than 600 teens from Southern Californina attended the event and chose from 40 workshops including creating a business, peer pressure, and Internet safety.

Hisayoshi Muto, Ed.M., is the deputy director of the scientific research institute division for the Ministry of Education in Japan.

2007

Jessica Camacho, Ed.M., received a $1,500 grant from the Junior League of Las Vegas.

Camacho will use the money to purchase the Take-Home Learning Packs from Lakeshore Learning. She is a teacher at Jack Dailey Elementary in Las Vegas, Nev. This is the sixth grant

Kate Levine, Ed.M.’09, and Alissa Valiante, Ed.M.’07

The HGSE Recent Alumni Circle Committee of New York hosted a networking event on January 12, 2010 at the 70 Park Avenue Hotel. The event included the panel, “Working in Education in New York City,” featuring Shane Mulhern, Ed.M.’02, executive director, New Leaders for New Schools, Greater New York Office, and HGSE doctoral student Shimon Waronker, Ed.M.’09, chancellor’s intern, New York City Department of Education.

Camacho has received in the past year.

2008

Autumn McDonald, Ed.M., has been named the national director of strategic initiatives for Genesys Works, a Houstonbased nonprofit. Genesys’ mission is to enable economically disadvantaged high school students to enter the economic mainstream by providing them with the knowledge and work experience required to succeed as professionals. McDonald will help lead the organization’s national expansion into multiple markets around the United States.

Corinne Morahan, Ed.M., and her husband, Christopher, are thrilled to welcome Landon Isaac, born on February 28.

They are doing great and are madly in love with their new baby boy.

Jessica Camancho (right) and librarian with Take-Home Learning Packs.

Wendy Harbour, Ed.M.’03, Ed.D., was named the Lawrence B. Taishoff Professor of Inclusive Education at Syracuse University. She will also be executive director of Syracuse University’s new Lawrence B. Taishoff Center for Inclusive Higher Education.

Landon Issaac Morahan

Wendy Harbour

Ed.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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alumni news and notes PHOTO FINISH

courtesy of Jiraorn Assarat

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Now it’s also worth an alumni note. We are now including alumnifocused photos in the alumni section of Ed. magazine.

(Either the alum is in the photo or the photo is connected to the graduate — a photo of a new baby, for example.)

Send your high-resolution digital photos to classnotes@ gse.harvard.edu. Photos that are not in focus, dark, or at a low resolution may not be usable. Please identify the people in the photo and include a few lines of context.

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

PROFILE

Jiraorn Assarat, Ed.M.’04, is excited about the future.

Since she was a teenager, Jiraorn Assarat, Ed.M.’04, has dreamed of creating a perfect school. One that feels more like a second home than an institution to its students; one in which exceptional academic programs are balanced with a curriculum of moral development. Now, back in her native Thailand after pursuing her own education at Yale and Harvard, she not only has started one “dream school,” she has started two.

At Ivy Bound International School the instruction is conducted in English; at Anubaan Assarat, the instruction is in Thai. “The two schools complement each other quite well,” Assarat says, “sharing knowledge and expertise . . . to enhance the children’s experiences and achievements.” One goal of the two programs, she says, is to tailor methods and practices conceived in the West to be culturally appropriate for children living in Bangkok, where the two schools are located.

“It concerns me that many educators merely apply Westerndeveloped school programs blindly without considering the

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• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

cultural context in which these programs take place,” Assarat says of the many international schools that have popped up around Bangkok in the last few years. “Surely, it is easy, quick, and profitable to import the whole program, but is it optimal for children living in Thailand? I think not.”

Her current team consists of five Ed School graduates — including Assarat, who is principal and codirector of curriculum and instruction, and her sister, Sikan Assarat, Ed.M.’08, who serves as teacher and assistant principal — and 10 Thai teachers. (The Assarats’ brother, Chatiporn, also serves as assistant principal in charge of enrichment programs.) The small staff has its advantages. “For now, we are a relatively small community,” she explains, “which means we are quite flexible and can adapt and respond more quickly to new situations or ideas.”

Though she hopes to one day expand to include more grade levels, presently the focus of both schools is early childhood. “The older a person is, the less malleable he or she becomes,” Assarat explains. “Since the mission is to create well-rounded, morally good citizens of this world, I think that early childhood is the most appropriate place for this type of intervention.” The expansion of the school continues in other ways, as a new, one-of-akind early-childhood facility is under construction in Bangkok to open in fall 2010.

Assarat welcomes the day-to-day challenges of establishing a school “with open arms,” she says, and even finds them stimulating. And, she remains certain that her dream schools are worth every sacrifice. “I knew that it was not going to be easy, especially since my nature is to decide on something and make it happen immediately,” she says. “The school occupies almost every aspect of my life, but it is satisfying and fulfilling to see as the project grows.”

— Marin Jorgensen

In Memory Bertha Bachner, GSE’30

Robert Spencer, M.A.T.’58

William Demmert Jr., Ed.D.’73

Joseph Bernard Doherty, Ed.M.’42

William Newton Stephens, Ed.D.’59

Cynthia Ardell, Ed.M.’74

Babette Samelson Whipple, GSE’45

Richard Clark, Ed.M.’61

Michael Kneale, Ed.D.’77

Doris Allene Carey, Ed.M.’47

Georgia Louras Bartlett, Ed.M.’62

Gerald Mohatt, Ed.D.’78

Barclay Feather, GSE’47

Ruth May Wilson, GSE’62

Gregory Kannerstein, Ed.D.’79

Owen Kiernan, Ed.D.’50

Thomas James Coffey, Ed.M.’63

Virginia Cornwall, Ed.M.’80

Otto Russell Mauke, GSE’51

Donald Keay, M.A.T.’63

James McChesney, Ed.M.’80

Margaret Stone, Ed.M.’51

Coleman Morrison, Ed.D.’63

Renee Weaver Johansen, Ed.M.’84

John Watson, GSE’52

Robert Zeeb, M.A.T.’63

Shirley Callan, Ed.M.’82, Ed.D.’88

Barbara Abrams, Ed.M.’54

Robert Lentz, Ed.M.’65

Susan Harkins, Ed.M.’91

Helen Feulner, Ed.D.’56

John Gordon Alford Jr., Ed.D.’66

Sandra Potrafke Hable, Ed.M.’92

Wendell Lowell French, Ed.D.’56

Raymond Almeida, Ed.M.’70

Cynthia Hsin-feng Wu, Ed.D.’93

H. Kent Moore, Ed.M.’58

Mary McMorris, M.A.T.’70

Jesse Howes, Ed.M.’04

Francis Edward Pratt, M.A.T.’58

Herbert Davis Simons, Ed.M.’66, Ed.D.’70

Jo Ann Swartz Rounsley, Ed.M.’58

LeBaron Moseby Jr., M.A.T.’67, Ed.D.’72

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

ZIP:

E-MAIL: NOTES FOR PUBLICATION IN ED. OR ON THE ALUMNI WEBSITE: Ed. and the Alumni Relations Office welcome news from HGSE alumni about employment, activities, or publications.

Classnotes will appear either in Ed. or on the alumni website.

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

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

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

Ed.

r this is a new address.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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Ken Offricht (left) rehearses with the members of the HGSE Harmonicas.

The Gift of Song by Jazmin Brooks A simple suggestion that led to the impromptu creation of an a cappella group has now blossomed into the opportunity for Ken Offricht, Ed.M.’10, to be inducted into Harvard legacy.

In the fall of 2009, Associate Professor Monica Higgins approached Offricht and other students in her Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Learning course. They shared a musical background and she suggested they start an a cappella group as a fun and creative outlet, as well as an extension of the team-leading principles they were exploring in class. After contemplating the idea, Offricht thought, “Why not?” With the help of another classmate, he held auditions, selected singers, and affectionately named the group the HGSE Harmonicas — an homage to the professor who ignited the idea.

When Offricht and the Harmonicas performed at the staff and faculty holiday party last December, he couldn’t have fathomed that Dean Kathleen McCartney would become so enamored with the group that she would suggest he write a song they could perform at graduation. The dean also proposed that if the song were well received, it could become the signature graduation song for the Ed School.

“It was immensely flattering for both me and the group,” says Offricht, who has a background in the creative arts, including as a songwriter, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. Still, despite his impressive resume, he says, “The idea of creating a Harvard tradition, for me, was like a whole other level.”

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The rest of the group was more than ready, though. “There’s a lot of musical talent here,” he says. Once he composed the music, he asked fellow Harmonica Leigh Jansson, Ed.M.’10, to construct the lyrics. “Leigh has such a strong sense of meter, poetry, and lyrics that it just made sense to enlist her help to ensure we had the best song possible.”

Offricht says his vision for the final song was celebratory and passionate. “[There is] something inspirational about [Ed School students’] love for education and how we want to impact the world — all the things that bring people here,” he says. “[The song] is to celebrate that we are now ready to go make them a reality.”

He also wanted to proudly show his respect for the school and its people.

“For me this place has been awe-inspiring. It has exceeded my expectations, which has never happened in my life,” he says. “People are real, they’re committed, and they care. So to be able to share that caring and to be able to give it back to them and to be able to share with the students and future students … I get a little emotional.”

Visit www.youtube.com/HarvardEducation, the Ed School’s YouTube channel, to watch videos about the Harmonicas and Ken Offricht.

jill ander son

recess

ed malitsky

High Standards

by Tricia Hurley

Deedie Keppel has been involved with the Harvard Graduate School of Education for nearly two-thirds of her life.

Her relationship to the school began when her late husband Francis Keppel, then only 32 years old, was tapped by Harvard President James Bryant Conant to be the school’s fourth dean and was given the task of organizing and increasing the profile of a school that was younger than he was.

“When we arrived, the Ed School campus consisted of Lawrence Hall and Palfrey House. It was a far cry from the Appian Way campus it is today,” says Deedie Keppel, now 90 years old.

While Francis worked tirelessly to increase the school’s profile and standing, both at Harvard and nationally — studying the American public education system, recruiting vibrant faculty members, and increasing the number of applicants — Deedie did all she could to help him achieve his goals.

In the early years of his deanship, she hosted faculty teas, often inviting faculty members from other Harvard schools to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue. To facilitate relaxed discussions between faculty and students, she hosted parties that replaced the more traditional tea and pastries with beer and sandwiches.

Students would sit on the floor of her living room and engage in debates around major issues in education.

“Frank and I had a partnership,” she says. “He had tremendous faith in the school and what it could be, and that kept us both going.”

In 1962 — when Longfellow Hall had been purchased and planning was well under way for the expansion of what is the school’s current home on Appian Way — Francis stepped down as dean to serve as commissioner of education under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Although the Keppels would live in D.C. and New York for many years, they returned to Cambridge in 1976 so that Francis could spend the remainder of his career teaching at the school he worked so hard to build. He passed away in 1990.

“The school was the love of his life and over the years it has become family to me,” says Deedie, who chose to honor her husband’s legacy with a gift annuity to the Ed School.

As a member of the Paul Hanus Society, Deedie believes wholeheartedly in the school’s mission and its ability to improve the lives of young people. For more than 60 years — through the tenures of six deans — she has been thrilled to watch the work she and her husband began in 1948 grow and evolve.

“I am so proud to be associated with HGSE,” says Deedie. “I give because the standards that the school has are the standards I have. It is the most human of all the graduate schools at Harvard.

It truly is a family.”

For more information please contact: Ericka Webb, associate director University Planned Giving telephone: 617-496-4003 fax: 617-495-0521 e-mail: Ericka_Webb@harvard.edu or visit www.alumni.harvard.edu/give/planned-giving Ed.

• Harvard Graduate School of Education • summer 2010

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Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 44R Brattle Street Cambridge, MA 02138

Where’s Ed.?

In November, the Higher Education cohort “got caught” reading Ed. in their Proseminar in Higher Education class, thanks to Scott Flanary, Ed.M.’10 (second to last row standing, plaid shirt). “ We consider this our ‘homeroom’ for the week,” Flanary says. “We even make homeroom-type announcements about happy hours, get-togethers, and personal successes.” He says that when he announced to the group that Professor Judy McLaughlin was going to take the photo for the magazine, “The whole cohort wanted fame and fortune, and so everyone opted in!”

Think you can top this photo? E-mail us a picture of yourself (or someone in your family) reading Ed. and you may find fame (but no fortune) on the back cover, too.