HGSE in the Media

December 2006

Are Immigrant Students Ready For Standardized Testing?
"Catherine Snow, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who specializes in language development, feels that immigrants are at a great disadvantage because they are unfamiliar with a new culture." (All Headline News, 12/28/06)

Breakaway Education Research Group Pulls From Diverse Disciplines
"'After listening to two days of talks, I fear the education research community has the same problem that's been attributed to math education — that it's a mile wide and an inch deep,' said Judith D. Singer, a statistician from Harvard University's graduate school of education and a member of the society's advisory board." (Education Week, 12/20/06)

Programs Impart Social Skills Along With Literacy
"Robert Selman, an education and psychology professor at Harvard University and a contributor to the Voices Reading curriculum, said that the program — while it emphasizes interpersonal skills — does not downplay the need for clear reading instruction and decoding skills." (Education Week, 12/20/06)

Higher Education Administrator: Keeping the Teachers in Business
"Kathleen McCartney misses teaching. But as dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, she finds other kinds of satisfaction." (U.S. News and World Report, 12/18/06)

Harvard Students Get an Education in Lawrence
"The goal, said Donna San Antonio, a Harvard education lecturer, is to prepare future counselors with hands-on field work in urban communities. But it's also to give a small school like Notre Dame assistance with students as they deal with the problem of urban life." (Boston Globe, 12/14/06)

Framing the Debate
"Robert B. Schwartz, the academic dean at Harvard University's graduate school of education, thinks private groups with credibility should write the standards. The federal government could play a role by making the National Assessment of Educational Progress the tool for measuring whether states are moving toward proficiency, he says." (Education Week, 12/13/06)

Can We Improve on Affirmative Action?
"If race-based remedies are supplanted by class-based remedies, the number of African Americans attending elite universities, for one thing, will fall. Tom Kane, a Harvard economist, told me, 'You'd need an economic affirmative-action program six times the size of the current racial preferences to [benefit] an equivalent number of African Americans.'" (Time Magazine, 12/10/06)

Trustees Want to Broaden Their Role
"Harvard University professor Richard Chait said yesterday that trustees told him they want to focus on critical issues facing the school rather than ‘the squeaky wheels' and ‘show-and-tell' presentations by administrators.” (The Columbus Dispatch, 12/9/06)

Can Successful Schools Serve Average Students?
"'The demographic makeup of some KIPP schools is changing,' says Harvard's Richard Elmore, 'because there's a sense that KIPP schools are very effective.'" (The New Republic, 12/7/06)

Strong Opinions Expressed at Rally Outside Supreme Court
"The T-shirts worn by Anita Wadhwa and Shannon Garth-Rhodes, both students at Harvard University's graduate school of education, expressed the message that most demonstrators at the court today promoted." (Education Week, 12/4/06)