University Business - August 2008 - (Page 23)

FUTURE SHOCK Star Schools of Education Launching pads for tomorrow’s educators By James Martin and James E. Samels I T SEEMS LIKE EVERYBODY IN side and outside of higher learning has a quick ﬁx for what ails public education. Stand around a Little League game, oﬃce water cooler, or local supermarket and you’ll hear the usual litany: higher teacher pay, longer school days, more homework, closer scrutiny of underperforming schools—and the list goes on. We intuit that the education improvement issue won’t soon go away, now that it transcends such divergent media as PBS, CNN, CNBC, and even the Fox News Network. Much has been written and said about so-called education reform over the last several decades. Take, for example, the most recent report from the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education—a study that sends a clarion call for reformation of America’s education system. “We know higher education is the key to our children’s future and the American dream, yet it is becoming more unaﬀordable and less attainable,” said Secretary Margaret Spellings, calling attention to the growing deﬁcits lurking in the U.S. education system. DEVELOPING THE EDUCATION LEADERSHIP TALENT POOL Most education school deans sense that we need to invest in more systemic, longerterm strategies for developing the education leadership talent pool, beyond simply ﬁlling the pipeline with newly minted classroom teachers. The nation needs to better prepare the next generation of K-12 school leaders as a new breed of education professionals committed to school improvement through transformational change. Over the past several months, we felt the need to scratch a little deeper on this. We need to develop the education leadership talent pool. We scanned top-tier institutions, public and private, with education schools that produce dynamic idea leaders, policy shapers, and opinion makers. In the process, we discovered several commonly shared habits and best practices among the highly ranked schools of education, including the creation of unique centers of teaching and learning excellence; proactive and willful interdisciplinary curriculum planning; educational innovation, nimbleness, ingenuity, and resourcefulness; globalization of programs, faculty, and students; commitment to action-oriented research, social justice, and civic engagement to be an incentive for collaborative professional development and faculty empowerment; and a willingness to take risks in the search for new pathways for educational improvement. THE VALUE OF PRACTICAL CONNECTIVITY At Stanford University’s School of Education, a place that prides itself on pathﬁnding research, Deborah Stipek notes in her “Message from the Dean” on the school’s website that the school is “com- mitted to developing new knowledge that can be used to improve education, and to make education more equitable in the U.S. and abroad.” To demonstrate its commitment, Stanford has adopted a pre-K-12 charter school and created school-based partnership programs in economically disadvantaged Bay Area communities. “The advantage of these ongoing practical connections for our students is the opportunity to be exposed to real world challenges and to be involved in problem-solving collaborations with practitioners and policy makers,” says Stipek. THE EMERGENT GLOBAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT Consider the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, chartered in 1863 as a land grant, agricultural institution, and its School of Education, founded in 1907. Ranked among its peers as a Top-Tier Graduate School of Education by U.S. News & World Report, the school boasts more than 20,000 alumni around the world—with linkages to people in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Paciﬁc Rim. In a letter to School of Education alumni and friends posted on the school’s website, Dean Christine McCormick observes that by creating sustainable, global learning organizations like The Center for International Education, the School of Ed will be a dynamic force in “preparing tomorrow’s leaders, creating unprecedented opportunities and initiating change James Martin is a professor at Mount Ida College (Mass.). James E. Samels is president and CEO of The Education Alliance. Their book is Presidential Transition in Higher Education: Managing Leadership Change (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). universitybusiness.com August 2008 | 23 http://universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - August 2008

University Business - August 2008
Contents
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Editor's Note
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
On the Hill
Future Shock
Independent Outlook
Community Colleges
Dorms of Distinction
Streamlining Admissions: Opening the Front Door
E-mail, Gmail, and Beyond
EduComm Deals a Winning Hand
What's New
End Note

University Business - August 2008