Stanford University School of StanfordEducator Education Alumni Summer 2012 Newsletter Welcoming Our New Dean An Interview with Claude Steele Steve Castillo By Amy Yuen and Mindy Hollar laude Steele stepped into his new role as the I. James Quillen Dean for Stanford University School of Education on September 1, 2011. Steele, who served as the twenty-first provost of Columbia University, is Ca preeminent social psychologist. Prior to assuming the position of chief academic officer at Columbia, he was a member of the Stanford psychology faculty from 1991 to 2009. On The Farm, he held appointments as the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social A Return to the Farm: Claude Steele at the Cubberley Library. Sciences, chair of the Psychology Department, director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His research focuses on the psychological experience of the individual, Table of Contents and particularly, on the experience of threats to the self and Inside Page the consequences of those threats. His book, Whistling Vivaldi: Welcoming Our New Dean 1 How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, examines his 2 theory of stereotype threat, which has been the focus of much of School of Education Launches Lemann Center his research for the past 20 years. Steele earned his doctorate in End of the American Dream? 3 psychology from Ohio State University, and has received honorary School Reform Gets Real World 5 degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, “Learning to Be Jewish” 8 Yale University, Princeton University, and the Faculty News 11 University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is an elected member of the National Academy Friends 18 of Sciences, National Academy of Education, Alumni News 20 American Philosophical Society, and American Alumni Spotlight: Todd Dickson 22 Academy of Arts and Sciences. Student News 26 http://ed.stanford.edu continued on page 14 SchoolNews School of Education Launches Center to Improve Brazilian Education By Amy Yuen n a concerted effort to significantly improve public education in Brazil in the next decade, the School of Education has launched a new center at Stanford aimed at developing new Steve Castillo Iapproaches to improve learning in Brazilian public schools. Named the Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil, the Center will create new educational oppor- tunities inside and outside of the classroom, particularly for Brazil’s low-income students. The Lemann Center is a ten-year partnership between Stanford and the Lemann Foundation, a nonprofit organization that aims to improve the quality of public education in Brazil. Program activi- Representatives from the Lemann Foundation meet with principal faculty and ties are predominantly taking place on the Stanford campus, with student fellows of the Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil. additional exchanges, seminars, and research taking place in Brazil. “We want to train a new generation of educational researchers the Center’s three areas of focus—education policy, technological and practitioners in Brazil, and encourage innovative policies that innovation, and entrepreneurship—as crucial components to will help our emerging country define our own education system,” sustaining lasting educational reform in a country as large and said Denis Mizne, executive director of the Lemann Foundation. diverse as Brazil.” “We chose to partner with Stanford University because of its prox- Major initiatives of the new Center include: imity to Silicon Valley and its demonstrated ability to inspire inter- Graduate training: Fellowships will be offered annually to disciplinary solutions to complex, global problems.” students from Brazil admitted to the School of Education’s mas- In addition to training educational researchers and practitioners, ter’s and doctoral programs and through Stanford’s joint MA/MBA the Center is training Brazilian policymakers, technology innovators, program between the Graduate School of Business and the School and entrepreneurs to improve access and quality in the educational of Education. Students will be trained to play key roles in Brazil in system in Brazil, which has become one of the fastest-growing the areas of educational policy, learning design, and educational economies in the world. The entrepreneurship. Center aims to attract the Hosting visiting researchers and professionals: The Center StanfordEducator best and brightest of Brazil’s will invite visiting educational researchers and innovators from Brazil CREDITS graduates and professionals to attend seminars and to work with Stanford faculty and Lemann Claude Steele, Dean from a range of top-ranked Fellowship students. Rebecca Tseng Smith, Associate fields, including engineering, Researching Innovative Approaches to Educational Change: Dean for External Relations economics, applied mathe- The Center’s four lead faculty—Eric Bettinger, Paulo Blikstein, Amy Yuen, Editor/Writer matics, and business. Martin Carnoy, and David Plank—will work with Lemann Fellows, Marguerite Rigoglioso, Mindy “The Stanford School visiting researchers and professionals, and other Stanford faculty Hollar, Brianna Liang, Nancy Mancini, Katie Oey, Heather of Education is known for and students to produce and disseminate research on educational Trippel, Rebecca Tseng Smith, producing leaders who policy, technological innovation, measurement, and entrepreneurial Contributing Writers are shaping research and projects related to improving Brazilian education. Elaine Kwong Design, Design practice around the world, Implementing an Educational Think Tank in Brazil: The and we are thrilled to build Center will create a counterpart policy research dissemination on our global involvement in organization in Brazil, with the goal of increasing the impact of education,” said Co-principal academic policy research in education policy debates in Brasilia Investigator and Professor and/or state capitals. This Brazil-based organization will draw on the Martin Carnoy. “We view continued on page 10 2 StanfordEducator the completion rate for students from End of the American Dream? low-income families has barely moved. Income Disparities are Widening the Achievement Gap “This rising gap in academic skills By Marguerite Rigoglioso and college completion has come at a time when the economy relies increas- It’s a well-established fact that the “That disparity is leading to a ingly on well-educated workers,” Steve Castillo rich are growing richer and the poor feedback cycle in which it’s becom- say Reardon. “Largely gone are the are growing poorer, and that there are ing harder and harder to achieve manufacturing jobs that provided a fewer and fewer people in between. the American dream,” says Reardon, middle-class wage but did not require What’s not so well known is how that an expert on the causes and conse- a college degree.” In today’s economy, income gap may be translating into quences of social and educational then, young men and women with- disparities in educational success— inequality. As he explains it, if family out college degrees are increasingly and what that might mean for the income is a predictor of how well peo- consigned to low-wage jobs with little long-term future of individuals, eco- ple do in school, and if school perfor- opportunity for advancement. This nomically challenged groups, and mance determines how much people is making educational achievement our entire nation. earn in the market, then economic more and more critical. A recently published study by inequality is only breeding more eco- Especially alarming, then, is Professor Sean Reardon is sounding nomic inequality. Education is no lon- Reardon’s finding that the gap in test alarm bells. Reardon has found that ger the pathway to social mobility in scores means that the lowest-income the gap in test scores between the the United States that it once was. children are lagging a crippling four highest and lowest-income students has Related studies have found that the years worth of schooling behind their grown by about 40 percent since the college completion rate for children more wealthy peers. Fifty years ago, 1960s and is now nearly twice as large from high-income families has grown they were lacking only about two and as the black-white achievement gap. sharply in the last few decades, while a half years behind. “The roots of widening educational inequality appears to lie in early childhood, not in schools,” Roots of the Growing Divide says Sean Reardon. “Schools are not the primary cause of the problem,” asserts Reardon. “If they were, the test-score gap would widen as students progress through school, but this does not happen. The test-score gap between eighth- grade students from high-and low- income families is no larger than the school-readiness gap among kinder- gartners. The roots of widening educa- tional inequality appear to lie in early childhood, not in schools.” Why? Parents who are struggling to make ends meet have little time to worry about their children’s cogni- tive development, and they don’t have the funds to pay for their enrichment, explains Reardon, whose research L.A. Cicero/Stanford News Service continued on page 4 Summer 2012 3 SchoolNews American Dream The solutions, then, Reardon prospects of rich and poor children posits, are economic and social. “The have diverged over the last 40 years continued from page 3 best way to reduce inequality and is not something our country wants to attracted national attention after being educational outcomes is to ensure believe about itself, but it’s an unde- published as a chapter in Whither that all students start on a more even niable fact that we have to come to Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, footing. This would take a number terms with.” and Children’s Life Chances (Russell of levers,” he says. “We need to make Linda Darling-Hammond, the Sage Foundation, 2011). In contrast, sure people have access to stable Charles E. Ducommun Professor parents who are economically com- jobs that pay a living wage.