Penn's Graduate School of Education Stanford Stanford
It's fitting that the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), a research group that analyzes government education policy (among other things), was founded by a student inspired by a professor who went on to become a high government official.
Donna Shalala, now Secretary of Health and Human Services, was a professor at Teachers' College in New York when she interested one of her students, Susan Fuhrman, in educational policy. And Fuhrman, now Dean of Penn's Graduate School of Education and director of CPRE, studies educational policy at all levels of government, including Shalala's.
Fuhrman founded CPRE in 1985, and for the past 11 years has developed a network of five universities and many researchers who study and evaluate reforms in areas such as educational standards, school-based management and teacher incentives. (In addition to
Susan Fuhrman
Since Fuhrman and CPRE began researching how public decisions affect educational success, legislatures and educators have increasingly used CPRE research in designing policy.
"In the 1970s and until the early 1980s, education policy at state level was education finance; states didn't do much except pay the bill," Fuhrman says. "As states began to get more and more involved, in issues of teaching and learning, their policies have had stronger effects on schools. That's the kind of research I've been doing, and much of what we've learned (about the legislative actions in education that are successful) has been used," she says.
School districts in 50 states are engaged in programs to set high expectations and coordinate other policies that draw off CPRE research, says Fuhrman.
"We have many ways of disseminating our findings: there are 12,000 policy makers and practitioners on our mailing list," Fuhrman says. "We've begun to disseminate on line. We have links to Web sites, including the U.S. Department of Education.
"We are participating in meetings of policy makers all the time, speaking and providing technical assistance to help people. We travel all over the country; that's why it's so hard to get a hold of Tom Corcoran."
Corcoran is one of four co-directors of CPRE, two at Penn and two elsewhere.
Tom Corcoran was a policy analyst for the New Jersey Department of Education. His background in education began when he traveled to Africa to teach. When he returned to the United States, he planned to be a history professor, but changed his mind when he got involved with his wife's middle school in Syracuse.
"It was a real Up the Down Staircase environment," he says. "Poor discipline, low expectations. There was no real sense of purpose, no idea of what to do with these kids."
At his wife's urging, he worked with staff there to figure out how to improve the organizational climate and get the kids more engaged.
He conducted a study of the aspirations of the African-American students, comparing the attitudes of those who had moved to the area from the South to those who were born and raised in Syracuse. He found that students who hadn't lived in urban areas had higher expectations for themselves and for what education could do for them, he said.
These and other revelations about urban education made Corcoran change his plans about studying history. Instead he pursued graduate degrees in education.
Peg Goertz, another CPRE co-director and a professor at GSE, worked for Education Testing Service before joining CPRE. She was interested in school financing issues from a young age.
Growing up in Chicago, Goertz remembers her mother getting on buses to travel to the state capitol to lobby state officials to spend more money on schools. Her mother was an economist, and Goertz was always fascinated by how state and local governments dealt with the issue of school finance. Chicago, with its then-segregated school system, also made an impression her.
"In the 1950s and 60s we expected poor kids to drop out of school, and they did," she says. "Our governments then decided to take responsibility for kids we didn't think we could educate -- poor children, disabled children. We've succeeded (in learning how to do it), but in some ways we've become captive of some of our success. "The issue now is how to provide the resources to give all these children a quality education."
Return to Compass Features for September 24, 1996