Printer-friendly versionJanuary
The authors of Educating Engineers: Designing for the Future of the Field say that engineering schools are heavily influenced by academic traditions that do not always support the profession’s needs and calls for a new model of engineering education. The authors, Sheri D. Sheppard, Kelly Macatangay, Anne Colby, and William D. Sullivan, write that in the midst of a profound, worldwide transformation in the engineering profession, U.S. undergraduate engineering education is holding onto an approach to problem solving and knowledge acquisition that is consistent with practices that the profession has left behind. Specifically, undergraduate engineering education in the United States emphasizes primarily the acquisition of technical knowledge, distantly followed by preparation for professional practice. “We are calling for a new model that will involve fundamentally rethinking the role and even the makeup of the faculty,” said Sheppard, who directed Carnegie’s multi-year study of the preparation for the engineering profession. “ The study was funded by Carnegie and The Atlantic Philanthropies. Educating Engineers, is the third of a series of reports on professional education issued by Carnegie’s Preparation for the Professions Program, follows Educating Clergy and Educating Lawyers.
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Catherine M. Casserly is selected as Senior Partner. Casserly was director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative as The Williams and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she managed grants to harness the power of the Web to equalize access to knowledge. As the first full-time Senior Partner appointed by Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk, Casserly is responsible for new program initiatives and manages the strategic direction of Carnegie’s work in Open Educational Resources.
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September
Toward Informative Assessment and a Culture of Evidence called for community colleges to develop richer, more revealing measures of student learning – beyond the traditional indices of grades, retention, persistence and degree attainment. The report was the final publication from Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), a three-year, action research project that explored the teaching and learning challenges in basic skills math and English at 11 California community colleges. A partnership of the Carnegie Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, SPECC asked participating faculty to use innovative forms of assessment, such as common exams and think aloud protocols (audio and video records of students verbalizing their thought process while trying to read texts or solve problems) to better track student learning and to improve instruction.
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The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced a $2.5 million investment to identify promising strategies to dramatically improve college success rates, especially among those students least prepared for college-level work. Today, close to 60 percent of young people who enroll in community colleges have to take at least one developmental course before earning college credit. For too many students, their postsecondary education stops there: that first class is the last class they will take in a community college. The situation for young people enrolled in developmental math courses is especially dire. These three prominent foundations have joined forces to invest in research that develops effective solutions to ensure those who are least prepared are much more likely to graduate.
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October
Bernadine Chuck Fong, president emerita of Foothill College (Los Alto Hills, CA), was named a Senior Partner, directing the new community college initiative. In this work, Carnegie addresses one of our nation’s most significant educational improvement problems: the extraordinarily high failure rates among students in developmental mathematics in community colleges. Fong, who formerly served on Carnegie’s Board of Trustees, has been involved in efforts to reform developmental education in the community college sector though her work as an educational consultant and executive coach for the national Achieving the Dream Initiative, which aims to increase the academic success of under-represented students though institutional transformation.
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Carnegie selected five partners to address education’s biggest problems. Innovators, expert educators, advocates and researchers joined Carnegie to inform, design and stimulate the organization’s new program of work. This work embraces a new approach to education research and development and seeks to tackle some of the most nettlesome problems affecting the educational success of a large number of our nation’s students. The first problem the Foundation will address is around the extraordinarily high failure rates among students in developmental mathematics in community colleges. Louis M. Gomez, the Faison Chair in Urban Education, University of Pittsburgh; Magdalene Lampert, the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor in Education, University of Michigan; James W. Stigler, professor of psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; Uri Treisman, director of the Charles A. Dana Center and professor mathematics and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin; and Guadalupe Valdés, the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education, Stanford University, are senior partners guiding the development of this new program agenda.
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November
Carnegie named Patricia Graham as chair, and selected community college presidents and Atlanta superintendent for the Board of Trustees. Patricia Albjerg Graham is a leading historian of American education and long-time friend of the Carnegie Foundation. Graham previously served on the Carnegie Board from 1984 through 1992, and has been active as an advisor for the past year as the Foundation has transitioned to a new focus of work under President Anthony S. Bryk, who came to Carnegie in fall 2008. Graham assumed her new role at the conclusion of Carnegie’s November 29-20th meeting in Washington, DC. The Carnegie Board of Trustees also elected two community college presidents to the Board: Gail Mellow, president of LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York; and Richard Rhodes, president of El Paso Community College. The third new Board member is Beverly L. Hall, superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools.
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Chicago education advocate and reformer, John Ayers, was selected as the new Vice President and Treasurer of the Foundation. As a consultant on school reform in Chicago, Ayers launched Union Park High Schools, a school management organization, in 2009 with plans to create four charter high schools in Chicago.
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The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and Carnegie named the top U.S. Professors of the Year. Four college and university educators who actively engage their undergraduate students in hands-on research and extensive team work were the national winners of the 2009 U.S. Professors of the Year Awards. Administered by CASE and sponsored by Carnegie, the awards recognize professors for their influence on teaching and their commitment to undergraduate students. In addition to the four national winners, state-level Professors of the Year were recognized in 36 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam. The national and state winners of the 2009 U.S. Professors of the Year award were honored at a luncheon and awards ceremony at the Willard InterContinental Washington, in Washington, DC.
The four national winners are:
- Outstanding Baccalaureate Colleges Professor of the Year: Rob Thomas, professor of geology at The University of Montana Western in Dillon, Montana;
- Outstanding Community Colleges Professor of the Year: Tracey McKenzie, professor of sociology, at Collin College in Frisco, Texas;
- Outstanding Doctoral and Research Universities Professor of the Year: Brian P. Coppola, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Chemistry, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor;
- Outstanding Master’s Universities and Colleges Professor of the Year: Richard L. Miller, professor of psychology, at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
December
Carnegie and the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) announced a partnership to continue Community Engagement Classification. In 2010, Carnegie will conduct its elective Community Engagement Classification, which is an elective classification established in 2006 and issued in 2008. This classification defines community engagement as “the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.”
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Carnegie President Tony Bryk collaborated with the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research on lessons from a seven-year longitudinal study on organizing elementary schools for improvement. Organizing School for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, provides a detailed analysis of why 100 elementary schools showed extraordinary progress in attendance and test scores over a seven-year period and why 100 others did not. This pioneering undertaking by authors Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton provides invaluable knowledge to urban education professionals and policy makers alike. The University of Chicago Press published this book on January 15, 2010.
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