Susan Fuhrman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1944 (age 80–81)
Columbia University (PhD)
Susan Fuhrman | |
|---|---|
| Born | Susan Harriet Fuhrman 1944 (age 80–81) The Bronx, New York, U.S. |
| Known for | founding Consortium for Policy Research in Education |
| Board member of | National Academy of Education president 2009–2013 |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Northwestern University (BA, MA) Columbia University (PhD) |
| Thesis | The Classification of Roll Call Votes in New Jersey (1977) |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | |
| Main interests | |
Susan Harriet Fuhrman (born April 1944) is an American education policy scholar and served from 2006[1][2] as the first female president of Teachers College, Columbia University.[3] Fuhrman earned her doctorate in Political Science and Education from Columbia University. She is an authority on school reform.
Fuhrman served as the Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education for 11 years,[4] where she is widely credited with elevating Penn GSE to enhanced national stature by "focusing on themes of urban and international education and broadening involvement with schools in underserved communities..."[5] Prior to her service as dean at Pennsylvania, Fuhrman taught at Rutgers University and founded the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, the nation's first federally funded education policy center.[6]
In 2007 Fuhrman was named one of New York's 100 most influential women by Crain's New York Business.[7] In 2009, she also became president of the National Academy of Education.[8]
Susan Harriet Fuhrman was born in April 1944[9] in the Bronx, the daughter of Irene Satz Levine, who rose from a stock girl to become Vice President of Ohrbach's department store. With a mother and three aunts who were all successful professionals, Fuhrman says, she always “had the model of a woman who was independent and a major figure in whatever field she chose to be in.” [10]
Fuhrman is a graduate of New York City public schools, including Hunter College High School which she graduated from in 1961.[11] She earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. After teaching in secondary schools and studying policy planning and administration in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, she received a Ph.D. in political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1977.[12] Her dissertation was titled, “The Classification of Roll Call Votes in New Jersey.”
Fuhrman's Teachers College advisor and mentor was Donna Shalala, later U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and President of the University of Miami, who enabled Fuhrman and other students to gain real-world experience working with the Connecticut State legislature and a commission appointed by New York Governor Hugh Carey. Fuhrman has credited Shalala for her own subsequent focus on “the interaction of theory and practice” and her lifelong interest in “working closely with policymakers to do practice based on good, research-based advice [10] "
Consortium for Policy Research and Education (CPRE)
After completing graduate school, Fuhrman taught public policy at Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute for Politics during the early 1980s. It was there, in 1985, that she founded the Consortium for Policy Research and Education (CPRE), a joint venture among leading schools of education that included scholars such as future U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley; Richard Elmore, now the Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at Harvard; and Marshall Smith, later Undersecretary of Education under President Clinton.
CPRE conducted some of the most influential early analyses of what would become the state education standards movement, critiquing the spate of school reforms enacted following the publication of “A Nation at Risk.” That report famously highlighted the failure of American students to keep pace with their counterparts in Japan, Germany and other countries. CPRE determined that the reforms of the 1980s were fragmented and largely ineffective. In a series of articles and policy briefs, the CPRE group articulated a theory of standards-based reform that called for directly tying text books, teacher preparation and testing to statewide standards for student learning. That vision was adopted by the National Science Foundation, which began funding state systemic initiatives in the late 1980s and 90s, and was subsequently taken up by every major policy association and adopted, to varying degrees, by nearly every state.[13]
“The big shift coming from CPRE was about changing standards from the generic benchmarking that had gone on in the past to something that actually shaped what students were learning in the classroom,” Marshall Smith said in 2007.[13]
While Fuhrman has continued to call for standards that promote deeper learning, she has publicly stated that, with the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and other measures, the standards movement has focused excessively on testing and other accountability measures.
“The early visions of standards-based reform were that states would develop standards and use them to develop curriculum,[14]” she said in an interview in 2013. “Instead, states developed standards and nobody developed curriculum. They commissioned tests, and the test specs became the de facto curriculum, and they were much narrower than a curriculum should be.” For the new Common Core State Standards to be successful, Fuhrman wrote in Education Week in 2009, “educators and policymakers in the states, or in groups of states, will need to flesh out the new standards with curricula that specify desired pathways through the subject matter that will lead to mastery of the standards.”[15]
University of Pennsylvania
In 1995 Fuhrman was named Dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) and the school's George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education. Her scholarship focused on enhancing the quality of education research, accountability in education, standards-based reform and intergovernmental relationships.[16] Her published books during this period included Designing Coherent Education Policy (1993); Redesigning Accountability Systems for Education (2004), co-edited with Richard Elmore; and “The State of Education Policy Research,” co-authored with David Cohen and Fritz Mosher (2006).[17]
As Dean of Penn GSE, Fuhrman was seen “as a driving force in the School’s increased engagement in local urban schools and in international education. Her dedication to rigorous research and practical reform was reflected in the quadrupling of externally funded research at GSE” and when she left for Teachers College, almost half of the School's standing tenure track faculty had been hired during her tenure.”[18]
Fuhrman broadened Penn GSE’s involvement with schools in under-served communities in West Philadelphia. Under University of Pennsylvania President Judith Rodin, Fuhrman spearheaded the creation of the Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander School, a university-backed pre-K-8 public school named for the first African-American woman to receive a law degree at the University of Pennsylvania. The school sends most of its graduates on to selective high schools.
Following the state takeover of the Philadelphia school system, Fuhrman also led Penn GSE in setting up partnerships with three low-performing schools in its West Philadelphia neighborhood, where it has been able to drive significant gains in student achievement.[18] This work convinced Fuhrman that universities in general are ideal partners for local public schools.
