Repolishing the Red Apple

University President Lawrence H. Summers promised unprecedented funding and support for the Graduate School of Education (GSE) when he tapped Ellen Condliffe Lagemann to be its dean last spring.

One of Harvard’s smallest and poorest graduate schools—particularly compared to schools with wealthy alums like the Law School and the Business School—GSE has historically received little attention from the University administration.

When Summers announced Lagemann’s selection, even Judith D. Singer, the school’s then-acting dean, marvelled that Harvard’s president would devote so much effort to finding the perfect fit for the GSE.

“This is not replacing [former Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean] Jeremy Knowles,” she said. “One could imagine a president not taking that kind of time to help find a new dean.”

Since Lagemann’s arrival in Cambridge, Summers says he has worked together with her and professors at the GSE “to renew the Education School and more sharply focus the University’s efforts in education on the crucial issue of public school education between K-12.”

The school, he says, should focus on “forging closer connections with the practice of education and increasing emphasis on teacher training, preparing people to work in public schools.”

At a community meeting last month, Lagemann outlined her plans to revamp the school, including consolidating programs and changing the curriculum to add core courses that all students must take.

And in her first year as dean, Lagemann has already partially redesigned and refocused the school to make it a more professional model for other schools of education.

“I think at the moment the Ed School is known because of famous faculty members,” Lagemann says. “I’d like the Ed School to be known for itself.”

Though Lagemann has set lofty goals for the GSE, in recent weeks the school has been forced to deal with more practical concerns.

A new GSE accountant recently discovered $2 million of previously unknown debt in the school’s Programs in Professional Education. The school now projects a deficit of $500,000 for this fiscal year, and a deficit of $150,000 for next year.

“Dealing with that has been a major blow for the school,” said GSE Acting Administrative Dean Richard Pagett.

GSE laid off 13 administrative staffers in the program. And Pagett said the school will also keep faculty positions vacant to cut costs.

But despite budget woes, Lagemann says she is set to push ahead with her plans—refocusing GSE’s curriculum, making it a template for education schools nationwide, and fostering increased involvement in issues surrounding K-12 education.

Creating a Core

When she arrived at Harvard, Lagemann created several committees to examine the school’s administrative and curricular structures, aiming to bring together the faculty’s three distinct divisions—Administration, Planning and Social Policy; Human Development and Psychology; and Teaching and Learning.

One of the committees—charged with investigating the workload of faculty and the appointment process—has recommended dissolving or modifying these groupings.

As a result, five new committees will be formed, which will work “in tandem” with GSE’s three central groupings to “give more emphasis to school-wide structures,” according to an e-mail Lagemann wrote to the GSE community in May.

“We are moving towards a nimble school-wide structure that promotes excellence within fields and vibrant collaboration across all fields,” Singer, who is now academic dean, writes in an e-mail.

Associate Professor of Education Wendy Luttrell says these changes will facilitate new opportunities at GSE.

“An ed school is the place for that sort of interdisciplinary scholarship to take place and yet our current structure doesn’t oil the wheels as well as it could in terms of the way administratively the school has been set up,” she says.

And the changes may help to eliminate “gaps” in doctoral training, Luttrell says, because students with similar interests earning the same degree become isolated in separate programs.

Many students with similar interests “would never in fact encounter each other over the course of their doctoral training,” she says.

The concept of consolidating GSE applies to the school’s masters degree students as well.

Currently, GSE boasts 14 masters programs.

But under Lagemann’s leadership, one committee has questioned the necessity of such a large number of programs, proposing changes Pagett calls “quite radical.”

Reducing the number of available programs and creating required core classes for all students are among their suggestions, Pagett says.

“Stepping back a step, does it make sense for a school this small to be offering a program of that much breadth?” Pagett asks.

Any change in the curriculum would follow a major reform this year that requires students to enroll in a particular masters program rather than building an eight course program on their own.

“We just didn’t think coming in and taking any eight courses adds up,” Lagemann says.

She points out that law, business and medical schools require certain courses that all students must take. Education schools, she says, are equally professional—and should have similar requirements.

Pagett says the first core course will be tried out—on an elective basis—next spring, addressing a general topic pertaining to education.

“No matter which [program] you graduate from, you should not be able to leave the Ed School without understanding how people learn,” he says.

A New Model

Lagemann hopes other schools of education will follow GSE’s lead and create more focused, professional programs.

And she has taken steps to encourage GSE faculty members to work with professors throughout the University.

Already, the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and Harvard Business School (HBS) have teamed up with GSE to train school superintendents.

Lagemann has also proposed an increased partnership with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to involve undergraduates in education and “make education a much more important part of life in the undergraduate Houses.”

And she has increased GSE’s involvement in local and national education issues, aiming to make GSE a leading voice.

“We’re trying to create a new model that we hope will be copied by other schools of education,” she says. “We really need to have an impact on policy and practice.”

In addition to strengthening existing connections to Boston and Cambridge public school systems, Lagemann has turned her gaze outward to include President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act” and other policy issues of national importance.

And Lagemann says she hopes to cast GSE’s net even wider.

“We think it’s very important to remember that people are moving around the world and most educational problems and possibilities have global roots,” she says.

This year Lagemann visited Mexico to recruit teachers, hosted the education minister of Ghana and encouraged her faculty to continue holding videoconferencing seminars, such as a lecture series by Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education Howard Gardner that was broadcast in China this past year.

Thomas Professor of Education Marcelo Suárez-Orozco says Lagemann’s global focus is crucial for affecting change in American public education.

“At a time when half of the children in New York City schools come from immigrant-headed households, global and international issues are much more powerfully felt today than in any other time in history,” he says.

With increased outreach, Lagemann says she hopes to identify several issues on which GSE—as an institution—can be an expert source.

“We should be known as the place where you can find superb thinking about important education problems,” she wrote to the faculty. “I believe that identifying one or several topics of school-wide concern would not only give us more standing with our external publics, but also make us a stronger intellectual community.”

Back to Basics

Though Lagemann has gotten the ball rolling on several major changes at GSE since her arrival, no concrete changes have been made at GSE to increase emphasis on K-12 education—which Summers stressed when he selected Lagemann.

Pagett says that while the school can “rhetorically” focus on K-12 education, “it takes time to translate that into real changes.”

Senior Lecturer on Education Katherine K. Merseth, who sat on one of the committees this year, says that Lagemann has maintained a focus on areas other than K-12.

“She’s also very deeply committed to research,” she says. “She comes from a research tradition.”

Lagemann says faculty needs to “think about children before kindergarten and young adults after [grade] 12” in order to improve K-12 education.

“You can’t empower K-12 education by just thinking about K-12 education,” she says.

Some faculty members say that K-12 education has always been a focus of GSE and that Summers’ comments have merely brought already existing work into the spotlight.

“What he’s done is he’s lit a fire under the possibility for really having an impact as a school in K-12 education,” Luttrell says. “Insofar as the school has always focused on K-12 the people who have been doing that kind of work for a while are getting more encouragement.”

Seeking Space

As Lagemann’s committees hammer out more precise details, they will need to find more than financial support for programming changes.

Crowded into three buildings on Appian Way and pushed into rental space, GSE has little room to grow.

But Lagemann says the University’s recently purchased land in Allston may provide the perfect fit.

Though formal discussions about relocating have not yet taken place, the new face of the GSE, she says, may be located across the river. And an Allston planning committee has begun to evaluate options.

“Generally speaking, we want to move to Allston,” Lagemann says. “Our physical plant currently is constraining what we want to do. We really need new space.”

New space would provide opportunities for the school’s restructuring efforts to come to fruition.

“The question of what activities we should be engaged in gets raised when you talk about space,” she says.

“If you really want to build a community, moving to Allston is a no-brainer,” Pagett says.

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.