On Monday, the Fordham Foundation awarded its 2007 Prizes for Excellence in Education. This year's winners numbered four. Kati Haycock won the award for valor, while Paul Hill shared the prize for scholarship with Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom.
Excerpts from their biographies, written especially for the event, follow. Full profiles are available online here.
Kati Haycock: Affectionately known as the "PowerPoint Princess," whenever Haycock keynotes a gathering of educators, policymakers, or business leaders, her talk is given against the backdrop of images that whiz by on the screen, one compelling bar graph or chart at a time. "My personal record," she says, "is 167 [slides] in 18 minutes."
The slides, explains Haycock, founder and president of the 15-year-old Education Trust, "reflect our commitment to honesty in data, even when it takes us places we'd, frankly, not want to go." The frenetic pace of her presentations says a lot about her. Haycock, often intense but always good-natured, is an unusually high-energy and effective warrior in Washington's policy battles.
Over the past 10 years, she has had greater influence on American education policy than anyone besides billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and President George W. Bush. That, at least, was the judgment of 179 education-policy experts who participated last year in a survey conducted by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, with support from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.
Haycock's high ranking in a survey of her peers is especially striking because at one time or another she has challenged almost all the other experts. She has jousted with Republicans reluctant to pour more funds into education, with Democrats leery of measuring the effectiveness of teachers or the learning of students, with free-market conservatives who question the value of pedagogical training or credentialing for teachers, and with entrenched educators who think schools can't improve until society sends them a different sort of student.
"We belong to the ‘no permanent enemies, no permanent allies' school of advocacy," said Haycock.
Washington's PowerPoint Princess/happy warrior is clearly ready for the next 15 years at Education Trust. Everyone else had best strap in.
Paul Hill: From his earliest days, Hill has been a careful observer of details. That attentiveness led him to RAND, where, he remembers, "you are taught to think through a system thoroughly ... and that single-answer solutions aren't going to do it."
To do this, one had to "get right down at the ground level" and look closely at what was really going on. Over the course of the next eight years, Hill spent plenty of time inside schools, looking at what works, and asking how to create the necessary conditions in the education system to let success replicate.
The work led him to develop a theory of school reform based on contracts, which says that rather than having school boards administer every detail of school operation and instruction, have them manage contracts between schools and diverse providers that handle curriculum, operations, and personnel. It made him famous with the ed policy crowd, but more importantly has fueled the charter movement.
Of course, new ideas rarely win over people immediately. Hill has been advocating contracts for the better part of 20 years. Today, he does so from his office in Washington state, where he is a professor at the University of Washington and head of the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
And though he works thousands of miles from the nation's capital, Hill gives Washington policy wonks plenty of grist.
Among the more notable projects was his two-year work as chair of the influential National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education, which was funded in part by the Gates Foundation. The commission, he said during the 2003 press conference announcing its findings, wanted "to move the debate off the extremes, where people say that school choice is definitely good or definitely bad, back into the zones where constructive debate can take place."
Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom: If the Thernstroms aren't dancing the tango in some ballroom or watching a late-night DVD in their 18th-century colonial farmhouse, it's a good bet the scholars are researching or writing in their Lexington, Mass., study.
His Harvard office is only a short drive away, but Stephan prefers working at home next to his 70-year-old dynamo of a wife, whose desk is so close to his it touches. "I've developed a wonderful skill in which Abby can talk on the telephone but I can tune her out and keep working," said Stephan, 72, gently teasing. "Whatever Abby is saying, I don't hear it."
As a couple, they've been a dynamic duo, especially on the sensitive topic of education and race. America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (1997), statistically portrayed a racial achievement gap that was not widely acknowledged at the time. No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (2003) tackled the thorny issue of racial "culture," which the Thernstroms defined as "values, habits and skills," such as doing your homework, avoiding excessive TV watching, and staying on the right side of the law. In short, the Thernstroms argued that culture goes a long way in explaining why blacks as a group trail whites, and whites in some respects trail Asians in academic achievement.
"Some people," said Abigail, "say this [the education achievement gap] has nothing to do with race. It's just that these kids are poor, or it's all about money. We demolish that. We look at NAEP and SAT scores by income and show that's not true.
"My reaction is if you care about the fate of black kids ... you don't pretend when you see a distinctive problem. You confront it head on and try to find solutions, or at least try to walk in the right direction."