Dr. Matt Hartley, assistant professor of education, has been awarded a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue research on the civic engagement movement in higher education.

Penn GSE Professor Margaret Beale Spencer was among the national artists, writers, and scholars selected as a winner of the 2006 Alphonse Fletcher, Sr., Fellowship.

Fellows receive a $50,000 stipend to fund work on race relations or African-American culture. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the selection committee, "We think of these as Guggenheims of race issues."

On May 10, Susan H. Fuhrman was approved as the new president of Teachers College, Columbia University, where she will take office on August 1.

Taking the helm from Arthur E. Levine, she will be the 10th person to hold the position and TC's first female president.

More than a generation after the end of the modem civil rights movement, social critics, reformers and scholars remain concerned over the seemingly intractable racial divisions that mark American society.

By all too many measures, minority children lag behind their white counterparts - in education, for example, half as many black students are placed in gifted programs as whites, African-American and Latino fourth-graders are approximately two years behind white peers in reading and math, and twice as many white students are earning BA degrees.

In her recent book, Penn GSE Research Associate Sigal Ben-Porath considers how democracies can preserve civic education in times of war.

An examination of civic education, the culture of war, and the quest for peace, Ben-Porath's book, "Citizenship under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict," draws on examples from Israel and the U.S. to understand how ideas about citizenship change when a country is at war - and what educators can do to prevent some of the most harmful of these changes.

The Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania has announced that James "Torch" Lytle, Superintendent and Chief School Administrator of Trenton, New Jersey, schools since 1998, will be joining the School's faculty as a practice professor, effective July 1, 2006.

The Penn Center for Educational Leadership (PCEL), housed at Penn GSE, has received a $4.9M grant from the Annenberg Foundation to launch the Distributed Leadership Initiative, a four-year collaboration with the Philadelphia School District to promote shared leadership at the individual school level.

A new breed of learning executive has emerged in the past decade to take on the challenge of both running learning like a business and making learning a critical contributor to organizational success. It takes a complex skill set to run an efficient learning function that is strategically aligned with and responsive to the needs of a business.

With Penn GSE in the lead, the University of Pennsylvania is partnering in a new center dedicated to improving middle school science education. Called the 21st Century Center for Cognition and Science Instruction, the project has received $10 million in grant support from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences.