10/22/96
CONTACT: Stanford University News Service (650) 723-2558
STANFORD -- The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching will get a new president and a new home. On Oct. 21, the foundation's board announced the appointment of Stanford Professor Lee S. Shulman as its eighth president. The independent policy center, which is currently based in Princeton, N.J., is expected to move its offices to Palo Alto when Shulman takes over in August.
Shulman, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, came to Stanford in 1982. An expert on teaching and teacher training, he has focused in his research and writings on the assessment and evaluation of teaching in elementary and secondary schools, as well as on the college and university level. Shulman's areas of expertise also include the psychology of instruction in science, math and medicine; the logic of educational research; and policies intended to increase professionalism in teaching.
"I'm terribly excited and deeply ambivalent. It means that when I begin as president, though I'll be able to remain near Stanford, my life will change because I won't be playing the kind of faculty role I've played all my life," Shulman said.
A five-year research project funded by the Carnegie Corporation that Shulman conducted between 1985 and 1990 contributed directly to the creation of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and the development of portfolio-based performance assessments. Shulman's current research focuses on how novice and experienced teachers can create communities of learners in their classrooms and within their own professional cultures, and how university and college faculty members can create disciplinary communities for the evaluation and support of one another's teaching. The work is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Association for Higher Education, the Pew Trust and the Hewlett Foundation.
Shulman was the 1995 recipient of the American Psychological Association's E.L. Thorndike Award for distinguished psychological contributions to education. Other honors include fellowships with the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Psychological Association and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is the immediate past president of the National Academy of Education and a former president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). In 1989 he received AERA's award for distinguished contributions to educational research.
Before coming to Stanford, Shulman was a professor of educational psychology and medical education at Michigan State University, where he was also founding co-director of the Institute for Research on Teaching. He holds bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago.
Unlike the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Foundation, founded in 1905, is not a grant-making institution. Until the presidency of Ernest Boyer, who died last December, the foundation was devoted exclusively to higher education issues. Shulman said he plans to continue the foundation's expanded mission, which includes K-12 education as well as post-secondary education. Interim President Charles E. Glassick will head the foundation until August.
Shulman said it was not hard to convince the foundation's board that Stanford's world-class School of Education and its proximity to the University of California and California State University campuses make Palo Alto a perfect location. "It was no problem for the board to pluck it out of Princeton and move it to the Farm," he said.
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