David Labaree
AERA, the American Educational Research Association, recently honored three faculty members of the Graduate School of Education — DAVID LABAREE, RAY MCDERMOTT and SEAN REARDON — at its annual meeting in San Francisco.
Labaree, professor of education, was selected to be a 2013 AERA Fellow for his exceptional scholarly contributions to education research. Labaree explores the development of the American education system and the role this system plays in American society. He is the author of a number of award-winning books, including Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, The Trouble with Ed Schools and How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education.
At the AERA conference, Labaree also gave the 55th annual John Dewey Lecture. His talk, “College — What Is It Good For?” traced how the modern American university came into being, looking in particular at how this institution developed its basic form in the “improbable context of the United States in the 19th century.”
Ray McDermott
Education Professor McDermott was chosen to receive a lifetime achievement award for distinguished contributions to social contexts in education research. He also gave the keynote address to AERA’s Division G, the organization’s section devoted to the social contexts of education. His talk, “Changing Borders: Relocating Race, Ethnicity and Class,” addressed how the dynamics of power along racial and ethnic borders affect access to educational opportunity.
McDermott, an anthropologist whose 45-year career in education began as a classroom teacher in New York City, joined the GSE faculty in 1989. Much of his recent research has been centered on the intersection of education, social structure and political economy. He takes a broad interest in the analysis of human communication, the organization of school success and failure, and the history and use of various literacies around the world. His work includes studies of inner-city public schools, after-school classrooms and the function of information technologies in different cultures.
Sean Reardon
Reardon, also a professor of education, and ANDREW HO, who received his PhD from the GSE and is now assistant professor of education at Harvard, were chosen to receive AERA’s Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award for their paper, “Estimating Achievement Gaps from Test Scores Reported in Ordinal Proficiency Categories” in the August 2012 issue of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics (JEBS). The award is given annually to recognize the highest quality of scholarship published in JEBS and three other AERA publications.
In the paper, Reardon and Ho present novel statistical methods that enable researchers to better use readily available test score data to estimate achievement gaps among student groups. In particular, they describe ways to more accurately estimate achievement gaps when only incomplete data are available.
— JONATHAN RABINOVITZ, Stanford Graduate School of Education
