2008 News

This year, ELPA students created two awards to recognize outstanding work by ELPA faculty. At the year-end ELPA celebration, student representatives presented the inaugural Teacher of the Year award to Prof. Clif Conrad and the Mentor of the Year award to Prof. Jerlando Jackson.

ELPA student Gareth Diaz Zehrbach is this year's recipient of the George Tipler School Law Study Program grant. The grant is administered by the Wisconsin Association of School Boards and the Wisconsin School Attorneys Association. Zerbach will study how and why dual language charter schools operate. The George Tipler family has funded an annual grant to be given to a student in the administrator preparation program of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. Mr. Tipler was the former Executive Director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.

Congratulations to Julie Mead on her promotion to full professor and to Richard Halverson on his promotion to associate professor with tenure.

The American Educational Research Association bestowed its 2008 Palmer O. Johnson Award on ELPA Professor Geoffrey Borman for the article, “Final Reading Outcomes of the National Randomized Field Trial of Success for All” (2007). The Award recognizes the most outstanding article of the year appearing in an AERA-sponsored journal. Read more. Professor Borman also received the AERA Publications Committee Award for Outstanding Participation in Reviewing Submissions for Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, his fourth such award as a peer reviewer for AERA journals.

WISCAPE Scholar Jennifer Delaney has been selected to participate in the 2008 Houston Higher Education Finance Roundtable on May 18-21. Sponsored by the University of Houston Law Center's Law for Higher Education Law and Governance (IHELG), the roundtable is an intensive seminar for junior faculty who write or teach in the broad fields of college finance, financial aid, and related areas.

David Vitale, ELPA graduate and the Director of Curriculum & Instruction for the Watertown Unified School District, was honored last month as one of three administrators to receive a 2008 Wisconsin State Reading Association Outstanding Administrator Award at the association’s convention in Milwaukee.  He was nominated by Watertown teachers and members of the Rock River Reading Council for providing leadership in the areas of early interventions and technology solutions that support reading at school and home. 

The ELPA community celebrated the achievements of the past year and congratulated this year's graduates at the end-of-the-year party, held May 16, 2008.

Dr. Merle Strong, professor of educational administration and director of the Center on Education and Work from 1968 to 1990, passed away on July 23, 2008 at home in Madison.   Over his 41-year career in education, including 20 years at UW-Madison, Dr. Strong provided exceptional leadership service for the field of vocational and technical education. Prior to his UW-Madison appointment, he served in the U.S. Office of Education (1959-68) and directed a curriculum development laboratory at Ohio State University (1955-59), while completing his Ph.D. Merle’s major contributions included consultation with international agencies on the development of policies and institutional development in Iran, Peru, Sierra Leone, Saudi Arabia and Jamaica.  He served as president of the National Association of Industrial and Technical Teacher Educators, and in 1985 received the Outstanding Service Award from the American Vocational Association.  A number of Dr. Strong’s graduate students held leadership positions in the Wisconsin Technical College System.

Professor Colleen Capper is one of just 200 triathletes chosen nationally to compete in the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii in October, an effort which she's dedicating to raising funds for the Gay Straight Alliance for Safe Schools (GSAFE), which has also named her Educator of the Year for 2008.  See her April 17 TV interview on the triathalon here.

Emeritus professor Donald J. McIsaac, Jr. is again reporting for service, this time for the American Statistical Association as organizing chair of the 2008 Quality & Productivity Research Conference June 4-6 at the Pyle Center on the UW campus.

Professor Julie Mead's new course, Legal Rights and Responsibilities for Teachers, debuts in Fall of 2008 as a 502 workshop which addresses the legal aspects of the work of teachers and other public school employees. The course is designed for undergraduate students training to be teachers and other school personnel. For more information, click here. With space limited, early registration is encouraged.

The application deadline is May 10 for eight to ten fellowships of $14,000 which ASHE, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, will award for the 2008-2009 academic year.  The fellowships must support dissertation research on student access and success in U.S. higher education, with an emphasis on topics that may lead to policy solutions to pressing issues in education.

With support from the Lumina Foundation for Education, ASHE administers the ASHE/Lumina Fellows Program, whose key objective is to promote innovative scholarship by creating an intergenerational community of scholars who will examine social, institutional, and policy barriers to opportunity and student success.  Print out this flyer (in Word) or visit www.ashe.ws/aboutfellowship.htm for more information and application materials.

ELPA Professor Jerlando F. L. Jackson will be director and instructor for "Research Course on African Americans and Education" for graduate students at the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) 2008 annual meeting in New York City. The session, held on Sunday, March 23, from 9 a.m.-6 p.m., aims to advance the research skills and competencies of graduate students in the area of African Americans and education research. Jackson and four other instructors will help the students develop a career research agenda for studying African Americans and education and will encourage young scholars to study the multitude of issues surrounding African Americans and education. AERA, founded in 1916, has approximately 25,000 members and is concerned with improving the educational process by encouraging scholarly inquiry related to education and evaluation and by promoting the dissemination and practical application of research results.

Twice this winter the University has highlighted ELPA initiatives to exemplify the UW's dedication to the Wisconsin Idea, i.e., that the boundaries of the University are (at least) the boundaries of the State.  In December, Wisconsin Week featured Jim Shaw and the Department's new Executive Ph.D. Cohort for School Leaders.  In January, it was Rich Halverson's work on a five-year grant to study how leaders in Wisconsin schools help improve teaching in the classroom.

Ph.D. student Gwen Drury is already applying her research on “Socially Ergonomic Environmental Design” to the campus's existing student unions and the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.  She's seeking ways that architecture and interior design can help build a sense of community and create ties outside the traditional community. She's featured in January's Wisconsin Week.