A Decade of
Smart Starts

Faces of Philanthropy: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

I have spent the last year and a half in deep conversation with our faculty, staff, students, alumni, and partners, developing a strategic vision—not just to shape the future of Penn GSE, but to imagine the future of education itself. This issue of the magazine celebrates that vision, and I’m excited to share it with you. As you explore our priorities, I invite you to reflect: Where do you see yourself in them, and how does your work advance our shared vision?

Penn GSE has always been more than the sum of its parts—more than its 39 programs, 319 faculty and staff members, 1,672 students, and 20,000-plus alumni. We are a place where teachers, leaders, scholars, and educational changemakers hone and leverage their expertise to realize transformational change in education and, by doing so, uplift communities worldwide. We are calling our new strategic vision Together for Good because it reflects not only our collective commitment to impact, but the reality that it will take all of us—across roles, professions, and borders—to make it happen.

Our dreams are bold, and the challenges ahead are real. In this moment of both great promise and peril in education, we need everyone—all of you reading this—to help us shape the educational future we have envisioned. As you, our alumni and supporters, lead, teach, research, counsel, plan, and innovate in virtually every sector and across 90 countries, you bring Penn GSE’s vision to life—advancing our mission, shaping education, and creating real change every day. I am eager to harness your expertise and urge you to collaborate with us: mentor students, partner with programs, speak on campus, visit classes, attend events. There are countless ways to connect your work with ours as we strive toward our shared goals.

NEWS & AWARDS

Laura Perna (9) was honored with the 2024 Research Achievement Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education for her influential work on college affordability and equity, particularly for minoritized students, which has been cited nearly 20,000 times.

A team led by Howard Stevenson (10) earned a Projects for Progress grant from Penn’s Office of Social Equity and Community for CROPS for HEALING, which uses racial literacy to protect Black and Brown youth from the harm of hate; prepare them to use their identity stories to confront dehumanization in relationships and schools and teach their peers; and improve their academic engagement and achievement. These grants, now in their fourth year, offer up to $100,000 of support to Penn teams piloting practical projects that address social justice issues in Philadelphia.

Jonathan Zimmerman (11) testified at a congressional briefing in September about the report from the American Historical Association, “American Lesson Plan: Teaching US History in Secondary Schools.”

New Partnership Brings Math Peer Tutoring Program to Rural Students

Successful completion of the training qualifies tutors for up to six undergraduate credits and a peer tutoring certificate from the University of Pennsylvania. The aim is to raise student achievement and increase the rates of college application, enrollment, matriculation, and success for rural students statewide.

“We are incredibly excited to expand our reach and offer high school students across Pennsylvania the opportunity to learn what it truly means to step into the role of a teacher,” said Penn Literacy Network Executive Director Lara Paparo, GED’06, GRD’22. “This program is more than just tutoring—it’s about empowering students to make a meaningful impact in their communities. This partnership allows us to deliver high-quality training and resources that not only improve student achievement, but also foster leadership, academic growth, and a sense of community—all key ingredients in cultivating the next generation of educators.”

The project will also create and disseminate resources aimed at supporting college success and readiness, which will be available to all students in participating districts. In addition to the 4,771 primary beneficiaries, college-readiness activities each spring and fall semester will impact an estimated 16,000-plus secondary school students from across the state, reflecting 10 percent of students attending rural high schools across Pennsylvania.

atharine Strunk joined Penn GSE as dean last year because she wanted to have an impact. As a researcher, she had spent her career pursuing community-engaged scholarship in partnership with school districts and state departments of education, providing them with evidence to inform their policies. As a leader, she aimed to continue that kind of consequential work on a larger scale. Penn GSE, she reasoned, was the best place for it.

“Penn is a place where you do work that is intended to be applied,” she said. “We have some of the most brilliant scholars in the world housed here, but the difference is that we are not doing this research just to add more knowledge for knowledge’s sake. We are actually thinking about how we use that knowledge to improve the lives of learners and educators throughout the world. Everything we do here is intended to feed back into our communities—whether they’re here in Philadelphia, across the country, or across the globe.”

To that end, Dean Strunk spent her first year at Penn GSE in conversation with faculty, staff, students, and alumni to seek input for a plan for the School’s future that they could all work towards together. The result is a strategic vision for the next decade, Together for Good: A Vision for Transformational Impact, that expands the work Penn GSE is already doing, responds to urgent needs in the field of education, and inspires lasting change.

hen Bobbi Kurshan joined Penn GSE as executive director of academic innovation in 2012, one of her stipulations was that she be allowed to start a new master’s program in education entrepreneurship, a program that had previously never existed—at Penn or anywhere else. But Kurshan was used to trailblazing.

She earned degrees in math and computer science when women were underrepresented in those fields. She developed the first children’s software products for Microsoft. And over her long career as an entrepreneur, investor, developer, and academic, she had been at the forefront of the intersection of technology and education. If she was going to return to a university—a place used to a markedly slower pace of change than the tech world—it was going to be with a promise that boundaries would be pushed and things would be done differently.

“I wanted to find a way for the educators that were creating all these startups that I was investing in to have a rigorous academic introduction [to entrepreneurship],” said Kurshan.

aren Weaver was a world-class field hockey player. She was an All-American, one of the first women to earn an athletics scholarship under Title IX, and even qualified for the 1980 Olympic team (though the US boycotted the Moscow games). She turned that level of skill and passion for a sport into a distinguished professional path, becoming a head coach at Salisbury University in Maryland and the Ohio State University before running athletics departments of her own.

Her education at Penn GSE, where she earned her EdD in higher education management, illuminated the chasm that existed not just in the practical knowledge that university leaders lack about college athletics and how its governing body, the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), works, but also the academic literature on the subject. Weaver has spent every year since working to fill those gaps, becoming a national expert on the intersection of college sports and higher education.

After more than 30 years in athletics administration, Weaver joined the academic side of the house, teaching sports business at Drexel University before joining the Penn GSE faculty as adjunct assistant professor in 2020. She now teaches in the higher education program and developed and runs GSE’s Collegiate Athletics for Senior Campus Leaders certificate program through the Center for Professional Learning.

5 Tips

for Dealing with the New FAFSA

ate this past summer, the US Department of Education announced that the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, would be delayed for the second year in a row. The forms were redesigned in 2023 to be more streamlined and easier to fill to out—cutting down the number of questions from over 100 to under 20 for most people—but its rollout has been plagued with setbacks, mistakes, and technical issues.

During last year’s admissions cycle, this not only delayed financial aid offers for students, but it also meant that fewer students submitted the forms. By the beginning of May 2024, when most colleges require decision commitments for fall, FAFSA applications were down 20 percent from the same time the previous year, according to the National College Attainment Network’s FAFSA tracker.

For this year’s admission cycle, the FAFSA launched in late November, about two months late. So to help you—and any aspiring students in your life—hit the ground running, we turned to Penn’s Vice Provost for Faculty and GSE Centennial Presidential Professor of Education Laura Perna, C’88, W’88, for some tips on navigating the new forms and potential challenges.