Penn GSE Magazine Fall/Winter 2025
college athletics
higher ed leaders
supporting philly
algebra teachers
Fall/Winter 2025Contents
departments
/
News
Will “One Big Beautiful Bill” Have Big Impact on Community College Students?
Associate Professor Rachel Baker
history lesson
Why Do We Have a Federal Department of Education?
Professor Jonathan Zimmerman
Alumni
Cory Zoblin, GED’13
Katie Carella, GED’05
Faculty Q & A
Noteworthy
Recess
Letter from the Dean
Across classrooms, campuses, and communities, generative artificial intelligence is changing how we teach, learn, and lead. AI offers real promise and poses real risks. Penn GSE is doing more than reacting to this change. We are shaping it through our research, academic programs, and partnerships.
This year, in collaboration with the School District of Philadelphia, we launched Pioneering AI in School Systems (PASS), a professional learning network that equips superintendents, principals, and teachers with practical knowledge and resources for using AI in school settings. We welcomed a cohort into the Ivy League’s first master’s program focused on Learning Analytics and AI. We recruited two new faculty leaders to join our already tremendous group of faculty connecting learning science, data, and design. We also convened state and local policymakers from across Pennsylvania at a summit on how to unlock AI for the public good.
Penn GSE approaches this technology with an abiding commitment to research-informed practice and practice-informed research. For us, innovation is not simply about chasing what is new; it means developing and using tools that communities need, grounded in what we know about how people learn. We seek tools and practices that supplement rather than supplant the human work at the heart of teaching and learning. We measure what matters for students and educators, scale what works, and change what does not.
View from Campus
AI FOR GOOD
More: penng.se/aisummit
CAMPUS QUEST BEGINS
News Briefs
Library of Congress Literacy Awards Honor Penn GSE–Related Initiatives
Building BabyGPTs
Over five days, students designed their own models, reflected on the implications of their data choices, and explored how AI can both help and harm communities. The workshop, part of the Franklin Institute’s STEM Scholars program, included mentorship from Penn undergraduate researchers and encouraged participants to see AI as a tool that can be shaped responsibly. Morales-Navarro said the goal was to help young people understand how AI works, how it is created, and how they can influence its future.
“We designed activities so that students are reflecting on authorship, copyright, and representation before they even train their models,” he said. “It’s about recognizing that decisions you make during data collection or model design will shape the outputs—and the potential impact on others.”
Will “One Big Beautiful Bill” Have Big Impact on Community College Students?
The Story
What will this mean for community college students, who make up about 40 percent of all undergraduate enrollment in the U.S.? OBBB’s new Pell Grant terms largely represent a big win for them, since community college students account for about a third of all Pell Grant recipients. The bill expands Pell Grants, which help low-income students pay for college, to include workforce programs (e.g., the job-training certificate programs that community colleges offer and were previously ineligible for this kind of financial aid).
HER TAKE
She points out that research from states such as Kentucky suggests that financial aid for these types of workforce programs can boost enrollment, drawing in students who might not otherwise attend college. However, Baker cautions that the picture is far from uniformly positive, noting that while Workforce Pell opens doors for some, the credits students earn still count toward their lifetime Pell eligibility limit—potentially restricting future opportunities for degree completion.
Overall, Baker describes the OBBB as a “mixed bag” that does little to simplify the complex higher education landscape for students while shifting opportunity in uneven ways.
History Lesson
Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education
hy do we have a federal Department of Education? For most of American history, we didn’t. In 1867, Ohio Rep. (and future president) James Garfield proposed and won a Department of Education as part of Reconstruction, the federal project to rebuild the South in the wake of the Civil War. That broad effort included aid to schools for newly emancipated African Americans, which provoked fear and rage among many white people; just 10 percent of enslaved Black people could read, and education could enhance Black economic and political power. The first Department of Education lasted just a year before Congress demoted it to the Office of Education, which collected statistics about American schools but lacked any other executive function.
For the next century, the federal government played a negligible role in American public schooling. The big game changer was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared that state-sponsored school segregation was unconstitutional. Southern states vowed “massive resistance” to Brown and dragged their heels on integrating schools until the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which provided assistance to poor school districts for books, equipment, and more. That also gave the federal government new leverage over schools, which faced the loss of these funds if they failed to comply with desegregation orders. In 1964, just two percent of Black children in the South attended majority-white schools. Six years later, in 1970, one-third of them did.
ESEA also triggered an avalanche of other federal educational programs, including aid for children with disabilities and second-language English learners. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed into law a new Department of Education to centralize and oversee these efforts. It passed over the objections of Republicans like Ronald Reagan, who argued that public schooling should be a state and local concern. Upon his election to the White House the following year, Reagan pledged to eliminate the department. But his wishes were undermined by his own secretary of education, Terrel Howard Bell, whose much-discussed 1983 report on mediocrity in public education (A Nation at Risk) made removing the department politically untenable.
Faculty News
Published December 2025
Routledge
Published September 2025
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published June 2025
Multilingual Matters
Sade Bonilla received a grant from the Neubauer Family Foundation to evaluate Penn GSE’s Algebra 1 Fellowship partnership. She also received a grant from the Spencer Foundation to study the causal effects of ethnic studies on civic participation and postsecondary attainment, and a grant from the Lumina Foundation to examine workforce education and career pathway investments in community colleges. Bonilla co-authored a chapter, “Career and Technical Education: History, Theory, Evidence, and the Path Ahead,” in The Handbook of Education Policy Research, 2nd Edition, and has two forthcoming articles in Education Finance and Policy.
A. Brooks Bowden received a grant from the Neubauer Family Foundation for “Economic Value and Return on Investment: 9th Grade On-Track Strategy.” She was honored with the Penn GSE Faculty Recognition of Service Award, and co-authored a book chapter, “Examining costs: Designs and strategies and analysis,” in The Evaluation Handbook: An Evaluator’s Companion.
Forging Pre-Apprenticeship Pathways
Cory Zoblin, GED’13
It was during his Urban Teaching Apprenticeship at Penn GSE more than a decade ago that he first started thinking about expanding the ideas of what a classroom could be. “Penn GSE made me think about the boundaries of traditional education, its shortfalls, and how it wasn’t serving certain people,” Zoblin said. “When you have an institution like our school system that hasn’t changed much in 200 years, and you have so much failure in terms of test scores and other metrics, something’s not right there. We need to do something different.”
One place doing something different was One Bright Ray Community High School, a network of alternative schools for overage and under-credited students. Over his nine years there as an English teacher, Zoblin honed his approach to relationship-based teaching. “You can’t teach a kid who doesn’t trust you,” he said. “You have to build that bond first, then use it to help them take academic and emotional risks.”
Homeroom
So when Carella left the classroom, she turned her attention to children’s book publishing, eventually founding Scholastic’s Branches early chapter book imprint to fill a hole in the market where young readers—or older ones who are struggling—can access more sophisticated plots via books written on a second-grade reading level.
“The window of time we have to reach a new reader is very small,” she said. “Newly independent readers need, want, and deserve strong, complex storylines. We just need to be providing that content on their reading level.”
Guiding Education’s AI Revolution
By Lini S. Kadaba
n the Zoom classroom of “Large Language Model Applications in Education,” Penn GSE Lecturer Haiying Li, GED’21, is sharing a demo of a hypothetical app she made using ChatGPT. The program could help high schoolers hone their SAT skills by producing personalized questions, from easier to harder, based on the generative artificial intelligence’s analysis of their performance on a practice test.
“You can see, this isn’t [necessarily] bad,” she said to the 11 graduate students from around the country and as far away as China and South Korea, inviting them to think critically about how AI can inform the design of technologies that meaningfully support students. They’re among the 50 students enrolled in the new Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence master’s program launched this year—the Ivy League’s first education degree in the much-ballyhooed field of artificial intelligence (AI), said Li, the program manager.
Known formerly as Learning Analytics, the program’s 16-month revamped curriculum is weighted heavily toward generative AI and its promises and perils for education. Besides large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, the online program dives into AI-integrated feature engineering, data visualization, machine learning methodologies, deep learning models, and ethical considerations. Applications have doubled this academic year, she added, and a new dual degree with Penn Engineering, which launches in spring 2026, will further bolster GSE’s offerings.
A Presidential Roundtable
unning a college or university is a monumental undertaking. A president oversees thousands of people’s jobs and educations. They must have both a specific vision for their institution’s future and a broad understanding of its history and traditions. They need to be both a public figurehead and an action-oriented doer. It has never been an easy job, but these days, it seems downright impossible. Between a demographic cliff that means fewer students going forward, abrupt changes to longstanding research-funding norms, and skirmishes over free speech, academic freedom, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, higher education leadership is juggling numerous challenges in an environment where the value of a college education seems up for debate for the first time ever.
Penn GSE has educated more than 100 college presidents—many through its Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management (Exec Doc) program—and more than 40 are currently sitting leaders. So, we convened a small alumni panel to ask leaders how they do what they do in this uniquely challenging time.
The Future of College Athletics 
oger Ward, GRD’09, has long viewed college athletics as a vehicle to help student-athletes maximize their educational opportunities. The provost and executive vice president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) coached his two daughters as they traversed the competitive hoops circuit (his youngest eventually transitioned to volleyball), and he continues coaching the sport, now with former NBA player Carmelo Anthony’s Amateur Athletic Union Team Melo in Baltimore. So, he tries to help his players and other parents as they navigate college recruitment, where promises of five- and six-figure financial commitments are part of a new landscape.
“We’re a sporting family to be sure, but it’s always been the case where sports have been a means to an end,” said Ward. “None of my kids wanted to play pro, so it was always about the academics for us.”
College sports are drastically different now, thanks to a nearly $3 billion legal settlement that was formally approved in June. The House v. NCAA settlement, which marked the end of three different antitrust lawsuits that each claimed the NCAA was illegally limiting the earning power of student-athletes, now allows schools to begin paying their athletes. Many of the most prominent Division I teams in the country were already run like professional organizations, but now they need general managers to manage their team’s payroll. They have to decide which sports and athletes to spend their money on to see if they can remain competitive in a market where dollar values are eye-popping for fans.
Giving Back
Board Chair Jeff McKibben’s Ecosystem of Support
He has been committed to supporting Penn ever since. That support has included financial gifts—from an early $19.93 gift to the Penn Fund to endowing multiple scholarships—volunteering his time for class gift and reunion committees, and serving on, and now leading, Penn GSE’s Board of Advisors.
“An early mentor analogized the concept of philanthropy to be like botany and advised me to start small and nurture growth over time,” said McKibben. “Extending the analogy, we have learned that intent and inspiration to have an impact are the seeds of giving. The resources invested in terms of time, effort, and dollars provide the necessary nourishment for the seedling to sprout and grow.”
This is his story of that growth.
Giving Back
Board Chair Jeff McKibben’s Ecosystem of Support
He has been committed to supporting Penn ever since. That support has included financial gifts—from an early $19.93 gift to the Penn Fund to endowing multiple scholarships—volunteering his time for class gift and reunion committees, and serving on, and now leading, Penn GSE’s Board of Advisors.
“An early mentor analogized the concept of philanthropy to be like botany and advised me to start small and nurture growth over time,” said McKibben. “Extending the analogy, we have learned that intent and inspiration to have an impact are the seeds of giving. The resources invested in terms of time, effort, and dollars provide the necessary nourishment for the seedling to sprout and grow.”
This is his story of that growth.
Changing the Equation
he career paths of Senior Lecturer Caroline Ebby and Professor Janine Remillard have overlapped and intersected many times over the years. Early on, both were math teachers (Ebby for middle schoolers and Remillard in an elementary school). In their classrooms, both found inspiration in an experimental curriculum from the 1970s, the Comprehensive School Mathematics Program, that “made big ideas in mathematics accessible to kids by using visual representations,” said Remillard. Both pursued PhDs in education and now research mathematics teaching and learning—Ebby with a focus on student thinking and Remillard with a focus on curriculum. And when Remillard first came to interview at Penn GSE more than 25 years ago, Ebby was the doctoral student on her hiring committee. They have collaborated on a number of teaching, research, and professional development projects ever since.
Alumni Notes
-
At Penn, all alumni have an affiliation—a series of letters and numbers following their name to indicate their degree, school, and year of graduation. A master’s degree from Penn GSE is represented as GED and an education doctorate as GRD. A philosophy doctorate from any school at Penn is represented as GR. An undergraduate degree offered by the School of Education until 1961 is represented as ED. The two numbers following the letters represent the year in which that degree was completed.
Denotes alumni authors whose latest book is featured on the alumni bookshelf.
-
1970s
- Lawson H. Bowling, GED’77, was the first faculty member to be named in the Manhattanville University Athletics Hall of Fame.
- Thomas M. Bruggman, GED’78, is serving as the president of the board of the Fire Museum of Maryland.
- Amy M. Pollack, GED’74, recently published The Still Further Adventures of Jelly Bean, the third book in her The Adventures of Jelly Bean series.
-
1980s
- Andrew Choi, GED’98, is currently working as the senior legal counsel (employment) at Nike based in Singapore.
- Jolley Bruce Christman, GED’71, GR’87, was honored at the Education Law Center’s 50th Anniversary Celebration.
- Mona S. Weissmark, GR’86, released a new book, Seeing the Other Side: Shifting Perceptions, introducing the Science of Diversity Method®, an evidence-based approach to examining information, questioning assumptions, and testing competing explanations. This same focus inspired her newly designed course, “Evidence-Based Thinking in the AI Age.”
- Shelley Wepner, GED’73, GRD’80, was invited to serve on the senior editorial board of the Journal of Higher Education Management, the peer-reviewed journal of the American Association of University Administrators.
- Jack Yu, D’82, GED’84, M’85, is developing new curriculum to train surgical residents using simulation. He writes: “I am applying what I learned from GSE in psychomotor evaluation. We are also trying to develop ways to teach physicians on the proper use of AI, which is changing how medicine is practiced. I am also working on a book, Don’t Cut the Aorta—The Making of American Surgeons’ and Consumers’ Guide for Elective Surgeries.”
-
1990s
- Jessica Brown, GED’97, GED’99, is director of magnet schools for Aurora Public Schools in Colorado. She writes: “Next year, we are launching our first Spanish bilingual elementary school and the following year, we are launching our Health Science High School, where students will focus on a sequence of academic and technical courses and work-based learning opportunities. I am honored to be a part of directing these newly created programs and look forward to many more.”
- Ed Bureau GR’92, published Schools As Seeds of Change: A Regenerative Approach to Transforming Learning.
- Sandy Burghgraef-Fehte, GED’91, a multiple myeloma survivor, was recently interviewed for an upcoming documentary Reclaiming Life: A Cancer Story of Hope. The documentary is set for a March 2026 release to coincide with Multiple Myeloma Awareness Month. She continues to work as an elementary school principal.
- Barbara A. Caruso, GR’93, is a wellness practitioner who created the BAC Co-Transitioning Model, which, she writes, “creates a spiritual bond that assists our loved ones during the end stages of the dying process.” This seminar has been piloted with end-of-life practitioners as well as counselors and educators.
- Carladenise Edwards, C’92, GED’93, is currently serving as chief administrative officer, one of the deputy mayors for Miami-Dade County. She completed Harvard University’s Adaptive Leadership Initiative in June 2025 and serves as a member of the Penn School of Nursing Board of Advisors and Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute’s External Advisory Board.
5 Tips
for incorporating arts-based inquiry into literacy classrooms
iteracy plays a big role in fostering the skills necessary for students to critically examine our world and imagine a better one. So do the arts—and incorporating them into literacy classrooms can enhance critical inquiry, strengthen the imagination, and increase engagement, all while equipping students to better understand the world around them across a variety of modalities.
Jessica Whitelaw
Lecturer in Literacy Studies
She shared the following tips for teachers interested in integrating the arts as a storytelling device into their literacy classrooms.
The Penn GSE Magazine is produced by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Reproduction of these articles requires written permission from Penn GSE. ©2025 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. Please contact Penn GSE at (215) 573-6623 or alumni@gse.upenn.edu for references or to update your address.
Katharine O. Strunk
Dean
William Parker
Vice Dean, Marketing and Communications
Rebecca Raber
Editor
Editorial Board:
Matt D’Ippolito
Hassan Javed, GED’26
Nada Khan, GED’26
Jane L. Lindahl, GED’18
Jennifer Moore
Kat Stein
Designed by Bold Type Creative
Copyedited by Colleen Heavens
Jeffrey S. McKibben, W’93, Chair
Deborah L. Ancona, C’76, GED’77
Olumoroti G. Balogun, GED’19, GRD’20
Brett H. Barth, W’93
Allison J. Blitzer, C’91
Harlan B. Cherniak, W’01
Jolley Bruce Christman, GED’71, GR’87
Webster B. Chua, W’04
Samara E. Cohen, C’93, W’93
Beth S. Ertel, W’88, WG’92
Evan S. Feinberg, W’09
Jeffrey L. Goldberg, W’83, WG’89
Patricia Grant, GED’01, GRD’04
John A. Henry
Alexander B. Hurst, C’01
Heather Ibrahim-Leathers, W’95
Andrew H. Jacobson, WG’93
Douglas R. Korn, W’84
R. Neil Malik, ENG’92, W’93
Gregory A. Milken, C’95
Andrea J. Pollack, C’83, L’87, GED’17
Lindsay Greene Ramsay, C’05
Francisco J. Rodriguez, W’93
Molly P. Rouse-Terlevich, C’90, GED’00
Michael J. Sorrell, GRD’15
Navin M. Valrani, W’93, GED’18, GED’22, GRD’23
Steven M. Wagshal, W’94