Atlanta Harper Lecture: The Ambitious Elementary School: Its Conception, Design, and Implications for Educational Equality

Decades of reform efforts have failed to produce schools that reliably enable disadvantaged students to achieve at high levels. In a recent book, The Ambitious Elementary School: Its Conception, Design, and Implications for Educational Equality(University of Chicago Press, 2017), Lisa Rosen and colleagues argue that the reason is a failure to account for schools as organizations. Intervening to improve teaching and learning is not like plugging a new appliance into an electrical outlet. Rather, any new program, technique, curriculum, or practice needs to be purposefully integrated within an overall system of instruction, which in turn requires accounting for the tremendous heterogeneity of both student skill and teacher expertise. In this talk, Lisa Rosen will present a study of one elementary school—the University of Chicago Charter School—that attempted this purposeful integration, explaining the results of this model for student learning in reading and mathematics while also discussing the implications for reducing educational inequality.

To register or find out more information, please click here.

Featured Faculty

Lisa Rosen is executive director of the UChicago Science of Learning Center and research program director for its initiative, Successful Pathways from School to Work. She is particularly interested in fostering collaboration between researchers and practitioners to translate research into interventions that can improve learning in both home and school settings. Rosen’s recent coauthored book draws on her prior work at the Urban Education Institute, where her research examined the social and cultural dimensions of urban school effectiveness and improvement. Rosen’s work has appeared in several volumes on the anthropology of education and education policy, including in the American Educational Research Association’s 2009 Handbook of Education Policy Research. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of California, San Diego.

Learn more about Lisa Rosen’s recent book with Stephen Raudenbush and Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick, AM’05, PhD’07, The Ambitious Elementary School: Its Conception, Design, and Contribution to Educational Equality (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Questions? Contact alumniassociation@uchicago.edu or 773.702.2150.