New Leaders for Tc’s Campaign
Board of Trustees members Marla Schaefer (M.A. ’03), William Dodge Rueckert and Leslie Nelson have been named to lead TC’s $300 million Campaign, Where the Future Comes First

Marla, Leslie and bill are energized, know the College and care deeply about its future,” TC President Susan Fuhrman said last spring of TC’s new Campaign leaders.

Marla Schaefer, an alumna in organizational psychology, is Campaign Chair. Leslie Nelson, daughter of TC Trustee Emeritus and former Board Co-Chair Enid (“Dinny”) Morse, and Bill Rueckert, current Board Co-Chair and descendent of TC Founder Grace Hoadley Dodge, are Campaign Vice Chairs. The three succeed E. John Rosenwald Jr., Chair of the Board’s Committee on Development, and Laurie M. Tisch, Board vice Chair, who led the Campaign through its quiet phase and launch.

“Laurie and John did an extraordinary job laying the groundwork for a successful Campaign,” Fuhrman said. Fundraising totaled $180.4 million as of mid-October. “Preparing teachers is an important part of what TC does, but there’s so much more,” Schaefer says. “You can get a world class education in diabetes management, organization and leadership, conflict resolution. TC has so much to teach the world.”

Priority in Action: Students Come First
THE CAMPAIGN FOR TC IS increasing support for the College’s talented and promising students as never before. Scholarship giving for fiscal year 2014 (ending August 31) stood at $12.4 million, up 35 percent over last year’s $9.2 million. The successful drive builds on an $11 million commitment from Trustee Emerita Abby O’Neill to support students earning dual certification in areas of great need for New York City schools, and a $500,000 pledge from Trustee and alumna Pat Green. Other generous alumni and friends are joining the Campaign by establishing new scholarships and contributing to existing ones in all departments. “The best and brightest come through TC with a passion for education and shouldn’t be hampered by inadequate funding,” says Lida Orzeck (Ph.D. ’72), CEO of the lingerie business Hanky Panky, whose endowed scholarship supports doctoral students in Social & Organizational Psychology. Celia Genishi, Professor Emerita of Education, agrees. “My devoted parents couldn’t afford to send my sister and me to college,” says Genishi, who contributed annually to create a scholarship in her family’s name. “Yet through scholarship support we both attended Barnard, and I went to graduate school. So supporting TC students is a nice way to pay it forward.”

On The Road
President Susan Fuhrman and TC faculty and staff continued their travels around the world this year to share the latest news about TC’s Campaign and updates on exciting developments at the College. Alumni and friends attended recent events in Phoenix, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Rome and Paris. New destinations will be added to the Campaign travel Calendar for 2015. Engaging TC’s network of more than 90,000 alumni and friends around the world is an important Campaign priority — and a great way to connect with fellow TC graduates in your region.
 
Every Gift Makes A Difference
The Campaign offers a variety of ways to give at all levels to support TC’s extraordinary students.
•    Create an Endowed Scholarship with a minimum $50,000 gift.
•    Give to an existing Endowed Scholarship Fund.
•    Support the TC Fund Scholars Program by establishing a one-year scholarship for a student with demonstrated need.

On Board: Spotlighting the work of TC’s dedicated Trustees
By: Joe Levine

Meeting Learners Where They Live
Josh Solomon’s “M.O.” has been to speak to students’ interests. He’ll bring the same approach to board service at TC.

Everyone talks about teaching to students’ interests. The Business of Sports School (BOSS), founded by Josh Solomon in 2009, is devoted to that premise. “We serve many students who have not done well in middle school and are not interested in aca¬demics,” says Solomon (Ed.D. ’09), who previously cofounded another school, East-West School of International Studies in Queens. “So we wanted to create a school that would really engage them and also provide them with real skills. Some go on to have careers in sports business, but all are prepared for business careers of some kind.”

Solomon worked in investment banking before switching careers, but his pragmatic approach to education was substantially shaped at Teachers College, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on TC’s Sum¬mer Principals Academy (SPA): “SPA is unique in that it prepares teachers to be prin¬cipals without taking them out of their current jobs. But that raises the question: what type of field project does it make sense for them to do? A lot of programs assign a paper or research. Well, that’s not only tough for a working teacher to accommodate, it doesn’t make sense. Teachers who are going to be principals need experi¬ence managing other faculty.” 

From TC and SPA, Solomon also learned that the training of school leaders could be “less theoretical and more practical.” “For Craig Richards, who was my dissertation adviser, and other faculty members like Ellie Drago-Severson and Terry Maltbia, there were no sacred cows. They were all about opening up people to incorporate new ideas.”

That’s precisely the role that Solomon, who served on TC’s President’s Advisory Council, hopes to play on the Board. He’s particularly interested in the College’s preservice teaching programs, where he sees opportu¬nities to align efforts with how principals are prepared. Having lived and studied in Japan, he’s also eyeing TC’s global partnerships. But it may be his entrepre¬neurial skills that ultimately prove most valuable. In leading BOSS, Solomon has secured funding from the Gates and Ford Foundations and partnered with Morgan Stanley to create a mentoring program for the school’s students.

“We try to give our students a personal network of people from the wider New York business community,” he says, “because ultimately it’s not just about what you know, but also who you know.”


Board Certified –New Trustee Valerie Wayne brings an ideal resume to the Job
By: Joe Levine

If you were designing the perfect TC Trustee, Valerie Wayne would be it. For starters, Wayne (M.A. ’98) earned her TC degree in social studies and education after three years in the federal government “because I knew I wanted to work in the classroom.” She served as a special education teacher at Harlem’s progressive Central Park East Secondary School and then absorbed an entirely different approach in Australia, where she worked with aboriginal children and students from immigrant families.

“They used direct instruction there,” she says. “It’s very phonics-based, and you work with a script- exercises, questions, drilling. I thought it was going to be terrible, but it was actually very effective.”

After volunteering for Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, Wayne also worked in the U.S. Department of Education- first for Deputy Secretary Madeleine Kunin, the former Governor of Vermont, and then for Terry Dozier, a former national Teacher of the Year who advised Education Secretary Richard Riley. Her focus: teacher profes¬sional development and the improvement of teacher preparation standards.
  
And yeah, Wayne is also a Rockefeller- the daughter of Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Sharon Percy Rockefeller, President and CEO of WETA, Washington, D.C.’s public television station. Valerie is also the cousin of TC Trustee Emerita Abby O’Neill, whose mother Abigal Aldrich was John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s only daughter. (John D. Rockefeller Sr. be it recalled, was a TC Trustee who endowed the College with a $500,000 gift in 1902.) As Chair of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, headquartered just a few blocks from Teachers College, Wayne was much in the news this fall when the Fund announced plans to begin divesting itself of fossil-fuel stocks to align its investments with its grant-making to fight climate change.

“There is a moral imperative to preserve a healthy planet,” Wayne said in September on the eve of a United Nations Climate Change Summit in New York City, calling the decision to divest ”a natural progression” for her family that her famous forebear would have approved.

Wayne also serves as Vice Chair of the Asian Cultural Council and as a Trustee on the board of D.C. Preparatory Academy, a charter management organization in Washington. She’s also a former trustee of Spelman College, the nation’s leading historically black college for women.

All these experiences have left Wayne with strong ideas, particularly about education reform: that children need caring mentors and access to social services; that students thrive in small classrooms; that schools need more than just standardized test scores to measure students’ strengths and achievements; and that the United States needs a more equitable system for funding its public schools. But what’s per¬haps most striking about Wayne is that she join-ed TC’s Board mainly to learn.

“I’ve seen things from the classroom and federal policy perspectives, but less so from the leadership and ad-ministration perspective,” she says. “So I’m really excited, for example, to get more involved with the Teachers College Community School. I love that TC is bringing all its resources to bear, working with Columbia and other New York City resources. I’m also impressed by our involvement around the world. TC is doing it on every level.”

Which stands as a pretty good description of Valerie Wayne.

Published Friday, Jan. 23, 2015