Teachers College alumna Claudia V. Schrader (Ed.D., Ed.M., M.A.) will become President of Kingsborough Community College – part of the City University of New York – on September 15th.

Schrader has 17 years’ experience working at CUNY schools, including, most recently at Bronx Community College, where she served as Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic and Student success. In those roles, she helped improve graduation rates and rapidly expand the college’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs.

“I’m proud to recommend Claudia Schrader to the board to lead Kingsborough Community College,” said Vita C. Rabinowitz, CUNY’s Interim Chancellor, in a statement. “She has a proven record as an innovative leader, particularly in areas that are vital to student success at community colleges.”

Schrader was born and raised in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and attended Rutgers University as an undergraduate. She is certified in New York State as a special education teacher.

At TC, where she earned her master’s degrees in special education and instructional practice in special education (areas now housed in TC’s Departments of Health & Behavior Studies and Curriculum & Teaching), and her doctorate in International & Transcultural Studies, Schrader worked with faculty members Virginia Stolarski, whom she describes as her mentor; R. Douglas Greer; Robert Kretschmer and Florence McCarthy.

“The outlook I absorbed at TC was that all children can learn, and that my role as an educator is to figure out how that learning can happen. It’s up to us to figure out how to help them. That’s been my approach wherever I’ve worked, with students of all ages.”

– Claudia Schrader

“The outlook I absorbed at TC was that all children can learn, and that my role as an educator is to figure out how that learning can happen,” she says. “It’s up to us to figure out how to help them. That’s been my approach wherever I’ve worked, with students of all ages.”

While the leap from special education teacher to college provost and then president might seem unlikely, Schrader says the progression is a logical one.  “It gets back to the ideas of capitalizing on strengths and working on weaknesses.  I’m a very patient person, and I like to work problems from all sides to come up with the best way to do things.”

In addition, her focus on international education taught her “the importance of building a team, and of not coming in with all the answers.”

“You don’t go into a developing country and just tell people what to do,” Schrader says. “They also have the answers, so it is important to acknowledge and use their experience and skill base.”

Schrader calls Kingsborough Community College, which has been voted the fourth best community college in the United States and is again a finalist for the Aspen Prize, “an amazing place.”

“My role is to build on our strengths to the benefit of students – and to get students the credentials they need so they can walk across the stage at commencement and into careers or transfer into four-year programs,” she says. “Also, the awards the college has received speak volumes about the quality of our faculty and staff. So I want to continue to invest in the Kingsborough College community, so that we can all continue to invest in our students.”