Three longtime educators involved in reshaping and rethinking the way teachers and schools work have been awarded the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education.
James E. Bottoms, the director of the High Schools That Work program at the Southern Regional Education Board; Ernest L. Boyer, a former U.S. Commissioner of Education and the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; and Mary E. Diez, the dean of education at Alverno College in Milwaukee, received the awards at a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C.
The awards are given each year by the McGraw-Hill Companies, along with $25,000 cash prizes, to honor outstanding educators.
Mr. Boyer was recognized as one of the foremost educators in the nation, whose work has “dramatically influenced U.S education policy and helped shape the debate on school reform.” He served as the U.S. commissioner of education under President Carter, and became president of the Carnegie Foundation in Princeton, N.J., in 1979. He is the author of several books, most recently, The Basic School.
Mr. Bottoms was recognized for his work in reshaping high school academic and vocational studies in the South and East.
The High Schools That Work program is run by the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board-State Vocational Education Consortium, a group of superintendents, principals, teachers, and counselors. It seeks ways to improve the preparation of students for work and college. Mr. Bottoms has expanded the program, launched in 1987, to more than 450 sites in 19 states.
At Alverno College, Ms. Diez has been instrumental in creating programs for training teachers based on a model of what beginning, developing, and advanced teachers should know and be able to do. In 1984, the college began to redesign field settings and eventually its coursework according to the curriculum based on that model.
The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s Teacher Awards Program has named Pat S. Graff the 1995 National High School Journalism Teacher of the Year. Ms. Graff, a journalism and English teacher and adviser to The Edition school newspaper at La Cueva High School in Albuquerque, N.M., will receive a plaque and give a speech at the convention of the Journalism Education Association/National Scholastic Press Association in Kansas City, Mo. in November. In addition, a senior at her school will receive a $1,000 college scholarship to study journalism.
--Adrienne D. Coles
