Brooks-Gunn, Ginsburg Elected To National Academy of Education
Published in TC People
Faculty members Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Herbert P. Ginsburg have been elected to the National Academy of Education (NAEd). They are among 11 education leaders who were elected to the Academy for their “pioneering efforts in education research and policy development,” the Academy announced.
“The newly elected members are preeminent leaders in their respective areas of educational research, and they have had extraordinary impact on education in the U.S.,” said TC President Susan H. Fuhrman, who is also President of NAEd.
Brooks-Gunn is the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development and Education at Teachers College, where she is co-director of the National Center for Children and Families. She is also a Professor of Pediatrics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, and co-director of the Columbia University Institute for Child and Family Policy.
Brooks-Gunn’s research focuses on designing and evaluating interventions and policies aimed at enhancing the wellbeing of children living in poverty. She is a principal investigator in the “Fragile Families” study, a large-scale, longitudinal analysis of the connections between poverty, health and academic achievement.
Brooks-Gunn has received numerous academic awards, including the American Academy of Political and Social Science's Margaret Mead Fellow Award, the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy Award, and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science.. Brooks-Gunn also received an honorary doctor of science degree from Northwestern University.
Ginsburg, the Jacob H. Schiff Foundations Professor of Psychology and Education at TC, is a leading researcher on development of mathematical thinking and assessment of cognitive function. Ginsburg, who was named a fellow in the AERA fellow in 2010, contributed to a 2009 National Academy of Sciences study showing that organized mathematics education for young children is both feasible and desirable to provide a sound foundation for later learning and achievement. Ginsburg co-authored “Big Math for Little Kids,” a comprehensive and challenging mathematics curriculum for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children.
Research by Ginsburg and his doctoral students forms the basis of MathemAntics, software developed with Educational Network Services (ENS), to help children from age three to grade three learn basic ideas and methods of number, from learning to say the counting words through understanding negative integers.
With funding from the National Science Foundation, he collaborated with the company Wireless Generation to develop mCLASS:Math, software that enables educators using handheld or laptop computers to assess and understand their students’ mathematical performance and thinking in order to guide teaching.
The National Academy of Education (NAEd) advances the highest quality education research and its use in policy formation and practice. Founded in 1965, NAEd consists of U.S. members and foreign associates who are elected based on outstanding scholarship related to education. In addition to serving on expert panels that address pressing issues related to education, members are also deeply engaged in NAEd’s professional development programs, such as the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Program.
In addition to President Fuhrman, members of NAEd from Teachers College include Lambros Comitas, Edmund W. Gordon (Professor Emeritus), Hope Jensen Leichter and Henry Levin. Maxine Greene is a NAEd member emerita.
Nominations are submitted by individual members once a year for review and election by the entire membership.