Since 2006, TC has hired scores of new faculty members, conducted an historic Campaign, modernized its campus and dramatically increased student aid and research funding. Above all, the College has “connected the dots,” uniting minds across disciplines to address society’s most pressing challenges.
2006
- Alumna Susan H. Fuhrman (Ph.D. ’77) becomes TC’s 10th President and the first woman to hold the job. A noted education policy scholar, Fuhrman was previously Dean and George & Diane Weiss Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. She founded and leads the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE).
- TC’s Community College Research Center is co-recipient of $10 million from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to establish the National Center for Postsecondary Research, which measures the effectiveness of programs to help students transition to college and master basic skills for a degree.
2007
- Provost and Dean Thomas James creates TC’s Provost’s Investment Fund to support multidisciplinary faculty work.
- The new Office of School & Community Partnerships (OSCP), led by Nancy Streim, gives New York City schools a single point of access to TC’s resources.
- TC’s “Teaching The Levees: A Curriculum for Democratic Dialogue and Civic Engagement,” about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is distributed free to 30,000 teachers nationwide.
- Susan Fuhrman is inaugurated as TC’s President, declaring, “Our legacy demands that, like our predecessors, we will assure that our work always addresses the most important questions. By emphasizing health and psychology along with education, we must represent the interdisciplinary approaches that educational problems inherently demand.”
2008
- Janice Robinson, previously General Counsel, becomes TC’s inaugural Vice President for Diversity & Community Affairs.
- Susan Fuhrman becomes President-elect of the National Academy of Education (NAEd).
- TC faculty assist Jordan’s Ministry of Education and Queen Rania Teacher Academy in redesigning the nation’s public school system.
2009
- S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivers TC’s inaugural Phyllis L. Kossoff Lecture on Education & Policy, praising TC but calling for a “sea change” in most teacher preparation programs. Kossoff, a TC alumna, serves on TC’s President’s Advisory Council.
- The Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund gives $1 million to support OSCP and Teachers College’s Partnership Schools Network (Harlem public schools serving students at risk of dropping out).
2010
- At Academic Festival, TC presents its inaugural President’s Medal of Excellence to Prime Minister Nahas Angula of Namibia (M.Ed. ’79) and Ulysses Byas (M.A. ’52), who fought for better resources for Jim Crow-era Southern black public schools.
- TC honors Trustee Joyce B. Cowin (M.A. ’52) by dedicating the Cowin Conference Center.
- Teaching Residents at Teachers College (TR@TC), a master’s degree program backed by a $9.75 million U.S. Department of Education grant secured by faculty member A. Lin Goodwin, apprentices residents with experienced teachers at high-needs schools.
- TC psychologist Derald Wing Sue publishes Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.
- TC psychologist George Bonanno publishes The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss.
“Our legacy will also be in global terms. Increasing education and skill levels makes the world more interdependent and competitive.”
— Susan Fuhrman, President, Teachers College
2011
- The College creates a new Department of Education Policy & Social Analysis.
- The Teachers College Inclusive Classrooms Project convenes 500-plus New York City educators for professional development to improve opportunities for special-needs students.
- A new Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment, funded by the federal Institute of Education Sciences and housed and led by TC’s Community College Research Center, examines long-term employment and earning outcomes for postsecondary students.
- TC’s Department of Organization & Leadership launches a 45-credit, year-long Executive Master’s Program in Change Leadership.
- Professor Lucy Calkins, Founding Director of the TC Reading & Writing Project, co-authors Path-ways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement, with Mary Ehrenworth and Christopher Lehman.
“I came to Teachers College to learn to understand the issues surrounding education so I could challenge the theories of apartheid. I am happy that going back to independent Namibia I was leading the team. We dismantled the racial education system.”
— Nahas Angula (M.Ed. ’79) Former Namibian Prime Minister; Recipient of TC’s President’s Medal of Excellence
2012
- Teachers College and Singapore’s National Institute of Education establish a Singapore-based joint Master of Arts program in Leadership & Educational Change, part of a U.S.-Singapore educational collaboration.
- Psychologist Lisa Miller launches TC’s Spirituality Mind Body Institute, the nation’s first Ivy League master’s degree concentration in spirituality and psychology.
- Cate Crowley and Miriam Baigorri, faculty members in Speech/Language Pathology, and President Fuhrman and Provost James receive The National Council of Ghanaian Associations’ Humanitarian Award. TC students annually provide free services for Ghanaians with communication disorders and development for Ghanaian professionals.
- Led by President Fuhrman and Deborah Ball, Dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan (U-M), TC and TeachingWorks, based at U-M, host a major conference on connecting advances in learning research to teacher practice.
- The Teachers College Community School, launched in 2011, moves to a permanent home at Morningside Avenue and 127th Street.
- Science Education faculty member Christopher Emdin and rapper GZA launch the Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S. for New York City high school students.
- Faculty members Mariana Souto-Manning, Celia Genishi and Susan Recchia receive a $1.25 million U.S. Department of Education grant to prepare dual certified teachers in early childhood education and early childhood special education.
- A report led by faculty member Michael Rebell establishes a legal framework and cost parameters for providing the country’s neediest children with improved educational resources and wraparound services. Rebell debates his recommendations with New York Education Commissioner John King (Ed.D. ’08) and other policymakers.
- The Journal of School Health devotes a special issue to faculty member Charles Basch’s documentation of the disproportionate impact of health disparities on low-income minority youth’s academic achievement.
- TC sets records for applications, new student enrollment and selectivity. Applications are up 26 percent since 2007.
2013
- TC launches a year-long celebration marking the 125th anniversary of its founding.
- The New-York Historical Society launches the exhibit “Teachers College: Pioneering Education through Innovation.” On opening night, the College salutes member of its founding families: the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Macys, the Milbanks and the Dodges, including TC Board Co-Chair William Dodge Rueckert.
- Global TC Day unites the TC community worldwide.
- September 3rd, 2013 is proclaimed “TC Day” by Mayor Bloomberg, and New York City co-names Manhattan’s West 120th Street as “Teachers College Way.”
- A gala evening at Harlem’s Apollo Theater concludes TC’s 125th anniversary celebration and launches Where the Future Comes First, the largest-ever campaign for a graduate school of education. TC honors Trustees James Comer and Laurie Tisch, GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt and the wife-husband team of educator Susan Benedetto (M.A. ’98) and singer Tony Bennett, and announces the Emanuel & Barbra Streisand Fund, the entertainer’s scholarship tribute to her late father, who attended TC.
- TC launches REACH (Raising Educational Achievement Coalition of Harlem), a partnership with six Harlem public schools.
- The inaugural Cowin Financial Literacy Summer Institute, funded by Trustee Joyce B. Cowin, prepares 50 New York City high school teachers to incorporate financial education into their classes.
- Board Vice Chair Laurie M. Tisch gives TC $10 million. Half the gift, made outright, seeds new capital initiatives and establishes TC’s Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy, led by faculty member Pamela Koch. The balance is a call to action to the Board to revamp TC’s technology and infrastructure.
- The Tisch Food Center’s debut conference includes Newark Mayor and TC Trustee Cory Booker; New York City Council President Christine Quinn; Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer; and Kevin Concannon, U.S. Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services.
- TC’s National Center for Re-structuring Education, Schools & Teaching wins a $12 million U.S. Department of Education grant for its STEM Early College Expansion Partnership — TC’s largest-ever federal grant and first through the federal Investing in Innovation (i3) program.
“Our alumni are the best representation of TC — our ambassadors, our primary product. We are enormously proud of them.”
— Susan Fuhrman, President, Teachers College
2014
- TC mourns philosopher Maxine Greene, 96, and education anthropologist George Clement Bond, 77.
- TC’s Art & Art Education program launches a Creative Technologies concentration.
- Vice Dean A. Lin Goodwin establishes TR@TC2, a teacher prep program to improve student STEM achievement.
- A $10 million federal grant to TC’s Community College Research Center creates the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness, which evaluates new remedial assessment, placement and instruction approaches.
- TC and the Tyler Clementi Foundation create TC’s LGBTQ Diversity Scholarship.
- A study by TC neuroscientist Kimberly Noble, published in Nature, links poverty to children’s brain development. Nature also spotlights TC psychologist Peter Coleman’s application of dynamical systems theory to the study of intractable conflict and publishes findings by Lecturer Joey Lee and doctoral student Jason S. Wu that digital games help engage the public in climate change issues.
- Faculty members Lori Custodero and Hal Abeles launch the TC Teaching Artist Certificate program, supported by the Morse, Greenberg and Nelson families.
“TC has historically played a key role in art education. So we felt a responsibility to grapple with the rapidly expanding influence of technology in every aspect of the arts.”
— Judith Burton, Macy Professor of Education
- A $1 million gift from David and Maureen O’Connor establishes the Teachers College Resilience Center for Veterans & Families, directed by clinical psychologist George Bonanno. The Center pairs groundbreaking research on human emotional resilience with clinical training of students to assist veterans and their families.
- The College launches a certificate program in Sexuality, Women & Gender for educators, researchers, practitioners, administrators and activists.
- TC launches a Bilingual Latina/o Mental Health concentration — New York’s only culturally appropriate training program in delivering mental health services in Spanish to Latinas/os.
- Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars and Davis Jenkins publish Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success.
- Led by Kathleen O’Connell, TC launches its first fully online doctoral program, which enables nurses with master’s degrees to become nurse educators in academic or staff settings; and an online certificate program in Nursing Education.
- The College renames its Center for African Education as The George Clement Bond Center for African Education.
- Led by Pearl Rock Kane, TC’s Klingenstein Center for Independent School Leadership, with Columbia Business School and INSEAD, launches accelerated dual-degree programs in private school leadership and business administration.
- TC’s Department of Curriculum& Teaching launches a new doctoral specialization in Teacher Education — an emerging field focused on those who teach teachers and conduct related research.
“To create a climate of respect, “the numbers come first. Because you have to be around people of other backgrounds to respect and understand them.” — Susan Fuhrman, President, Teachers College
2016
- President Fuhrman launches a TC initiative in civic education, citing the nation’s rising racial tensions and violence, polarized electorate, susceptibility to fake news and declining rates of voting and political participation.
- TC launches a four-day summer institute, Reimagining Education: Teaching and Learning in Racially Diverse Schools. Led by education sociologist Amy Stuart Wells, Reimagining Education unites faculty in helping America’s predominantly white teaching force engage an increasingly diverse student population.
- The Middle States Commission on Higher Education emphatically renews TC’s accreditation and affirms its efforts to lead the shaping of 21st-century approaches to teaching and learning.
- The conference The Promise of Psychology@TC showcases TC’s psychology research on the linking of science and practice, social justice/advocacy, local relevance/global reach, and learning and cognition.
- Jack Hyland, Co-Chair of TC’s Board of Trustees, receives the College’s Cleveland E. Dodge Medal for Distinguished Service to Education. Hyland’s 29-year service on the Board spans two presidents and two record-setting campaigns.
- With the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the Department of Counseling & Clinical Psychology announces an online continuing education training program for school counselors, focusing on college advisement.
- Former New York Giants foot- ball great Justin Tuck and his wife, Lauran, founders of Tuck’s R.U.S.H. for Literacy, headline a celebration for the Cowin Financial Literacy Program. The Program is taught online to 126 Cowin Fellows, funded by Trustee Joyce B. Cowin.
- Philanthropy & Education, a new journal edited by faculty member Noah D. Drezner, publishes its first issue.
- Faculty member Sandra Okita hosts the 25th Anniversary international RO-MAN conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, on robot and human interactive communication.
- TC’s Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship program celebrates its 20th anniversary. Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad speaks on relations of power and equity in the academy.
- Faculty member Ansley T. Erickson authors Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits.
- TC introduces a master’s degree program in Bilingual Special Education Studies, leading to triple certification in initial childhood education, bilingual education and special education. The program is funded by New York City’s Department of Education.
- Carmen Martínez-Roldán, co-author of Visual Journeys through Wordless Narratives: An International Inquiry with Immigrant Children and The Arrival, receives the 65th Annual Conference of Literacy Research Association Edward B. Fry Book Award.
- TC’s Civic Participation Project, created by professors Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Laura Smith and Lalitha Vasudevan, conducts a forum on the mass incarceration of U.S. minority youth.
- At the inaugural Spiritual Child Conference of TC’s Spirituality Mind Body Institute, educators who promote young people’s spiritual development and schools’ spiritual character form a new National
- Council on Spirituality and Education, housed at TC. Psychologist/media personality “Dr. Dale” Atkins (M.A. ’72) receives the first William Leroy Stidger Award for Spiritual Activism.
- The publisher Heinemann introduces the Teachers College Reading & Writing Project Classroom Libraries Series — books for grades K-8 selected by the nation’s leading provider of literacy professional development for teachers.
- Early childhood education faculty member Mariana Souto-Manning and Instructor Jessica Martell receive the 2016 American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Critics Choice Book Award for Reading, Writing and Talk: Inclusive Teaching Strategies for Diverse Learners, K-2.
- TC’s Community College Re-search Center celebrates its 20th anniversary. U.S. Second Lady Jill Biden, a full-time community college professor, calls for continuation of efforts to improve and expand access, graduation rates and job placements of community college students.
- A study by TC’s Xiaodong Lin-Siegler in the Journal of Educational Psychology finds that high school students improved their science grades by learning about the personal struggles and failed experiments of scientists such as Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.
- Science educator Christopher Emdin publishes For White Folks Who Teach In the Hood…And the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education.
- Psychologist Peter Coleman receives the 2016 Outstanding Book Award from the International Association of Conflict Management for Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement.
“We’re interested in ensuring that education technology is effective —helping the world design things that actually improve teaching and learning.” — Susan Fuhrman, President, Teachers College
2017
- At TC’s 37th Winter Round Table, themed “From Ferguson to Flint: Multicultural Competencies for Community-Based Trauma,” TC psychologist Marie Miville receives the conference’s annual Janet E. Helms Award for contributions to the field.
- TC’s Gottesman Libraries opens its new Smith Learning Theater funded by an $8 million grant from TC Trustee Camilla Smith (M.A. ’72) and her husband, George.
- TC convenes “Education: The Public Good or the Individual Good?”, a symposium on the future of public education.
- The College mourns Board Co-Chair Jack Hyland.
- In New York, the Guggenheim Museum mounts a retrospective of the abstract expressionist Agnes Martin (M.A. ’52), while the Studio Museum of Harlem exhibits works by Alma Thomas (M.A. ’34). Georgia O’Keeffe, a TC student prior to World War I, is the focus at the Tate Modern in London.
- President Fuhrman announces a college-wide initiative to improve the quality of education technology. TC launches an innovation contest in which student teams, mentored by faculty and industry experts, develop research-based concepts and prototypes for educational tools.
- Psychology professor emeritus Morton Deutsch, a pioneer in the fields of conflict resolution, cooperative learning and social justice, passes away at 97.
- TC faculty members are elected to head three leading professional societies: Amy Stuart Wells, as President-elect of the American Educational Research Association; Regina Cortina, as President-elect of the Comparative & International Education Society; and Barbara Tversky, as President-elect of the Association for Psychological Sciences.
- Erica Walker, Professor of Mathematics Education, is named to direct the College’s Institute for Urban and Minority Education, (IUME) founded by her mentor, Professor Emeritus Edmund W. Gordon. At a forum co-sponsored by Save the Children, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Pearson Education company, TC faculty member Mary Mendenhall presents a report outlining strategies to improve teaching for refugee children.
- The World Health Organization globally distributes a manual, authored by TC psychologist Lena Verdeli, guiding non-specialists in using an evidence-based psychotherapy shown to alleviate debilitating depression in refugee populations.
- The African Diaspora, an advanced placement seminar on the forced dispersal of African people worldwide, pilots in New York City and Huntsville, Alabama. The course was developed largely at TC’s Institute for Urban and Minority Education.
- Michael Rebell and 16 TC and Columbia Law School students build a case aimed at persuading the U.S. Supreme Court to establish a Constitutional right to a quality education, based on the need for civic preparation.
- TC’s Campaign, Where the Future Comes First, breaks the $300 million mark.
2018
- A paper published in Clinical Psychology Review by doctoral student Meaghan Mobbs and psychologist George Bonanno finds that military veterans are more commonly troubled by the “transition stress” of returning to civilian life than by post-traumatic stress syndrome. They call for a paradigm shift in research and treatment.
- The College launches its Education for Persistence and Innovation Center (EPIC), directed by Xiaodong Lin, Professor of Cognitive Studies, and presents its inaugural EPIC Achievement Award to businessman and philanthropist Dr. James S.C. Chao. EPIC, which will study failure across disciplines as a catalyst for innovation and success, is funded by Weiming Education Limited; the Alvin I. & Peggy S. Brown Family Charitable Foundation, Inc.; the National Science Foundation; and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
- TC formally launches the Abby M. O’Neill Teaching Fellowships, one of the nation’s largest, most prestigious and most competitive private teaching fellowship programs. Funded by a $10 million gift from the late Teachers College Trustee Emerita Abby M. O’Neill, the Fellowships support outstanding TC students committed to teaching in New York City schools. Each Fellow receives $40,000 in tuition assistance.
- Teacher educator and researcher Nicole Brittingham Furlonge is named the next Director of TC’s Klingenstein Center for Independent School Education, effective September 1, succeeding Pearl Rock Kane, who has led the Center since 1980.
“IUME ... was one of the very first university initiatives of its kind to address issues in urban education and advocate for underserved people. That focus, created by Dr. Gordon, was such an important innovation, and we want to carry it forward into the 21st century — especially in the current political climate.”
— Erica Walker, Professor of Mathematics Education
- Pearl Rock Kane receives TC’s President’s Medal of Excellence.
- Thomas R. Bailey, TC’s George & Abby O’Neill Professor of Economics & Education, is named the College’s 11th President, beginning his duties on July 1st. Bailey founded TC’s Community College Research Center.
TC’s Bilingual Latina/o Mental Health Concentration prepares bicultural/bilingual counselors and counseling psychologists to serve Latina/o clients in Spanish. It is the only such program in the New York area and one of just a handful in the nation. From left: Katherine Ramirez, Mariel Buque, Pierluigi Bellini and Danisha Baro, students in TC’s Latina/o Mental Health concentration.