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Focus on research heightens GSE profile
Greg Fabiano is one Graduate School of Education faculty member whose research has helped raise the school’s profile in national rankings. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
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“Our faculty have very focused initiatives that seek to unlock some of the problems that seem to plague public education.”
Assistant professors in the Graduate School of Education (GSE) meet with tenured counterparts twice a semester to discuss professional and personal aspirations. When junior faculty members expressed concern over the amount of time they were spending on securing funding for work-related incidentals, the school began granting them yearly stipends of $1,500 to cover travel to conferences and other small, but essential expenses. Before budget cuts hit, the dean’s office also set aside $50,000 per year in seed money to launch research projects that tenure-track investigators wanted to pilot before applying for larger, external grants.
What the school has done, in short, is “to introduce an environment conducive to research for all faculty members,” says Dean Mary Gresham. Those steps are paying off. This year, UB’s graduate education program moved up 15 spots to No. 56 in U.S. News and World Report’s annual Best Graduate Schools ranking, putting GSE in the top 20 percent of institutions on the list.
GSE got there by improving its reputation among education school deans and K-12 superintendents, whose assessments together account for 40 percent of a school’s ranking, and by increasing research expenditures, weighted at 30 percent. GSE’s fiscal 2008-09 research spending totaled $7.3 million, up from $4.6 million in 2004-05. The Jean M. Alberti Center for the Prevention of Bullying Abuse and School Violence, a new initiative, also has attracted national attention.
“Our faculty have very focused initiatives that seek to unlock some of the problems that seem to plague public education,” says Gresham, who believes in pursuing research that transforms lives. “Why do kids drop out of school? How can we best educate kids with special needs? We look at those kinds of questions that might help the public P-12 sector become more successful.”
Scholars contributing to that agenda range from senior researchers like Douglas Clements and Lois Weis, both SUNY Distinguished Professors, to recent hires like Gregory Fabiano, an assistant professor of counseling, school and educational psychology who won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the country’s highest honor for professionals in the early stage of their careers.
Fabiano’s work includes helping preschool Head Start teachers improve classroom management, and examining the effectiveness of programs designed to benefit children with special needs. One recent study, reported in School Psychology Review, found that a “daily report card” helped students with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) perform better in the classroom.
In another completed study, Fabiano ran a program that enabled fathers—who are less likely than mothers to show up to typical parenting classes and support groups—to practice parenting skills while coaching kids with ADHD in soccer. In an ongoing project, funded by a $2.8 million award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, he is investigating whether improving communication between parents and children, and offering incentives for good driving can promote safer behavior on the road by teenagers with ADHD, a high-risk group. As an example of the critical importance of seed research funding, this project was first funded by the Office of the Vice President for Research through an Interdisciplinary Research Development Fund (IRDF) seed grant, which provided resources to Fabiano and his colleagues to develop preliminary data that was then used in the successful NIH grant application.
Clements is an influential expert in early childhood mathematics education and technology in education. A member of GSE’s learning and instruction faculty, he served on the President’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel. His work has affected planning and policy in mathematical literacy and access, and led to development of new curricula and teaching approaches.
Weis, in educational leadership and policy, has spent three decades analyzing how education intersects with class, race and gender to produce social inequalities. She co-edited the award-winning “Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in the United States School,” a 2005 volume that discusses educational policies and practices that reinforce disparities in privilege, and explores potential reforms to address such problems.
In a major National Science Foundation project, Weis is partnering with a University of Colorado-Boulder collaborator to research how urban schools prepare students interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics for college. The study will track individual teenagers as they progress from grade to grade, examining courses available to them, extracurricular activities they pursue and their access to such resources as technology and guidance counselors.
“We have a lot of rhetoric around education enabling social mobility and America being the land of opportunity and all of that, and certainly that is the case in many respects,” Weis says. “But it’s really important to look, empirically, at how that has worked or not, and for whom it has worked.
“We are a research institution and it is critical that we engage in research. There isn’t much money—we all know this—but the dean and the Office of the Vice President for Research has certainly allocated resources toward research, especially for junior faculty members, who are the people who need it most.”
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