News-Letter

Joyce Epstein is one of two University professors named American Education Research Association Fellows.

Two research professors from the Center for Social Organization of Schools (CSOS) at Hopkins were among 44 scholars named American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellows.

On April 10, James McPartland and Joyce Epstein were inducted into the second group of the AERA Fellows program, which was started last year. The first group of inductees was largely composed of previous officers or close associates of AERA, and was chosen without a nominating process. The 2009 Fellows were nominated and sponsored by members of the first class of fellows.

In its press release, AERA explained that through the fellows program, the Association aims to convey its commitment to excellence in research and to underscore to new scholars the importance of sustained research contributions in the field.

"The Fellows program is kind of a lifetime achievement award. It's meant to highlight general contributions from people who have been in the field for a long time," Epstein said.

McPartland and Epstein have been close colleagues at the CSOS. Both received their doctorates through the Hopkins Department of Sociology. McPartland participated in the preparation of the influential 1966 "Equality and Educational Opportunity" Report for Congress, in association with noted sociologist James Coleman who worked at Hopkins at the time.

Epstein has worked with CSOS since the mid-1970s.

McPartland is now the director of the CSOS and has led the center's Talent Development Program for middle schools and high schools. The Talent Development Program is a comprehensive school reform model that seeks to address a broad range of issues in underperforming schools, including student attendance, discipline, achievement scores and dropout rates.

"For a long time, [the CSOS] was engaged in research that compared various natural variations across schools to try and find what were the best strategies," McPartland said. "But we realized that there wasn't a whole lot of difference between many of these schools except for the student population."

The Talent Development program is distinguished from many other reform models by the close cooperation and support given by the CSOS to each school.

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