A Century of Leadership The year 2004 marked the 100th Anniversary of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development. Reaching this milestone provides the opportunity to not only celebrate the accomplishments of the School over the past century, but also to look forward and determine the future direction of GSEHD.
For more than 100 years, the School has continually adapted to and confronted challenging social, economic and political climates, all the while maintaining a steadfast commitment to providing the highest quality education for graduate students and the communities we serve.
Your involvement and support play a key role in the continuing progress of the School. As GSEHD embarks on the next 100 years and a new set of challenges, we encourage you to become more supportive and involved in the School's activities. Teacher education and the University's current name, The George Washington University, both came into being in 1904. Education, at first with fewer than a dozen faculty, changed from a University division in 1907, to a teachers' college in 1909, to a school of education in 1928. By this time its faculty were staffing departments of education, educational psychology and home economics. In 1932, a year before it began its doctoral programs, the School accepted the responsibility for providing required physical education to all GW undergraduates, until the '60s when these requirements were dropped.
The School is well known for its alumni who serve in classrooms and principals' and superintendents' offices from Hampton to Rockville and far beyond, across the U.S. and in many foreign countries. The U.S. Department of Education has benefited from the expertise of key administrators who graduated from the School, and such alumni, in turn, have built the School's well-deserved reputation for training high-quality teachers and administrators. The School has several times produced an annual group of Phi Beta Kappa nominees greater than that of any liberal arts department. Since the inception of GW's Distinquished Alumni Achievement Awards, 26 alumni have been chosen as award recipients in competition with all other GW schools' alumni.
The School has always found a distinctive niche. While, like other schools of education after World War II, GW attracted a bumper crop of young returning G.I.'s, it also provided expertise for a remarkable number of retired military officers, persons already trained in mathematics and science whose degrees from GW gave them entry to welcome second careers. Many of these graduates quickly rose to become principals and superintendents to the generation of baby-boomers, and provided a ready-made network for placing subsequent generations of GW teacher-trainees.
With the ink barely dry on the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, GW's School of Education led the University in welcoming the opportunities and challenges of desegregation. Its classes soon included minority teacher applicants from the District and from Virginia where segregationists, fighting integration paid African American applicants to apply out of state.
In the 1960s, curricular requirements elsewhere faltered in the face of student activism, but not in the School of Education. Aspiring teachers had professional certification requirements to meet. At a time when required liberal arts courses were being dropped in many other schools and colleges, the School of Education kept a central focus for its own students. By the late '60s, undergraduate majors in education took more physics and chemistry courses than any liberal arts students other than majors in those departments.
Another threat to standards surfaced during the Vietnam War when anti-war protesters showed up to register, all-too-obviously hoping for draft deferments. They received a chilly reception. Professor Carole St. Cyr built a reputation for spotting applicants who were more intent on avoiding military service than in pursuing careers in teaching. The '70s, by contrast, saw a turnabout in enrollments. Undergraduate numbers dropped alarmingly as earlier pools of students disappeared, and rising tuition drove many to less costly state-run schools.
To give its mission sharper focus, the School shifted its emphasis to graduate education. In the process it led the way in providing programs for newly perceived educational needs. In the late '60s it sought and received government funding for its new special education program, and later reached out to the community by training counselors as well as teachers. Today, the School's programs are organized within the three flourishing departments of teacher preparation and special education, educational leadership, and counseling/human and organizational studies. These departments house 19 master's programs, six education specialist programs, seven doctoral programs and seven graduate certificate programs. Such fine-tuning helps explain the School's remarkable renaissance in the past ten years.
Alumni, who since 1994 have known the School as The Graduate School of Education and Human Development, recall classes in adult and child development taught by the scholarly Martha Rashid; courses in educational leadership under John Boswell who, with Michael Castleberry, mixed classroom humor with a common-sense approach to subject matter; and the quiet reserve of Don Linkowski, much-published in the field of counseling.
Rita Ives, professor emeritus of special education, recalls how, in company with GW psychologists Gardner Murphy and Bertice Cornish, and working with counterparts at Georgetown, they won the first interdisciplinary grant from the U.S. Department of Education to study what were then referred to as "handicapped and disabled children."
The Graduate School of Education and Human Development's future holds promise of even greater contributions to the University, the city, the nation and the international community.
(Adapted by Abbie O. Smith, M.A. '58, Ed.D. '86 from From Strength to Strength, A Pictorial History of The George Washington University, 1821-1996, The George Washington University 1996.)
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