Dean's message

Working alone each of us can change people’s lives. Working together we can change the world.

That is the reason behind Stanford Graduate School of Education’s commitment to building a strong alumni community and our decision to honor several graduates with our first-ever Alumni Excellence in Education Award.

The GSE believes that the preparation our students receive during their time at Stanford leads — collectively, through their careers in education — to better solutions for today’s biggest educational challenges. The March/April issue of the Educator offers a glimpse of the impact we are having:

• One story tells of  GSE alumni who have teamed up to develop innovative apps to help children learn math.
• Another tells of graduates at a start-up that is pioneering easy-to-use technology for interactive video curricula.
• There is also a profile of Alexandra Bernadotte MA ’07 who — with support from Stanford faculty and alumni — has established an innovative nonprofit that is helping low-income students prepare for and graduate from college.

Our graduates have started or infiltrated public, private and charter schools, working together as teachers, principals and administrators. Their successes draw attention to innovative practices that educators nationwide choose to implement. (See, for example, the Washington Post column about Hillsdale High School in San Mateo and the Palo Alto Weekly article about Eastside College Preparatory Academy in East Palo Alto.)

For a broader view of how our alumni use their Stanford experience to good effect, read our recent report on what last year’s graduates are now up to; take a look at our first-ever all-alumni career survey or browse our latest class notes. What you’ll find are thousands of people who have devoted their lives — as scholars, entrepreneurs, teachers, nonprofit executives and policy makers — to advancing the field of education.

It is because of these extraordinary accomplishments that I am pleased to announce our new alumni award and encourage you to submit a nomination before the May 1 deadline. It is more than an opportunity to celebrate a colleague or classmate. It is critical step in our drive to raise awareness of the transformative work that our graduates are doing: Our goal is to demonstrate how our alumni put what they learned at Stanford into practice and how they become catalysts for educational change throughout society.

We want people to know that an education at the Stanford GSE is a giant step toward transforming education nationally and globally.