Timeline

1921

Terman’s gifted children

Terman launches his path-breaking longitudinal study of gifted children, solidifying Stanford’s reputation as a leader in educational psychology. 

Among his subjects are Fred Terman, his son and future university provost, and future faculty members Lee Cronbach and Robert Sears, who go on to direct the decades-long study after Terman’s retirement. 

1951

Cronbach’s alpha

Prof. Lee Cronbach publishes his equation to measure internal consistency in a set of psychometric test results. “Cronbach’s alpha,” as he calls it, gains wide use throughout the social sciences.

1961

The road to happenstance

Prof. John D. Krumboltz, an expert in social decision making, joins the school's program in counseling psychology. He goes on to reshape the field of career development with his Happenstance Learning Theory lauding the value of exploratory actions as a way of generating beneficial unplanned events.  

To this end, he opposes a 1990s proposal to restore the "F" as a grading option at Stanford, arguing "it will discourage people from taking risks to learn new things." 

In 2004, Krumboltz co-authors a widely read distillation of his research, Luck Is No Accident: Making the Most of Happenstance in Your Life and Career.

1963

Applied-linguistics pioneer

Internationally renowned linguist Robert L. Politzer joins the faculty. A pioneer in applying quantitative methods to language-related data, Politzer continues his contributions to the field of language learning and supervises more than 200 Stanford doctoral students.

An Austrian émigré who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, Politzer “took affirmative action long before there was such a thing,” former student Mary McGroarty, PhD ’82, wrote after Politzer’s death in 1998.

He “acted on the conviction that one could not theorize, investigate, or prescribe the language behavior adequately without including women and men, old and young, and native speakers of all varieties studied, not just as informants but as active researchers and interpreters of data and shapers of the policies related to those interpretations,” wrote McGroarty, later president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics.

Learn how Politzer influenced a kindergartner to make language his career. 

1972

Wait time

Mary Budd Rowe, PhD ’64, introduces the concept of wait time as an instructional variable. She finds that lengthening the silence between a teacher’s question and the student’s answer yields remarkable gains in student language and logic.

Rowe, a longtime professor at the University of Florida, returned to Stanford to teach from 1990 to her death in 1996. 

1972

The Garbage Can Model

Prof. James G. March coauthors “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” a method of explaining how colleges function that becomes a milestone in modern organization theory. 

1974

Tyack’s touchstone text

Prof. David Tyack publishes The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. 

Influential and accessible, it outlines the transformation from 19th-century village school to urban bureaucracy in a way that, one reviewer wrote, offers “an explanation for unequal outcomes that did not discount the possibility of a more democratic future.”

1984

Educating for health

The American Heart Journal publishes Prof. Carl Thoresen’s findings that altering Type A behavior reduces mortality and morbidity in people who have had heart attacks.

Through the school's PhD program in Counseling Psychology, Thoresen, MA '60, PhD '64, influences practitioners to employ educational interventions far beyond the traditional classroom setting.

1984

The ethic of care

Prof. Nel Noddings publishes Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. She introduces the ethic of care – the obligation to relate to others and to treat them well based on this caring relationship – as a fundamental aspect of teaching and learning. 

1986

Pedagogical content knowledge

Arguing against a 1980s emphasis on pedagogy in teacher training and assessment, Prof. Lee Shulman seeks closer attention to “the fundamental connections between knowing and teaching.” 

He publishes his concept of pedagogical content knowledge: Rather than treating teaching method and instructional content as separate fields to master, successful teachers master a synthesis that roots their teaching strategy in qualities specific to the subject matter.

1986

Working together

Prof. Elizabeth Cohen publishes Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom. Cohen uses sociological theories to champion success for all children. Her research inspires others to work toward equity in education. 

After Cohen's death in 2005, Prof. Rachel Lotan publishes the third edition, now available in several languages.

1995

Giving youth a voice

Profs. Milbrey McLaughlin and Shirley Brice Heath win the $150,000 Grawemeyer Prize in Education for their book Identity and Inner City Youth: Beyond Ethnicity and Gender.

1995

Looking back on past efforts

Tyack and Cuban publish Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. The book documents the tension between Americans’ deep faith in education and the challenge of improving schools.

2001

Problems we solve, dilemmas we manage

Professor Larry Cuban, a scholar of the history of educational reform, publishes How Can I Fix It?: Finding Solutions and Managing Dilemmas, his “educator’s road map” to navigate the daily complexities teachers encounter in their practice. The book becomes required reading in the Stanford Teacher Education Program.

Hear Larry Cuban talk about making schools better on School’s In, the GSE’s SiriusXM radio show.

2002

History without tears

Prof. Sam Wineburg founds the Stanford History Education Group to incubate ideas about teaching history and disciplinary literacy in creative ways.

The group crafts hundreds of free lessons, assessments and the Reading Like a Historian curriculum, downloaded 4.4 million times. 

2005

Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

Prof. Elliott Eisner wins the Grawemeyer Prize for his 2002 book The Arts and the Creation of Mind. Its thesis: Art is not merely an enrichment for academic programs, but a key way that students learn how to learn.

2013

Lens on race, inequality and language

The doctoral program in Race, Inequality and Language in Education (RILE) enrolls its first cohort. 

In RILE, now headed by Prof. Arnetha Ball, students and scholars explore phenomena of race, language and inequality and apply their theoretical knowledge to educational practice in increasingly complex and diverse societies. In 2017, faculty vote to formalize RILE as a cross-disciplinary doctorate program. 

2013

A Nobel professor

Physics laureate Prof. Carl Wieman joins the education school faculty as a leading voice in improving science teaching.

2016

Big data

Prof. Sean Reardon announces the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), an initiative aimed at harnessing data to help scholars, policymakers, educators, parents and other learn how to improve educational opportunity for all children. 

Some of the first studies map local inequities across the United States. The project highlights a new era in how big data can be used in education research.