Sunday, February 22, 2009. Dr. Pearl Rock Kane, Director, Klingenstein Center and Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University.

MS. FORD: Ladies and gentlemen, will you please take your seats? Thank you. It's a great honor to introduce our keynote speaker this year, Pearl Rock Kane, someone who's already known to many of you. (Applause and cheers.) That sort of proved my point.

She has been a leadership role model for countless members of NAPSG and her influence has in turn helped to shape the leadership aspirations of leaders and girls in our school, as well. Dr. Kane is currently an associate professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She's holder of the Klingenstein Family Chair for the Advancement of Independent School Education, director of the Klingenstein Center, and advisor for the master's degree programs. She herself holds an MA from Smith College and a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia.

Prior to her work at Columbia, Dr. Kane was a teacher and administrator at public and private schools in Michigan, Massachusetts, and New York. She serves on numerous boards and has published numerous articles and books on issues of leadership, diversity, governance, and the attraction and retention of strong faculty. Her current research focus is on privatization, charter schools, and private school organization and governance. She's also in the midst of finalizing a four-year study of charter schools in New York. Please welcome to NAPSG Pearl Rock Kane.

DR. KANE: Thank you so much. If this was my classroom, I'd say, "Please move up."

Thank you for that generous introduction. It's been quite a trip from my early teaching days at Public School 59 in New York City to this podium at the Westin in San Antonio. When I arrived on the campus of Teachers College in 1977, having been awarded a Klingenstein Fellowship, I was on a one-year leave from the Dalton School where I was teaching English and history, and I pictured a terrific year, but I never imagined I would stay on to earn a doctorate, let alone become the director of the Klingenstein Center, and in 1992, I would become the first female ever tenured in the Department of Educational Administration at Columbia Teachers College.

In those days, administration was a male-dominated field, particularly in public schools. My life history has been marked by good fortune punctuated by what often seem like insurmountable challenges. As the mother of Bradley, a rambunctious 16-month-old, I learned as I was about to give birth to his sibling that it was not one child I carried, but three -- that's before amniocentesis -- and that they were triplet daughters. My husband, Richard, and I immediately had to deal with how we would introduce these intruders into the life of our son, to say nothing of our own psychological and financial life, and how that would change. Should we bring these babies home all at once, which might overwhelm Bradley? Or should we bring them home one at a time, which might lead him to believe that the parade of sisters would never end? We really worried about that. We decided to bring the girls home all at once.

Walking through the corridors of New York Hospital two days later, my husband holding two bundles and me holding one, there were bystanders who just gasped and shrieked, and I knew my life would never be the same. When we settled into a taxi, the cabbie turned around and quipped, "Sorry, lady, only four to a cab."

Partly because I am driven and partly because my kids drove me to it, I returned to work in a public school the year the girls started nursery, and for two years I taught middle-school students bussed in from Harlem, but that second year New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, and I lost my job in a massive teacher layoff because of low seniority. The day I left, the principal confided that a group of parents had met with the district superintendent to ask if they could run bake sales to raise money for my salary. The teachers union would not permit it, but even today, I get choked up when I talk about it. You know, the initiative of those disenfranchised parents from Harlem was and remains a poignant moment in my professional career.

Luckily for me, I landed a job at the Dalton School, and at Dalton, unlike the public school where I had worked, there were many teachers who cared, and there were many administrators who cared and made decisions that made sense, and in a self-contained school, as opposed to the 1.1 million system of New York City, you know who is in charge, you know there are high expectations for teachers and for students, and you know that a teacher can work within the system rather than having to subvert it. Quite simply, a new world of education opened to me. I fell in love with independent school education and with the educators who worked there.

The Klingenstein Fellowship came my way two years later. The fellowship existed because some years ago John Klingenstein, as president of the Philanthropic Fund, came to Teachers College with a vision. He and his brother Fred believed strongly in the value of independent school education. They and their children had benefited greatly from attending independent schools, and they wanted to give something back to the field to strengthen and expand opportunities for others.

The Klingenstein brothers were most concerned about who would replace the great school masters such as Frank Boyden of Deerfield, where they had attended; Endicott Peabody of Groton, or Alfred E. Stearns of Andover. In preparing for this talk, I reviewed Otto Kraushaar's 1972 book called American Non-Public Schools. Kraushaar's observations of school heads are instructive. "A good head," he said, "must be something of a renaissance man, a jack-of-all-trades; and he must learn to live with the fact that his day, like 'women's work,' is never done. Well, the women were doing the work, but they weren't being recognized. Where was Mrs. Chips?

Women were the heart and soul of the schools, and some were actually developing schools, mostly for girls, sometimes in their very own kitchens. But male leadership figures provided the model. It was men who were chosen to lead the well-established schools, and it was men whose lives were celebrated in books.

The Klingensteins debated whether to establish the program at Harvard or at Teachers College. They chose Teachers College and the fellows program began in 1977.

Bringing their vision to an education school was both bold and ambitious. Independent school educators often rejected schools of education as either being insufficiently rigorous or too theoretical. And education school faculty dismissed private schools as being elite, exclusive, and irrelevant to solving society's problems. These perceptions were relatively accurate on both sides.

Historically, teaching has been considered a women's profession with temporary commitment and low status, and education degrees usually lacked rigor and depth. Private schools were exclusively serving white Anglo-Saxon children of affluent families. Jews or Catholics were often not welcome. Private schools remained white bastions until the Civil Rights movement of the '60s when most schools began to open their schools to all. But paradoxically, white-flight academies were created to keep the doors shut, although those schools have certainly changed over the years.

The new program at Teachers College attracted teachers with the potential to become leaders because the Klingensteins had wisely involved independent school heads in the planning. I was excited to be selected one of the three women in the first cohort of 12. But it quickly became apparent that the program wasn't working. We were frustrated with the disorganization. Classes were cancelled without notice, and a much-anticipated trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with policymakers, never happened. There were a lot of bagels at our weekly seminars, but there wasn't much sustenance.

The Klingenstein Foundation threatened to withdraw support. I was invited to assist the director and, as an incentive, was offered the opportunity to pursue a doctorate. Two years later, I found myself director of the center. That was certainly a turning point in my career, and an act of great good fortune, but I still had that other job as a mother of four. I was working full-time, and studying at night, and I wanted to stay married.

In my new role I became a student of independent schools. There was a paucity of research available on independent schools, so I turned to the broader literature on leadership and learning. In the early 1980s many independent schools were mired in the past. Pedagogical practices were outdated, and the schools were often removed from the larger community. Developments in cognitive science were ignored and school leadership was considered a solo enterprise, not a team effort.

The success of independent school graduates often had more to do with student selection and the school's connections to prestigious colleges than instructional effectiveness. The chasm between independent school practices and the potential to improve those practices shaped the vision and the goals of the Klingenstein Center.

To succeed in breaking down long-held stereotypes about education, we had to demonstrate the way that professional knowledge such as theory of change or organizational behavior could be applied to improve those schools. The program had to be relevant, rigorous, and substantive. The center's programs were redesigned with these objectives in mind. Bit by bit, we built the confidence and the loyalty of our benefactors and gained their support for other initiatives.

One of these initiatives was a summer institute for beginning teachers. Teacher retention has been a chronic problem in schools, and research tells us that the most capable young teachers are also the most likely to leave. It's the challenge that keeps smart people in teaching. If you were still doing in the third year what you did in the first, you're likely to get bored. You have to give young teachers compelling reasons to commit to a career in teaching. We designed a program to serve 1575 teachers annually, focused on the complexities of teaching. We included brain research, child and adolescent development, curriculum design, understanding diversity in all its forms, and techniques for collaboration with colleagues.

Here's a typical response from Mac Caplan, a teacher at the Rivers School in Massachusetts. Mac says, "I never realized the complexity of my work as a teacher until I spent time thinking deeply about what great teaching really involves. The Institute forces you to look closely at everything you do as a teacher and breaks down your previous assumptions about what constitutes successful teaching. Then it builds you up again so that you return to your teaching with new knowledge and confidence."

The summer teachers -- they call themselves Klingons -- keep networking when they return to their schools. There are now 1,500 alumni of that program. Many of these educators often remind me that they would have left teaching had it not been for the Summer Institute. A good number of them also found their mates. And my daughter Lisa tells me we were the forerunner of match.com.

If keeping young teachers in the field of education is important, it's equally important to renew and sustain the spirit of heads of school. In 1991 we began a program for heads which immerses them in the study of moral leadership, current issues, and research. To no one's surprise, the school heads, just like their young counterparts, feel buoyed by an intense interaction with their colleagues who are experiencing similar challenges.

Last year, Reveta Bowers, head of the Center for Early Childhood in Los Angeles, wrote saying that when she began her fellowship in 1996, she had planned to leave education within three years. But the program, she said, was transformative for her. "After spending time with my cohort, learning from the outstanding faculty at Columbia, and the opportunity to reflect on my career, I made the decision to commit long-term to my school. My experience," she said, "enabled me to stay in a school and field I love."

Well, I have heard similar comments from many of the 257 school heads who have been in that program, some of them right here in the audience. Soon we added a full-time master's program in educational administration. Previously most teachers grew into administrative positions without benefit of formal training. They learned on the job. Our goal was to professionalize leadership preparation, offer kind of a combination MBA and education master's, including ethics, law, adult learning, marketing, financials, cognitive development, and field experience. To date, this program has prepared close to 500 educators for administrative positions. Many are now principals and school heads, Thomas Harvey said that the program changed his career path. "It was the first glimmer," he wrote, "that I might be a headmaster. It altered everything, what I thought and how

I thought." Tom is here in the audience and he's now the head of Hampton Roads Academy.

In response to a huge increase in the need for more independent school leaders, and to accommodate teachers and administrators reluctant to leave their jobs and homes for a whole year, we now offer a master's degree over two summers with record number of applicants. We take only 45 a summer, but we could easily triple that with great people.

With all of these programs, they enable us to serve independent schools at various stages of their career. Each one is guided by the Center's mission to develop and renew leadership by focusing on four core goals: Emphasizing reflective practice, improving student learning, working in collaboration, and committing to social justice.

Social justice is incredibly important to me personally, since my days in the inner city public schools, and it shapes my teaching and my work with independent schools. Whether our participants leave the classroom for designated leadership positions such as principals or school heads or continue to lead as master teachers, they are embodying our belief that leadership is a behavior, not a position. In fact, Steve Albert, dean of faculty of Hotchkiss, says, "The program probably made it harder for me to move into administration, because I felt in some ways I was abandoning my true calling. But my effectiveness as an administrator probably owes a lot to what I learned about teaching at Columbia."

As for me, like the old adage, I take myself lightly but my work seriously. Personally I am an opportunist. I collect good ideas. My husband -- and yes, we are still married -- would say I'm obsessed and that I'm always working. I'm sure some of you share that. It's

true and I always have my antennae out, assessing what I see, read, or hear that might improve our programs.

What has kept me motivated and enthusiastic over the course of my career are the extraordinary people who have come and made our programs better. For the almost 3,000 participants over the years, including many of you here this afternoon, the Klingenstein Center is your legacy of achievement and innovation. We certainly stand on the shoulders of great people.

The success of our alumni has been the long-term support of the Klingenstein Foundation, whose contributions have exceeded $16 million in operating support, and last year the fund committed $20 million to endow the center. Today, thanks to the Klingenstein Foundation and alumni friends of the Center, we award over a million dollars in scholarships annually and we're hoping to increase that amount.

We've been successful, but complacency did not get us where we are today, and we have to keep asking ourselves the hard questions. What should the core curriculum be? What should we be doing differently to better prepare our students? What knowledge, skills, and capabilities are required for leadership in the 21st century? To whom should they be taught?

We want the Center's programs not only to prepare leaders but to shape the nature of leaders who will continue transforming independent schools. And we want our alumni to be beacons of excellence for all schools. Given the talents of people who work in independent schools, their resources and autonomy, independent schools have a responsibility to demonstrate exemplary practice.

It's encouraging to see how former independent school educators and students such as Doug McCurrey of Achievement First and David Levin of KIPP are taking the lead in the charter school movement. Both are inspired by the independent school model of high expectations for students and teachers, requiring the same basic curriculum for all students and a "no excuses for failure" policy to deliver high-quality education for poor students. Both are breaking through public school bureaucracy and demonstrating what is possible. The influence of independent schools extends well beyond the students we serve.

I have no idea what my career in New York City's public schools might have been, but being laid off from my teaching job at PS59 led to the world of independent schools and ultimately to the Klingenstein Center. Working with exemplary professionals has given me the chance to create an institution that is bigger than any of us. My family survived, as well. Bradley emerged with a great sense of humor, and is now an expert on wine, and his three sisters are successful women juggling motherhood and careers. I'm a grandmother of five.

I'm thrilled and honored to be invited to speak here at this meeting of the National Association of Principals of Schools for Girls. I really, really do appreciate this honor and I thank you so much for your kind listening. Thank you.

MS. FORD: Thank you, Pearl. In recognition of her remarkable contributions to education in general and to independent schools in particular, Pearl Rock Kane is a recipient of the NAPSG 2009 Outstanding Achievement Award. This comes with a small cash prize which Pearl has chosen to commit to philanthropic interests, a small gift, and also a plaque.

I would like to read you the citation. ≥NAPSG Outstanding Achievement Award. At the November 2007 meeting of the NAPSG Council, it was proposed and unanimously endorsed that NAPSG establish an award to be made from time to time in recognition of outstanding professional achievement in education with a particular focus on the education of girls and young women. We are delighted to present this NAPSG Outstanding Achievement Award to Dr. Pearl Rock Kane, associate professor of education, and the Klingenstein Family Chair for the Advancement of Independent School Education at the Teachers College of Columbia University, editor, author, and mentor to hundreds of women and men in the field of education."

Dr. Kane, your career brings the mission of NAPSG into life. We are proud to present you with our 2009 Outstanding Achievement Award.

DR. KANE: This is indeed an honor. Thank you so much. And many of you who have been in the program -- could you raise your hands? Because I think there are quite a few. Wow, great to have friends. You inspire me every day through the work you do, and you bring honor to the Center. I'm happy to be a small part of your lives, and I'm so grateful for this generous award and for your kind comments. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.

MS. FORD: Thank you again, Pearl.

This concludes this part of the meeting. Please join Pearl Rock Kane and one another for drinks right out here, and then we will follow that with dinner and a few more program items at dinner. So thank you. Enjoy.