USC Rossier Centennial

The EdD dissertation experience was also overhauled. Under the new plan, USC ROSSIER 99 The First Century
education doctoral candidates would have the option of working in “thematic
dissertation groups”—teams of students under a faculty adviser—to address a
contemporary problem in educational leadership.

This change was an effort to “emulate the type of collaboration and teamwork
required in real work settings” and became the path chosen by more than 80 per-
cent of the school’s EdD candidates, according to a 2013 paper by Rueda and two
colleagues in the journal Planning and Changing.

To keep the changes “close to the ground,” research and practice faculty
worked together on the redesign. For those guiding the process, this collabora-
tion was a sign of progress in a school that had been seriously fractured by earlier
attempts to shift its practice-oriented culture.

In fact, Gothold, the emeritus professor who had been superintendent of the
Los Angeles County Office of Education, co-chaired the doctoral overhaul com-
mittee with Dembo, whose focus was scholarship. “That was an important step in
changing the direction of the school,” Dembo said.

The revamping of the doctoral programs led to a complete reorganization of
the school. All discipline-based departments were eliminated, a change that was
“almost unheard of in any other school of education,” Rueda noted at the time.

In place of departments, the organizing principle became the degree program,
a move that trimmed bureaucracy and streamlined the system for students.

USC Rossier’s approach to the EdD was praised by the Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching as a model for other education schools.

“Applications to both programs have increased dramatically, and faculty
members now have a commitment to shared intellectual enterprise,” Carnegie
Foundation President Lee Shulman noted as lead author of a 2006 critique of
education doctorates for the journal Educational Researcher. “USC underwent
tremendous change to address significant problems.”

Dean Gallagher acknowledged to Shulman that the remake wasn’t easy, but
the process paid dividends. “Change of this magnitude can almost kill you,” she
said. “But it causes you to think, ‘How can we do things differently?’ You are
forced to think innovatively if you want to do something important.”

By 2018, USC Rossier offered three EdD programs: Educational Leadership,
which develops the research-based knowledge needed to lead schools and
other organizations; Organizational Change and Leadership, aimed at profes-
sionals who work outside of schools, such as in law enforcement or corporate
professional development; and Global Executive Education, for educators with
extensive leadership experience who desire an international perspective on how
to reform entire systems.

•—•

Once the important work of reframing the doctorates was done, Gallagher led the
school into new territory.

In 2009 USC Rossier entered the digital age with the first fully online master
of arts in teaching program in a major research university. It found an enthusias-
tic partner in 2U, a technology platform created to build, market and administer
online postgraduate degree programs.

Within two years the school grew its master of arts in teaching enrollment by
a factor of 10, to 1,500 students—“more than the master’s programs at Harvard
(972) and Stanford (415) combined,” Atlantic magazine staff writer Derek Thomp-
son wrote.

Another major venture centered on a novel partnership to turn around a failing
school.

Crenshaw High School had temporarily lost its accreditation in 2005 due to a
host of problems, including abysmal test scores and a nearly 60 percent dropout
rate. Two years later, USC Rossier joined the Urban League and the Tom and Ethel

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4

6
5

1. Learning in action at USC Hybrid High
2. Barbara and Roger Rossier, alumni and philanthropists
3. Students celebrating the naming of the USC Rossier School
of Education
4. Karen Symms Gallagher, Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops
Dean (2000–present)
5. Shaun R. Harper, Provost Professor of Education and Business,
Clifford H. and Betty C. Allen Professor in Urban Leadership, and
Founder and Executive Director of the USC Race and Equity Center
6. Dean Gallagher demonstrates USC Rossier’s online learning
platform for U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. and others

Bradley Foundation in an effort to raise achievement at the South L.A. school and USC ROSSIER 101 The First Century
uplift the surrounding neighborhood.

The School of Education’s role in the project included professional develop-
ment for teachers and administrators, advising the district on Crenshaw’s need
for new management, and research to guide academic goals.

Gallagher “stepped right out there when Crenshaw lost its accreditation and
helped develop the Crenshaw collaboration,” recalled Maria Ott PhD ’94, an
LAUSD veteran and former superintendent of the Rowland Unified School District,
who later joined USC as a clinical professor of education. “She said this is the
urban work we should be involved in.”

Two other faculty members also played important roles. Sylvia Rousseau, a
former principal of Santa Monica High School, helped lead Crenshaw’s adminis-
tration as an interim principal, while Sandra Kaplan provided consulting.

But the partnership collapsed after five years of struggle among the stake-
holders to agree on a plan for lasting change. “Just because everyone wants
change doesn’t mean they all want the same change,” Gallagher wrote in a 2016
article for Zócalo Public Square.

The frustration of wrangling with the entrenched culture of an existing school
ultimately led USC Rossier to create a new one.

In 2012 it launched USC Hybrid High School, a charter school located in down-
town Los Angeles with a predominantly low-income Latino and Black enrollment.
It was the first in an expanding network run by Ednovate, a charter management
organization started by USC Rossier and chaired by Gallagher that seeks to pro-
mote “positive multigenerational change.”

Getting the school off the ground wasn't easy. Organizers had difficulty finding
an affordable location near the USC campus. Parents asked for curriculum chang-
es, which necessitated staffing adjustments. And stricter standards for student
conduct caused some members of the inaugural class to leave.

By the second year, however, the school began to find its groove, and in
subsequent years signs of success emerged: Hybrid High’s first three graduat-
ing classes attained a 100 percent graduation and college acceptance rate, an
achievement much welcomed by Gallagher and other USC leaders after pulling
out of the Crenshaw collaborative.

“The adoption of Crenshaw was an attempt to change the existing system,”
observed Hentschke, who had tried to persuade the faculty to work on a charter
school when he was dean. “Now, with the growth of charters, the question is how
do you change by using a parallel system?”

Some of the answers may come from Darnell Cole and Shafiqa Ahmadi, co-di-
rectors of USC Rossier’s Center for Education, Identity and Social Justice, who are
studying Hybrid High students’ progress to college and why some may not persist
to graduation. “It’s a big risk for a reputable school of education to take on such
a challenge in the face of a school partnership that didn’t fully meet the dream it
was intended to,” Cole said of the Crenshaw experiment. “The real challenge … is
having the commitment to stay connected.”

•—•

The center directed by Cole and Ahmadi is one of eight research centers that have
opened under Gallagher’s leadership. Others include the Center on Education
Policy, Equity and Governance; the Center for Engagement-Driven Global Educa-
tion; and the Center for Human-Applied Reasoning and the Internet of Things.

Most of the centers have as their main goal reducing inequities in education,
an outcome of a schoolwide effort to revitalize USC Rossier’s mission after a 2016
academic review by the Provost’s Office.

The academic review suggested that the school’s urban education mission
was ill-defined. It also cited a “lack of faculty whose research focus is centered
on issues of power, equity and/or inclusion” and urged the school to recruit more



professors of color. USC ROSSIER 103 The First Century
An internal task force on diversity and an assessment by the University of
Members of the USC Rossier
Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race & Equity in Education made similar Faculty, 2019
observations. “Rossier fails to actualize its urban mission, insufficiently engages
racial issues in the curriculum, mishandles race in classrooms, and maintains
a poor intellectual climate that affects cross-cultural learning and engagement
outside of classrooms,” the Penn report concluded.

In 2017, after a year-long study that involved surveys of faculty, staff and stu-
dents, USC Rossier unveiled a new mission, the main tenet of which was “to pre-
pare leaders to achieve educational equity through practice, research and policy.”

Improving urban education remained a priority, but “advancing educational
equity is central to everything we do now,” Gallagher said.

Recent additions to the faculty have increased diversity and scholarship that
confronts questions of race. The hiring of Shaun R. Harper, an authority on the ob-
stacles facing Black male undergraduates, signaled the seriousness of the school’s
intent: Harper directed the forceful critique of USC Rossier for the University of
Pennsylvania and was outspoken in his criticism of racism in higher education.

“It is White people who get to determine who gains access, how many of us
are let in. It is White people who determine the metrics of deservingness to have
a seat at the table,” Harper, who is Black, told the Association for the Study of
Higher Education in 2017 after he was named to the Clifford H. and Betty C. Allen
Professorship in Urban Leadership at USC Rossier.

He was also appointed Provost Professor, a designation conferred on a select
group of faculty, and founded the USC Race and Equity Center, which conducts an an-
nual national survey of student attitudes about race, gender and other factors shaping
campus climates. Gallagher described Harper’s return to USC—he had earlier served
as the first director of the Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership program—
as a “pivotal moment not only for USC Rossier but for the entire university.”

As the school turned 100, Gallagher reflected on the often painful work of
plotting a new course for an enterprise that was slow to reform itself. She count-
ed the focus on equity and the successful move into charter schools as important
signs of the School of Education’s evolution.

“I think we have managed under my leadership to prove that, through our
research and our practice, a school of education can be relevant,” she said.

•—•

After the social and political disruptions of the 1960s, historian and USC law
school graduate Carey McWilliams wondered if the university would “adjust to the
new realities that swirl about it in a community that has become synonymous with
rapid change.”

In 2018, the same question could be asked of the School of Education. 
Like the city that grew around it, the school at times embraced the swirling
changes and at other times ignored them. Against this backdrop of social, polit-
ical and economic churn, it also contended with an inherent tension: the con-
flict in schools of education between meeting the scholarly expectations of the
research university and serving the workaday needs of educators in the trenches. 
USC Rossier may be closer than at any point in its history to balancing the
drive for academic respectability against the need for relevance to the field it is
duty-bound to serve. Whether that harmony is achievable remains an open ques-
tion. The only certainty is what the future will demand of the School of Education:
the will to engage with the realities and possibilities of leading, teaching and
learning at every level and, when necessary, to reinvent itself for the next century.



SELECTED USC ROSSIER 105 The First Century

This selected bibliography lists works that were especially valuable in identifying noteworthy
people in the history of the USC Rossier School of Education and providing historical and social
context for its evolution and response to critical challenges.
1. Historical Overview
Lane, Mary C. The Melbo Years: A History of the School of Education of the University of Southern
California 1953–1973. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1974.
Levitt, Leon. A History to 1953 of the School of Education of the University of Southern California.
(1970). Unpublished manuscript, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
Lifton, Sarah and Moore, Annette. The University of Southern California: 1880 to 2005.
Los Angeles: Figueroa Press, 2007.  
Servin, Manuel P. and Wilson, Iris Higbie. Southern California and Its University: A History of USC,
1880–1964. Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1969.
2. The Progressive Era
Cameron, James William. (1976). The History of Mexican Public Education in Los Angeles,
1910–1930. Unpublished manuscript, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
Gutfreund, Zevi Moses. (2013). Language Education, Race, and the Remaking of American
Citizenship in Los Angeles, 1900–1968. Unpublished manuscript, University of California,
Los Angeles.
Lewthwaite, Stephanie. “Race, Place, and Ethnicity in the Progressive Era,” A Companion to
Los Angeles. Ed. William Deverell. John Wiley & Sons, 2014. 40–55.
Raftery, Judith Rosenberg. Land of Fair Promise: Politics and Reform in Los Angeles Schools,
1885–1941. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.
3. Development of Education Schools in the United States
Clifford, Geraldine Joncich and Guthrie, James W. Ed School: A Brief for Professional Education.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Shulman, Lee S., Golde, Chris M., Bueschel, Andrea Conklin, and Garabedian, Kristen J.
“Reclaiming Education’s Doctorates: A Critique and a Proposal.” Educational Researcher 35(3).
(2006): 25–32.  
Photos are reprinted with permission of the University of Southern California; University of California,
Los Angeles; and Los Angeles Public Library; as well as the faculty, staff and alumni of the USC Rossier
School of Education.

BIBLIOGRAPHY