AACTE to Honor Bryk With Lifetime Achievement Award
AACTE will honor Anthony S. Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, with the 2016 AACTE Lifetime Achievement Award. The award will be presented at the 68th AACTE Annual Meeting Speaker Spotlight Session, Thursday, February 25, at The Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.
Bryk will be honored especially for his transformative work at the Carnegie Foundation developing the field of improvement science in education—lessons of which he will then be sharing as a panelist at the Speaker Spotlight Session.
As Bryk describes in his new book Learning to Improve and summarizes in a recent blog post, improvement science aims to disrupt the seemingly endless cycle of education reforms with disappointing results by finding better ways to improve. “Instead of rolling out more and more reforms fast and wide and hoping for the best, we need a more systematic approach aiming at learning fast in order to achieve quality outcomes, reliably, at scale,” he writes. By studying other professions’ similar efforts and considering their potential for use in education, Bryk and his colleagues developed a set of organizing principles and a new model for collaborating on improvements: the networked improvement community.
“Though we expect Tony to continue his enormous contribution to education for many years to come,” said AACTE President/CEO Sharon P. Robinson, “at this moment it is especially important to recognize his leadership in advancing a methodology to support innovation in a deliberate, disciplined, and responsible manner—the ultimate impact of which is better service to all who depend on our work, and our own continued professional growth. Improvement science allows us to work across institution, across sectors, and across disciplines to be transparent about experimentation and faithful to our standards.”
Prior to arriving at the Carnegie Foundation in 2008, Bryk held the Spencer Chair in Organizational Studies in the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Before that, he was Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the University of Chicago’s sociology department, where he helped found the Center for Urban School Improvement and the Consortium on Chicago School Research. Bryk was appointed by President Obama to the National Board for Education Sciences in 2010, and in 2011 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also is a member of the National Academy of Education and holds degrees from Boston College and Harvard University.
“Tony Bryk is one of the most imaginative and effective persons working to improve education in America today,” said Patricia Albjerg Graham, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Education Emerita at Harvard University. “He combines the rigor of a statistician and the breadth of a sociologist with intense intellectual curiosity and passion to confront the most challenging problems of educational practice in America today. Most important, his confrontations have led to some remarkable solutions.”
The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes an individual’s distinguished and outstanding lifetime contributions to the educator preparation profession and is the only AACTE award whose winner is personally selected by the president of the Association.
AACTE issued a press release today announcing all of its 2016 award winners. For more information on the awards program, visit http://aacte.org/professional-development-and-events/awards.
Tags: Annual Meeting, research
