Dear USC Rossier Faculty, Staff and Students,

I’m pleased to announce that Dr. Lawrence O. Picus will be installed this fall as the Richard T. Cooper and Mary Catherine Cooper Chair in Public School Administration. He will continue as associate dean for research and faculty affairs.

An endowed chair is one of the greatest honors that can be bestowed upon an individual in the academic community. It is awarded to a scholar who demonstrates the highest level of excellence in leadership and research in his or her area of study.

Dr. Picus will be the second holder of this positon, following Dr. Guilbert Hentschke, who served as dean of USC Rossier (1988–2000) prior to becoming the Cooper Chair in 2003.

The endowment was established from a gift in 2001. Richard and Mary Catherine Cooper were longtime educators in Los Angeles, Richard serving as a teacher, coach, principal and area superintendent, and Mary Catherine as a first grade teacher in the Pasadena Unified School District as well as a bilingual teacher in LAUSD. Richard, a two-time Rossier alumnus, died in 2016.

Dr. Picus is one of the nation’s foremost experts on school finance equity and adequacy and has made a number of important contributions to our understanding of efficiency and productivity in the provision of educational programs for P­–12 school children.

He is the co-developer, along with Allan Odden, of the Evidence-Based Model of school finance adequacy. This model, which is used to estimate the amount of funding needed to help all children meet state performance standards, has been used in over 20 states and is the most widely used approach for estimating school finance adequacy. He is co-author, again with Dr. Odden, of School Finance: A Policy Perspective, 5^th edition, the leading textbook in the field of school finance.

Among his other books are In Search of More Productive Schools: A Guide to Resource Allocation in Education; Developing Community Empowered Schools; and Principles of School Business Administration. He has published numerous articles in professional journals and consults extensively on school finance issues with states and local school districts.

Dr. Picus is past-president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy and was the president of EdSource, where he was a member of the board of directors for 14 years.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Picus.

Sincerely,

Karen Symms Gallagher, Ph.D.

Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean

USC Rossier School of Education

Waite Phillips Hall

Los Angeles, CA  90089-0031

Asst: hardison@usc.edu

213.740.5756 (office)

213.821.2158 (fax)

Hello Trojans,

I hope everyone had a great weekend.  Now that we are approximately midway through the Spring Semester, we want to gather feedback on your courses so that we can make adjustments (if necessary) to improve your learning experience while the semester is still in progress.  You will also have an opportunity to provide final thoughts at the conclusion of this semester.

We encourage you to provide detailed comments. While individual responses will remain confidential, please note that feedback and comments on mid-semester course evaluations will be shared in aggregate with the faculty course lead for each class so that they may provide feedback to instructors.

To complete the evaluation, click on the anonymous survey link below. We ask that you complete a survey for each of the classes in which you are enrolled. The survey will remain open until Friday March 2 at 5pm PST.

https://usceducation.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cYegQfuiT9N57VP.

We appreciate your feedback!

Dear USC Rossier Faculty, Staff and Students,

I’m pleased to announce that Dr. Gale M. Sinatra will be installed this fall as the Stephen H. Crocker Professor of Education.

A professorship is one of the most coveted honors that can be bestowed upon an individual in the academic community. It is awarded to a scholar who demonstrates the highest level of excellence in leadership and research in his or her area of study.

Dr. Sinatra will be the fourth holder of this endowed professorship, following Drs. Joanna Lemlech, Myron Dembo and Robert Rueda. The professorship was established through an endowment from Stephen H. Crocker, who also created a separate professorship at the USC Thornton School of Music.

Dr. Sinatra has been a professor of psychology and education at USC Rossier since 2012. Like her predecessors in this position, she is one of the top researchers in her field while also serving as an outstanding teacher and adviser. In the spring of 2017, she was one of 22 university faculty members to receive a USC Mentoring Award.

She is an internationally recognized expert on STEM learning and motivation. In particularly she has been a leader in research on climate science education, evolution education, conceptual change learning and the public understanding of science.

Dr. Sinatra has also been a prominent leader in her field through a number of organizations. In August, she will become president of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) educational psychology organization, Division 15, a role that also includes oversight of the prominent journal Educational Psychologist, which she edited from 2005 to 2010. She currently serves as an associate editor of the APA journal Psychological Bulletin, one of the top ranked journals in psychology.

As the Crocker Professor, she will continue on the path that she has already forged at USC Rossier, fostering the next generation of scholars while enhancing the impact of educational psychology on education and public policy.

Dr. Sinatra has edited two books, written dozens of book chapters, co-authored more than 60 scholarly papers and delivered nearly 200 conference presentations in education psychology. She is currently writing a book based on her 2016 article, “Public Understanding of Science: Policy and Educational Implications,” published in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain. The book will explore the psychology of science resistance, doubt and denial.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Sinatra for this important distinction.

Sincerely,

Karen Symms Gallagher, Ph.D.

Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean

USC Rossier School of Education

Waite Phillips Hall

Los Angeles, CA  90089-0031

Asst: hardison@usc.edu

213.740.5756 (office)

213.821.2158 (fax)