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Corporation News
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Carnegie Corporation Announces New Leadership For Urban High School
Reform Initiative
New
York, NY—September 16, 2002. Vartan Gregorian, president
of Carnegie Corporation, announced today the appointment of Constancia
Warren, an expert in school reform who has been a key player on
the Corporation’s urban school program, Schools for a New
Society, as senior program officer and director of the Urban
School Reform Initiative in the Education Division. Warren succeeds
Michele Cahill, who leaves the Corporation to join Schools Chancellor
Joel Klein as Senior Counselor for Education Policy in New York
City.
“Connie Warren assures continuity, commitment and confidence
in the Corporation’s strategies to achieve excellence in the
nation’s urban schools, particularly in our efforts to redesign
the high school,” says Gregorian. “And we are so pleased
that we are able to tap into Connie’s experience with the Schools
for a New Society initiative during her years as the leader
of our technical assistance team as well as benefit from her experience
and achievements in building public-private partnerships in education.”
Warren's involvement in high school reform dates back to the early
1980s, when she was part of the planning team that created the Manhattan
Center for Science and Mathematics, a small science-oriented public
high school in New York City. More recently, during her seven years
at the Academy for Educational Development (AED), where she was
Senior Program Officer, Warren headed teams providing evaluation,
technical assistance and other support to a series of school initiatives
across the country. Recently she directed a learning network of
the local school-community collaboratives in seven cities that received
implementation grants under the Corporation’s Schools for
a New Society high school reform initiative. As part of the
initiative, each city is undertaking community and district-wide
reforms of its secondary education system to guarantee all students
an excellent preparation for college or secure employment. Under
Warren's leadership, AED's technical support team also provided
a combination of on-site and long-distance support to the local
planning collaboratives in each of these cities.
“The loss of Michele Cahill is a gain for the city of New York
schools, which are of particular interest to us and our reform work,”
says Gregorian. “Because Michele and Connie worked together
on these initiatives, the transition in leadership will be seamless.
We also expect Michele to work closely with us on the New Century
High Schools Consortium for New York City, a $30 million collaboration
of the Corporation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and
the Open Society Institute.”
Cahill, a leader in innovative education, designed and implemented
the Corporation’s ambitious national program to redesign America’s
inner city high schools, which won recognition and attention from
educators, urban leaders and scholars in her brief three years at
the Corporation. Under her leadership, other foundations, youth
development organizations and higher education have been mobilized
to create a movement for national reform of the large American urban
high school.
During Warren’s career at the Academy for Educational Development,
she directed AED's two-phase evaluation of the New York City Beacons
initiative, a complex strategy for building school-community-family
partnerships by creating community centers in public schools. Cahill
played an important role in developing the Beacons program during
that time. Previously, Warren also directed a three-year evaluation
of New Jersey School-Based Youth Services Program, an initiative
integrating a range of support services for adolescents and their
families in centers in or near 29 high schools throughout the state.
Prior to joining AED in 1989, Warren was director of adolescent
pregnancy and health programs at the Center for Public Advocacy
Research, where she worked to expand school-based health services
for adolescents in New York State. She also organized a coalition
of New York City non-governmental organizations, service providers,
and public officials to improve policies and practices in the education
of pregnant adolescents and adolescent mothers, co-chairing the
New York City Chancellor’s Working Group on the Education of
Pregnant and Parenting Adolescents. She also worked in the Office
of Policy Analysis and Planning of the New York City Board of Education,
focusing on high school redesign and school system-university collaboration.
Warren serves on the Steering Committee of the National Alliance
on the American High School. She also was an evaluation consultant
to the Mott Foundation and served on its Evaluation Task Force for
the U.S. Department of Education’s 21st Century Community Learning
Center Initiative. Her teaching experience includes ninth grade
English in an independent high school and in the government department
of John Jay College, part of the City University of New York. She
holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Bryn Mawr College
and a doctorate in political science from Columbia University.
Carnegie
Corporation of New York was created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to
promote "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding."
As a grantmaking foundation, the Corporation seeks to carry out
Carnegie's vision of philanthropy, which he said should aim "to
do real and permanent good in the world." The Corporation's
capital fund, originally donated at a value of about $135 million,
had a market value of $1.7 billion on September 30, 2001. The Corporation
awards grants totaling approximately $75 million a year in the areas
of education, international peace and security, international development
and strengthening U.S. democracy.
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