Melissa Roderick '83 to Deliver Brodie Lecture Dec. 2

Story posted November 20, 2009

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Educator Melissa Roderick '83 will deliver Bowdoin's Brodie Family Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, December 2, 2009, in Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center.

Roderick will give a talk titled "Rising to Meet Obama's Challenge: What the Crisis in Educational Attainment Means for Urban High Schools." The lecture is free and open to the public.

Melissa Roderick is a co-director at the Consortium on Chicago School Research and the Herman Dunlop Smith Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.

A 1983 magna cum laude graduate of Bowdoin, where she earned high honors in economics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, she earned her M.P.P. at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and her Ph.D. in Committee in Public Policy at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

In 2000 she was recognized as one of "Ten Who Set the Course for Chicago Schools," and in 2004 she was named one of "Chicago's 100 Most Powerful Women."

She has written dozens of articles, book chapters and reports on the state of education and school reform, and is the author of The Path to Dropping Out: Evidence for Intervention, which was awarded a Choice Award by the National Librarian's Association as one of the best academic books of 1993.

The Brodie Family Lecture Fund was established in 1997 by Theodore H. Brodie of the Class of 1952 and an overseer of the College from 1983 to 1995. The income from this fund is designated to support an annual lecture at the College by a speaker of note in the field of education who would deliver a message on the subjects of problems and practices of teaching and learning. Brodie is chief executive officer of New England Insulation in Canton, Massachusetts.

Roderick's Bowdoin lecture is also presented as part of the series "Seeking the Common Good," presented by the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good.

For more information contact the Department of Education at 725-3465.

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