The University of Pennsylvania has teamed up with the Milken Family Foundation to launch the Milken-Penn GSE Prize for Business Plans in Education, the first competition specifically aimed at stimulating entrepreneurship and addressing challenges in education, developing innovative solutions that boost student achievement and strengthening school effectiveness.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) has been named one of the first recipients of a newly established national grant program. The award will go toward funding a PFT collaboration with Penn GSE and the University's Netter Center for Community Partnerships.

The AFT Innovative Fund Grants are awarded by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) for education initiatives by teacher unions and their partners to improve schools, teaching, and learning.

Two Penn GSE professors are teaming up with the Marion Anderson Recreation Center in South Philadelphia to help adolescents manage personal conflicts through interactive basketball games, starting in October.

Howard Stevenson and Duane Thomas are leading Peacemakers, a two-year parent-development component of the Preventing Long-term Anger and Aggression in Youth project, or PLAAY, and teaching 150 parents to become supportive life coaches for 150 children in seventh and eighth grades before, during and after peer conflicts.

Two University of Pennsylvania professors received a three-year, $1.4 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to advance integrated data systems-based policy analysis and research as a field of professional practice.

Penn professors Dennis Culhane, from the School of Social Policy and Practice, and John Fantuzzo, from the Graduate School of Education (together with Trevor Hadley from the School of Medicine), are co-founders of the Kids Integrated Data System (KIDS) in Philadelphia and are recognized as leaders in the integration of administrative data for research.

Beginning in early July, researchers from Penn GSE are partnering with a family of multi-generational Penn alumni to introduce laptop computers and a technology-based curriculum to students and teachers in a rural community school for the children of coffee-farm workers in Nicaragua.

Comercial Internacional Exportada S.A., or CISA, a green coffee exporter in Nicaragua, will provide a grant to fund a three-year research initiative at the Buenos Aires School to examine issues surrounding bridging the digital divide.

GSE's Chinese Language Teachers' Institute will offer intensive summer courses covering Chinese for Chinese teachers and standards-based foreign language curriculum design and assessment. Partial to full tuition support is available to participants who already hold teacher certification in another subject area.

The major goals are:

Glenn Cummings, former Speaker of the House in the Maine House of Representatives and current student in Penn GSE's Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management, has been selected as deputy assistant secretary of education in the Obama administration. He was offered the administration post by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Christopher N. Steel, a student in GSE's Mid-Career program and the director of Curriculum, Instruction, & Technology at the Emerson Schools (NJ), has been named a 2009-2010 Fulbright Fellow by the United States Department of State. The Comisión Fulbright del Ecuador in Ecuador and the presidentially appointed J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board jointly selected Steel on the basis of his academic and career achievements and leadership in the field.

Lawrence Sipe, a professor in the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, has been named a Fellow of Munich's International Youth Library, a collection of more than 600,000 children's books.  The fellowship began on March 1 and will end May 31.  Sipe is an authority in early-childhood literacy development.

This fellowship is one of 12 offered this year, and Sipe is the only scholar from the U.S. for 2009.