Sandra Gotshalk Stotsky

FAYETTEVILLE — Jewish mothers, as the stereotype goes, push their children hard and push equally hard on behalf of them.

Sandra Stotsky is a Jewish mother to schoolchildren everywhere.

“We had a TV, but it was stuffed in a cold, dark basement, so nobody wanted to go down there,” Stotsky says. “I made sure [my children] wouldn’t spend much time on TV. They were all in their rooms, reading every night.”

“She’s completely fearless about talking to anybody about anything,” adds her brother, Don Gotshalk of Boston. “You’re not going to win any argument with her.”

A major figure in education reform, Stotsky is a doting mother of five and grandmother of 12, a tiny woman who lights up when talking about their many accomplishments. She expected her kids to shine in school, and on the rare times they fell short, she didn’t come down too hard on them because she knew she had instilled them with her ferocious work ethic.

It was that work ethic that drove her to enroll in college at age 16 - in a family where no one had ever graduated from college - and that has made her a towering presence in the rough-and-tumble world of education standards.

Since 2007, Stotsky has been the professor of education reform, 21st Century Chair in Teacher Quality at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where she works on ways to better public education by studying ways to improve teacher quality. She tirelessly pushes to improve state standards, tests for granting teacher licenses and teacher preparation.

Retired University of Virginia Provost Paul Gross has worked with Stotsky on a number of projects. Together, they were engaged by NASA to review the space agency’s kindergarten through grade 12 science education programs. They also co-wrote a chapter in the 2000 book What’s at Stake in the K-12 Standards Wars: A Primer for Educational Policy Makers, in which Stotsky served as editor and authored or co-authored several chapters.

What impressed Gross most about Stotsky was her professionalism.

“She’s an utterly serious person about education,” Gross says. “This may sound trivial, but it isn’t; there are an awful lot of people in this business, especially people who do theoretical research and thinking about education, that strike me as being less than fully serious. She’s of very high intelligence.

“The other impression was the remarkable degree of self-organization in her work. When she said she’d get something done, she got it done on time, fully and completely, with no monkey business. This, too, is an unusual thing.”

Run an Internet search for Stotsky and you’ll find her name attached to dozens of publications - from the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to a recent issue of Education Week.

She’s got her staunch defenders and plenty of people who don’t want to hear what she has to say. Their passion is understandable; what’s at stake in the education battles is nothing less than the future of our country. (Or other countries, as when Stotsky worked with the U.S.Department of Education to help develop public-school coursework in former Eastern bloc countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

Stotsky understands the cause of her critics’ fervor, and she relishes the opportunity to engage in civil debate. Opponents be warned, though: Stotsky rarely stakes herself to a position unless she has a mountain of supporting evidence.

“She knows what’s right and is going to go down to the grave fighting for it,” Gotshalk says.

HONEST ANSWERS

“Sandra Stotsky can be abrasive, blunt and overbearing,” according to a June 2010 column in The Boston Globe. “She’s also the best defense Massachusetts has against a decline in educational quality.”

That bluntness served Stotsky well during her first foray into the national limelight: the so-called Brookline standards wars.

It was the late 1980s, and educators at Brookline (Mass.) High School had made drastic changes in the school’s social studies department. Most notably, they had eliminated advanced placement European history in an effort to introduce more multiculturalism into the curriculum.

Stotsky was outraged. She fought back, helping form a group called Citizens for Quality Education. They submitted a petition in favor of the course’s reinstatement, signed by more than 450 people, including 188 students.

Citizens for Quality Education started a letter-writing campaign, getting former Brookline graduates and parents - among them Harvard University educators and Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize winner in physics - to testify what the course meant to their studies.

Larry Harmon, who wrote The Boston Globe column, first met Stotsky when he was covering the controversy in Brookline. Although they are not friends, Harmon gained a great deal of respect for Stotsky’s dedication to educational quality.

“She was confronting what she thought were some really sloppy policies,” Harmon says. “I thought she made a tremendous amount of sense. She put a lot of [public] attention on the high school’s curriculum.”

Stotsky isn’t a sugar-coater when it comes to education. She tells it like she sees it, no matter if it rubs people the wrong way.

This unapologetic style comes from her straight shooting mother, Ida Gotshalk. Ida loved her children dearly, but if young Sandra was wearing a dress her mother didn’t like and asked for an opinion, her feelings weren’t spared.

“She wouldn’t mince words,” Stotsky says, laughing. “Everybody used to kid and say, ‘If you want an honest opinion, go to Ida.’ Even though people may not have liked her opinions, they knew they’d get a straight answer from her.

“Her sisters were like that, too. We got used to the fact that they spoke bluntly in my family. You knew they weren’t playing games with you.”

The fighting in Brookline caught the attention of the national media. It soon appeared in newspapers and magazines around the country, and Stotsky was a much sought-after guest for interviews.

At the same time, defenders of the academic changes began viciously attacking those in the Citizens for Quality Education group - calling them everything from “elitists” to “brown shirts.” Stotsky never wavered, though, and advanced placement European history was ultimately reinstated.

She took that same mindset to the Massachusetts Board of Education, to which she was appointed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney in November 2006. Her willingness to ask tough questions brought her many admirers - and plenty of detractors too, like current Gov. Deval Patrick, who chose not to reappoint Stotsky to the board this year in favor of someone whom Harmon says would more willingly go along with his educational positions.

“I think there was a strong feeling on the board that they wanted a more collegial member to take her seat,” Harmon says. “But she’s been a major figure in education reform in Massachusetts. She pushed for high standards harder than anyone, and for that, the state owes her a big debt.”

A GOOD CITIZEN

Stotsky is a big believer in civic republicanism - “small caps,” she says of “republicanism” - the idea that you want self-government at the local level.

A suburb of Boston, Brookline is governed by representative town meetings, a system of elected government common in New England. It’s similar to the U.S. House of Representatives, except on a local level, and from 1984-94, Stotsky was an elected representative from her precinct for town meetings.

She was active for years in her local parent-teacher organization and the League of Women Voters, serving for two years as the president of the Brookline chapter. She was also elected to the Brookline Library’s board of trustees for 14 years.

For her strong sense of civic republicanism, Stotsky credits the sort of education she received growing up in Bridgewater, Mass., about 30 miles south of Boston. A well rounded education was vital, because once kids became adults, they were expected to lead the town.

“They had very clear ideas of what a good curriculum to develop educated citizens was all about, because once you turned 18, you could go to town meetings and vote,” Stotsky says. “That’s what it was all about. [At] open town meetings, there were no qualifications. You just walked through the door, female or male, it didn’t make a difference; if you were a resident, you could vote.”

Pushed by her mother, Stotsky demonstrated great aptitude growing up. She aspired to be a concert pianist, and although she realized she lacked the ability to be a first-rate one, she still loves to play.

Stotsky is a voracious reader, and her brother jokes that “she grew up in a library.”

“She attends music camp every summer, and she’s easily the oldest person there,” Don Gotshalk says. “All 12 of her grandchildren are super students and musicians because of her. Whenever you go into her house as a grandchild, you see piles of books with a person’s name on it.”

Stotsky graduated from the University of Michigan at 20, earning a bachelor of arts with a concentration in French literature, with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and after she married she began having children. Despite a divorce that left her the primary caretaker of five children, she enrolled in the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, earning her doctorate in 1976 with distinction in reading research and reading education.

Her children followed in her footsteps. All five graduated from college, and three went on to earn higher degrees.

“She really devoted herself to her children and gave us opportunities to do all we wanted in life,” says daughter Janet Stotsky, who lives in McLean, Va., and is an economist with the International Monetary Fund. “She pushed us hard. She had high expectations, but didn’t put us down when we didn’t live up to them.

“She showed the example of how you could lead a busy life raising children, going to school and still be part of the community.”

DEMANDING MORE

When Janet Stotsky was a ninth-grader, she was assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird.

Sandra Stotsky always kept on top of her children’s schoolwork, and when she saw the list of questions assigned, she was appalled. She went to the assistant superintendent and, in short order, the assignments got a lot tougher.

“‘What cold and wet thing did Scout find under her bed?’” Stotsky recalls decades later, making no effort to hide her disgust. “What a ridiculous question to ask!

“You wouldn’t even ask this question in grade 4. This is what they call literal comprehension; you don’t even have to read the novel to guess it was probably a dog.”

Stotsky is unwilling to passively accept low standards.The opportunity to improve education is what drove her from the East Coast, where all her children lived, to Arkansas.

She had no family here, she just knew she was being given a chance to affect teacher quality. Armed with a research budget, Stotsky can engage in broad studies that result in works like Literary Study in Grades 9, 10, and 11: A National Survey, which was published in the spring.

“My only concern was ‘How do we help get kids to do better?’ and ‘How do we make sure we have better teachers to teach these kids?’” says Stotsky, who lives in Fayetteville. “And by better teachers, I’m [focused on] ‘How do we get more academically competent teachers to begin with, and then how do we ensure we put enough intellectual demand on kids so that they end up as educated high school graduates?’

“That’s why I became a professor of teacher quality, 21st century chair.”

For the countless excellent teachers in this state who are struggling to reach students, Stotsky may prove to be their strongest advocate, because she knows how demanding the position can be.

Shortly after graduating from Michigan, Stotsky found herself teaching 40 third-graders in working-class Easton, Md. Years later, she taught high school French and German in Bladensburg, Md., and this summer she taught an English language arts course for teachers in Arkansas.

Stotsky loves teaching, and she remembers what it was like “in the trenches.” She knows there are countless factors affecting student performance that are beyond the control of any teacher - like when one of her German students stopped doing coursework after receiving a car for a 16th-birthday present.

So her sympathies will always lie with those she wants to help: teachers.

“There are an awful lot of administrative types who never suffered a classroom at all, or did it such a long time ago they forgot what it’s really like,” Gross says. “What I found unique about Sandra is the combination of empathy for teachers in the classroom, coupled with a very serious attitude about what teachers do.”SELF PORTRAIT Sandra Stotsky

PLACE OF BIRTH Bridgewater, Mass.

MY POLITICAL HERO WAS Margaret Thatcher. She spoke out. She was blunt about what she said and a lot of people didn’t like her bluntness, but you always knew what she thought.

WHEN I’M BACK IN MASSACHUSETTS I make soup. Either chicken soup with matzo balls or, if it’s not Passover, a vegetable soup of some kind. My grandchildren love it.

THE BEST ADVICE I EVER GOT WAS From an uncle who was a professional violinist and conductor. When I was 11 or 12, he brought a friend from Juilliard to hear me play, because they wanted to know if I was good enough to send to a music academy. They listened and then my uncle, after a week or so, very politely and diplomatically said, “The worst thing in the world is to be a third-class musician.” He was saying, “Unless you’re going to be first-class in something, it’s going to be a tough life for you.”

THE TWO MOST INFLUENTIAL NOVELS I READ GROWING UP WERE Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe series.

A WORD TO SUM ME UP Nonconformist.