Anna Maria Chávez And Women Over 50 Who Are Champions For Education

Teacher Appreciation Week is typically observed during the first week in May. However, like so many moments of recognition dedicated to people, issues and professions that are too often taken for granted for the rest of the year (see also: Mother’s Day), a week of discounts and gratitude for teachers is woefully insufficient.

This is especially true right now: Over the past 14 pandemic-ridden months, educators across the globe have not only had learn how to lead remote classrooms, but they’ve also had to witness how inadequate access to broadband wifi can force their students out of that classroom. Some 10- to 16 million school-aged kids lacked reliable internet before Covid shut down in-person learning, and reports indicate that of that number, just 3- to 4 million students have been given internet access since the beginning of the pandemic.

Of course, providing access to quality education to all of America’s school-aged children is not a new problem; it’s something that activists have been working towards for decades. And so, because many of these activists happen to be women, and because honoring educators is something that should happen well beyond the first week in May, Forbes and Know Your Value want to shine a light on the women over 50 who have been champions for education access in the U.S. They are:

Anna Maria Chávez, 53: In 2011, Chávez became the first woman of color to lead the Girl Scouts of America as CEO. She used her tenure to focus on teaching girls more about STEM, adding badges in areas including financial literacy and science education.

Today, Chávez is the executive director and CEO of the National School Boards Association, an organization that advocates for 13,000 school districts and represents the nation’s 50 million public school students. Since taking the role in June 2020, Chávez has centered her lobbying efforts on getting educators more coronavirus relief and also getting schools more funding for special education.

“The move to remote learning has shown us that our educators are incredibly innovative and resourceful in how they teach our students,” Chávez said in January. “But when you’re neurodiverse, disabled, or don’t have access to the internet, the move online can be devastating.”

Judith Rodin, 76: Rodin grew up in West Philadelphia and attended the University of Pennsylvania on scholarship. Twenty-eight years after receiving her bachelor’s degree, she became the school’s president—the first Penn alum to lead the institution and the first woman to ever run an Ivy League university.

During her ten-year tenure, she doubled Penn’s research funding and tripled its endowment. She instituted initiatives that helped attract record numbers of applicants, but equally important was the work she did in and around the university’s West Philadelphia home: Rodin led investments in local public schools and spearheaded the construction of a pre-K-through-grade-8 school in collaboration with the city, the school district, and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

“Part of what we try to achieve as educators is to help our students understand their role as citizens in a democracy. And how can we do that if we don’t role model what a civically engaged institution looks like?” she said recently.

Engaging students in democracy has long been a priority for Rodin; after she left Penn, she went on to serve as the president of the Rockefeller Foundation for twelve years, during which time she gave 20,000 New York City public school students free tickets to the Broadway show Hamilton. “How do you infuse new ways of thinking about our American democracy that touch young people in a way that feels more personal, more accessible, and makes it feel like it opens opportunities for them instead of looking like a world where they’re never going to get a break?” she told Forbes in 2016.

Laurene Powell Jobs, 57: As Powell Jobs remembers it, her first-ever charitable contribution was a $20 cashier’s check she sent to the Southern Poverty Law Center when she was in her teens. Forty years later, she’s able to write much larger checks: after her husband, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, passed away in 2011, she inherited billions of dollars worth of stock in Apple and in Disney.

She has used some of this money to found the Emerson Collective, a hybrid investment, social impact and philanthropic firm with a core focus on education. Among the entrepreneurs and organizations that Emerson invests in and supports is the XQ Institute, a $50 million initiative that works to ensure high school students graduate ready to succeed by sharing data and resources with schools and school districts.

Powell Jobs also cofounded College Track, a nonprofit program that helps students with disadvantaged backgrounds prepare for and graduate from college.

“For the students who I work with, I understand that school is their way out,” she told the Washington Post in 2018. “It’s really their portal to anything larger than what they see around them. That was true for me.”

Anne Williams-Isom, 56: The unsung hero of this group, Williams-Isom is an endowed chair at Fordham university and the former CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone, an organization that annually serves 13,000 students across 100 blocks of northern Manhattan. Williams-Isom had been the organization’s COO since 2009 and took over as CEO in 2014 after its iconic founder, Geoffrey Canada, stepped down.

“We believe our fundamental mission is to end generational poverty,” she said in 2018. “The way we believe that we can do that is by giving [students] everything that they need, all the time, until they don’t need it anymore, just like we would do for our own.”

Williams-Isom now serves on the executive committee of the board of directors of Child Trends and the Central Park Conservancy, and the boards of Graham Windham, Collegiate School, Metropolitan Montessori School, Weill Cornell Medicine, Partnership Schools and the Advisory Board for Columbia Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Design.