Susan Fuhrman

Susan Harriet Fuhrman (born April 1944) is an American education policy scholar and the first female president of Teachers College, Columbia University. Fuhrman earned her doctorate in Political Science and Education from Teachers College. She became very engaged in issues of educational equity and emerged as an authority on school reform school reform. Fuhrman is known for her early and ongoing critical analysis of the standards movement and for her efforts to foster research that provides a scientific basis for effective teaching.

Fuhrman served as the Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education for 11 years, where she is widely credited with elevating Penn GSE to enhanced national stature by "focusing on themes of urban and international education and broadening involvement with schools in underserved communities..." Prior to her service as dean at Pennsylvania, Fuhrman taught at Rutgers University and founded the Center for Policy Research in Education, the nation's first federally funded education policy center.

In 2007 Fuhrman was named one of New York's 100 most influential women by Crain's New York Business. In 2009, she also became president of the National Academy of Education.

Susan Harriet Fuhrman was born in April 1944 in the Bronx, the daughter of Irene Satz Levine, who rose from a stock girl to become Vice President of Ohrbach’s department store. With a mother and three aunts who were all successful professionals, Fuhrman says, she always “had the model of a woman who was independent and a major figure in whatever field she chose to be in.”

Fuhrman is a graduate of New York City public schools, including Hunter College High School which she graduated from in 1961. She earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. After teaching in secondary schools and studying policy planning and administration in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, she received a Ph.D. in political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1977. Her dissertation was titled, “The Classification of Roll Call Votes in New Jersey.”

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