Attracting Top Talent

Penny Bender Sebring ’64, a Grinnell life trustee, and her husband, Charles Ashby Lewis, conceived and provided initial funding for the Grinnell Careers in Education Professions program. The program will provide access to speakers, internships, and other opportunities to help students explore education as a career option.

The couple believes that improving public pre-K–12 education is one of the nation’s most pressing needs. “It’s both a social justice issue and an economic competitiveness issue,” Lewis says.

Sebring co-founded the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, and Lewis is also deeply involved in education improvement.

In other countries with the best educational outcomes, top college students are encouraged to pursue teaching as a career, Lewis notes. That is not true in the United States, Sebring and Lewis say.

Even when students pursue an education career, there are challenges. Often, young teachers leave the profession just as they begin to excel at it, leaving behind an open position and classroom instability.

Ashley Schaefer, the College’s Lawrence S. Pigeon Director of Careers in Education Professions, says helping students build connections and skills through the program should not only help change the perception of teaching as a worthwhile endeavor, but also lift the trajectory of students’ career paths. “Today, teaching is often one of the last things that students consider doing,” she says. “We want to make it one of the first things they consider.”

The couple recently helped start companion programs at the University of Chicago and Amherst College.