PILF President Offered Harvard Scholarship
Public Interest Law Foundation president Jennifer Nagourney is one of 25 people recently offered a full scholarship and stipend to attend Harvard University through the Zuckerman Fellowship program. All of the fellows will have a professional degree, and will come to the School of Education, School of Public Health or School of Government to put their professional degrees to work in public service.
Nagourney, who will start in the fall, plans to pursue a master's degree in education policy and management. "I hope to use the degree to work toward systemic, sustainable change in public schools," she said. "I am also considering other opportunities at Harvard, including staying for a Ph.D. in a similar field."
Prior to law school, Nagourney served as a Teach for America corps member, where she taught 8th grade social studies in an under-resourced middle school in rural North Carolina. At the end of her two-year commitment, she taught 8th grade social studies for an additional year at a gifted and talented magnet school in Raleigh, N.C.
"My teaching experience, law school education, and extracurricular leadership allowed me to develop superior legal knowledge, problem-solving skills, and management expertise," she said. "I want to use my education and experience for the specific purpose of improving public education systems, with particular emphasis on low-achieving students. This requires a deeper understanding of the factors of effective public schools and policies that foster achievement among low-achieving students."
According to its Web site, the Zuckerman Fellows Program "stands in stark contrast to the narrow professional training that is all too common in the educational world today. The animating idea behind this fellowship is cross-pollination: the creativity that results from bringing the perspectives of multiple professions and academic disciplines to bear on public sector problems."
Mort Zuckerman, the fellowship's donor, is the chairman and editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report and chairman and publisher of the New York Daily News. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, and the International Institute off Strategic Studies. He serves as a trustee of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, the Aspen Institute, New York University, the Hole in the Wall Gang Fund, and the Center for Communications.