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Karen Symms Gallagher    

Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education

Karen Symms Gallagher is the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean at the USC Rossier School of Education. Under her leadership, the school pioneered the practitioner-focused education doctorate more than a decade ago, an EdD program that serves as a national model. In 2009, the school launched the groundbreaking online Master of Arts in Teaching degree, which has now prepared more than 3,000 teachers. The Global Executive EdD program, which launched in 2012, also uses an online platform and prepares education leaders from around the world.

Dean Gallagher has a long career of collaborating on teacher preparation improvement. In 2015, she joined with other education leaders to form Deans for Impact, an organization that aims to improve educator preparation through data-driven initiatives. She is currently chair of the board of directors of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), the nation’s only teacher-accreditation organization.

She also led the USC Rossier initiative that successfully opened three charter high schools in Southern California while securing approval to open two more in 2017.

In 2013, she was honored with USC’s inaugural Provost’s Prize for Innovation in Educational Practice and was also named to the spring 2013 cohort of Pahara-Aspen Fellows.

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