Their lifetime commitment to education has left a legacy throughout Kansas and Missouri
When you cover education in the bi-state region, the learning never stops.
And one thing we at Ingram's have learned well since the debut of Icons of Education in 2009 is that this region is richly blessed with people who make selfless contributions to education, from pre-kindergarten through graduate school.
Yes, they have powerful tools at their disposal: At the K-12 level, educators generally have had the go-ahead from taxpayers to build and operate new schools as the region has grown. That has led to the impressive array of award-winning public school districts that abound in throughout the region. Business leadership also has played a key role, with legions of native sons and daughters of the two-state region staying here to build their careers. Often, they remain closely bound—both through direct financial support and with board service—to the schools that educated them. And the administrators at our top public and private universities have delivered on their charge as stewards for the resources available to them, pushing their institutions well up in the national rankings for the best values in higher education.
This year's Icons of Education, as with the four classes that preceded them, have made deep, lasting contributions to the lives of the students they've touched. As important as that role has been, each has also had a profound impact on his or her institution—and on the communities they call home.
Join us in saluting Ingram's 2013 Icons of Education and recognizing their contributions and achievements, which have set a standard for educational excellence.
David Becker
Washington University School of Law
Barely a year out of law school, David Becker dismissed an overture from the University of Michigan, inviting him to apply for a non-tenure-track teaching position at the law school in Ann Arbor. His wife, Sandi, fished that letter out of the trash, Becker recalls, then “read it, confronted me, and challenged and cajoled me into taking a chance.”
She saw in her husband something that Becker himself wasn’t yet willing to recognize: “Without long-time experience and expertise, I strongly believed that I was not ready to make that move or even contemplate a career in teaching,” he said. “My professors at the University of Chicago were brilliant, experienced, in total control of the classroom, and larger than life. I was certain that I was not ready, if ever, to emulate their success with students.” Inspired by his wife’s challenge, Becker took that chance back in 1961. More than 50 years and hundreds of law school students later, Becker is winding down his career as a fixture in the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. His former students include lawyers from firms large and small, judges, congressmen, teachers, corporate CEOs. “But mostly,” Becker says, my favorites are those that have had to overcome adversity of every kind.”
Half a century of teaching yields plenty of opportunities for scholarly writings, and Becker has found a rich vein to mine in the rule against perpetuities. Very broadly speaking, the rule limits any individual’s ability to control assets long after he has died, as if attempting to direct affairs of one’s estate from the grave.
The rule, Becker says, “always fascinated me because it was something most students had difficulty with and most lawyers—and often judges—misunderstood and even tried to ignore or avoid.” His experience showed that most students, and many teachers, could solve perpetuities problems through intuition, but not by sound legal processes. “For me, this was not good enough,” he says. He set out to examine a wide range of related issues and devised a formula for solving perpetuities problems that every lawyer could readily apply. “This took six articles and a book,” he notes. But books—even well-researched and ground-breaking ones—can only go so far. The true impact of a teacher on students, Becker says, “is unlimited and, in a sense, is forever. My goal as a teacher is to empower my students to be self-educators and to be problem-solvers with respect to the law and even things beyond it.”
Students have been the most rewarding part of his career, “and in reality they have given to me much more than I have given to them,” Becker says. “They have challenged me with their intellect, their tenacity, and their imagination. They have enriched my life with their diversity, their character, their vitality, their resourcefulness, and their resilience. And finally, they have rewarded me with enduring friendship, their success, and the good lives they have led.”
Marilyn Rhinehart
Johnson County Community College
“Almost everyone,” says Marilyn Rhinehart, “can remember a favorite teacher. I don’t think too many students can recall their favorite administrator!” And yet this former history teacher who loved the interaction with students made the leap into full-time administration when she left her native Texas for Johnson County Community College in 1995. You can’t say she hasn’t looked back, but she’s lived the life of a teacher more vicariously, through the administrative successes she’s achieved on behalf of other instructors at JCCC.
“I have never been ambitious to be an administrator, but even as a full-time faculty member, I enjoyed putting class schedules together—all the logistical things that allow faculty to teach and students to learn,” she said. She was a faculty coordinator for the history department at North Harris College in Texas, then head of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Division. A chance meeting with JCCC administrators at a seminar kindled relationships that paid off with an invitation to apply for an administrative position at the fast-growing community college in Overland Park.
Rhinehart’s path through the system—as teacher and administrator, but also as a student—wasn’t a cakewalk. She earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degree within a single six-year period, but when she returned to school for her Ph.D., she was working full-time and had a family with two children. “I met that challenge, but anyone who does this faces numerous barriers—time being a major one,” she said.
During her tenure, Johnson County’s population has exploded, and the long-running recession and weak recovery have compelled more people to go back to school. Regardless of the reason, such growth strains resources, and that’s where top-notch administrative talent makes a difference. “I like to be in the thick of things; enrollment growth presents the opportunity to do some problem-solving and be resourceful,” Rhinehart said. “I do feel a sense of accomplishment in terms of the latter, in particular.”
Just days into her retirement, Rhinehart is able to look back at a record of collaboration and relationship-building that has produced a new level of mutual respect between faculty members and the school’s administration. Part of that stems from her own experience in addressing potentially shaky relationships.
“As a female in male-dominated degree programs and work environments early in my career, I felt that I constantly had to prove myself and not allow myself to be overlooked or ignored,” she said. And when she ran into rude and uncivil behavior—“I don’t tolerate it well,” she notes—she refused to respond in kind. “It can be challenging to find ways to respond to such incidents in such a way that someone has one of those ‘teachable moments’ without being cut to shreds,” she says.
Brady Deaton
University of Missouri
John F. Kennedy issued the call for Peace Corps volunteers, and young Brady Deaton answered. The next two years of service would give the native of Kentucky a new direction in life, and one that ultimately would make an impact not just on the University of Missouri, where he’s been chancellor since 2004, but on an international stage, with global food production issues and policy.
“I was selected to go to Thailand,” he recalls. “I went in with the full expectation to complete my two years, finish my degree and go to graduate school.” And he did, but with a new focus, shifting from animal genetics to economics. He also came home with a new view of the world. “I was able to experience another culture, even another religion for a while, going to Bhuddist temples, and had another perspective on international issues—it was very much a world-view changer for me.”
He went on to earn his bachelor’s at the University of Kentucky, and demonstrating his belief in the power of education, followed up with master’s degrees in diplomacy and international commerce at UK and ag economics at the University of Wisconsin, where he also earned his doctorate. He was on the faculty at Virginia Tech for 12 years before the right opening emerged at MU in 1989.
“I told my wife many years before that MU was one of a handful of universities in the nation I’d be interested in going to,” Deaton says. “It was well known for its interests in rural an international economic development, and was one of the great public universities in the nation.” He applied education and experience alike over the years with service on more than a dozen national agriculture and education committees, and nearly as many regional ones.
After four years on the ag economics faculty in Columbia, Deaton made the leap to administration as chief of staff to the chancellor. Next came deputy chancellor, then provost, before he assumed the top leadership role. He took no small amount of heat from Mizzou grads opposed to seeing the university pull its athletic teams from the Big 12 Conference for the Southeastern Conference, but notes that with the furor from last fall’s announcement subsiding, MU is now on track to leverage the academic benefits of being in the SEC.
Two decades in university administration have not diminished Deaton’s passion for global food-production research and policy. “Food issues are something so many of us feel committed to improving,” he says. “There’s still too much poverty. But I feel honored to be in position to continue working on those issues, drawing on all the strengths at MU and working with the private business sector as well as volunteer organizations to target areas where the world’s hungry are.”
Marlin Berry
Olathe School District
The superintendent for the Olathe School District doesn’t think of himself as an icon. “I’m an educator,” Marlin Berry says, simply, “trying to do the best for kids.” And that he’s done. Most of Berry’s career has been spent in administrative roles, including the past five years in Olathe, where he became superintendent in 2010. Before that, he held similar roles in north-central Kansas for the Smoky Valley and Abilene districts. He also served as principal in both the Lindsborg and Gardner-Edgerton districts after moving into administration from teaching roles. His achievements along the way made him his peer association’s pick as Kansas Superintendent of the Year for 2012.
“I’ve been blessed to work with so many good administrators in my career that I always tried to learn and grow from their examples,” he said. “To be honest, I’ve also learned from administrators whom I did not want to be like.” One of the good examples was set by his own father, who was teaching when he was just 17 years old. But Berry also attributes much of his success to the support of his wife, and to legions of school administrators and the countless after-school hours and nights devoted to the cause. “I loved my time with students in the classroom,” he says, but “the opportunity to work with all students as a building principal, and then at the central office, can be just as rewarding.”
The breadth of his experience provides a rare perspective on K-12 education in a big state that has long struggled with school finance and disparities between wealthy and poor districts. “I like to be an optimistic person, partly because I believe in the good in everyone and also because it’s just more fun,” Berry says. “The state has a responsibility to equitably educate all students, no matter their ZIP code.” Predictably, he sees the challenge facing lawmakers as a teachable moment: “Our students can learn from a great example of compromise if the state can produce a plan that will equitably and positively impact the learning environments in our Kansas schools. It can be done.”
In fast-growing Olathe, Berry’s influence touches nearly 29,000 students—almost twice the enrollment of the Kansas City School District—and that growth recently eclipsed the longtime leader in Johnson County, the Shawnee Mission district. Berry, though, knows that a school executive is only as good as the team he’s assembled and the community that supports all of them.
“We have such wonderful building principals and administrators in Olathe, it is very satisfying to work with them on a daily basis as they guide schools full of kids. I enjoy working with our Board in Olathe to impact our district positively. Making connections with our community groups and organizations to support our school district efforts is also very important work.”
