The Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education continues to shine a light on people who have had an extraordinary impact on the field. This year’s winners, announced by the Graduate School of Education, are Richard Baraniuk, Doug and Lynn Fuchs, and Carol D. Lee. Each is recognized for their achievements in higher education, preK-12 education, and learning science research respectively and will be honored Wednesday, November 10 in a streaming ceremony. Each winner will also receive an award of $50,000 and a prize sculpture.

Since 1988, the McGraw Prize has celebrated innovation in education by recognizing outstanding individuals who have dedicated themselves to improving education and whose accomplishments are making a huge impact. The University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) became the new home for the prize in 2020. As part of the partnership with the McGraw Family Foundation, Catalyst @ Penn GSE has created an array of programs to share ideas, insights, and best practices from the community of nearly 100 former McGraw Prize winners.

“We are so proud to be able to partner with the McGraw family for these awards. It gives me great pleasure to celebrate the work of these remarkable educators,” said Penn GSE Dean Pam Grossman. “Their body of work embodies a tremendous mix of innovation and inspiration aimed at making substantive changes in how we teach and learn.”

Engineer, education entrepreneur, and researcher Richard Baraniuk, the 2021 McGraw Prize winner in Higher Education, has revolutionized college publishing by putting free and open-source books in the hands of tens of millions of students and faculty worldwide. As founder and director of OpenStax, a nonprofit educational and scholarly publishing project he founded in 1999, Dr. Baraniuk and his team address a major but often hidden barrier to college affordability: the cost of textbooks and related educational materials. Dr. Baraniuk is the C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University.

Trailblazers in the field of special education, Lynn Fuchs and Doug Fuchs are the 2021 McGraw Prize winners in the PreK-12 Education category. Across four decades of methodologically rigorous and innovative research and development, they helped establish Data-Based Individualization as the most respected approach to instructing students with serious learning disabilities and as the sine qua non of special education intervention. Dr. and Dr. Fuchs are Institute Fellows at the American Institutes for Research and research professors in the departments of special education and psychology & human development, respectively, at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.

Carol D. Lee, the 2021 McGraw Prize winner in Learning Science Research, has had a profound and lasting impact on the learning sciences by introducing transformative perspectives to the field. In her five-decade career, she adopted a broad ecological focus, closely attending to the role that people’s participation in cultural practices contributes to robust learning, with a special focus on literacy. Dr. Lee is the Edwina S. Tarry Professor Emerita in the School of Education and Social Policy and in learning sciences and African American studies at Northwestern University.