Stephen L. Schechter
Dr. Schechter is a Professor of Political Science at Russell Sage College where he is also the director of the Council for Citizenship Education. Professor Schechter has been at Sage since 1978 with a leave of absence from 1986 to 1990 to serve as Executive Director of the New York State Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. Since 1995 Professor Schechter has also served as the Senior Research Advisor to the New York State Commission on the Capital Region. This Commission is a statewide pilot project created by the State Legislature and the Governor to recommend ways in which local governments can work together to achieve more efficient delivery of municipal services like economic development, land use planning, and transportation.
Professor Schechter received his B.A. from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 1967 and his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh in 1972. Prior to joining the Sage faculty, he has been on the faculties of the University of Ume‡ (Sweden), Temple University (Philadelphia), and the State University of New York at Albany.
Professor Schechter has published over one dozen books and journals and numerous articles, papers, and book chapters in the fields of constitutional law and history, federalism, state and local governments and civics. He is the founding editor of the Publius Annual Review of American Federalism and his books include: Contexts of the Bill of Rights New York and the Union: Contributions to theAmericanConstitutional Experience (1990), (1990);Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted Well Begun:Chronicles of the Early National Period (1990), (1989).
Professor Schechter is also active in the political science discipline. For example, he founded the Section on Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations in the American Political Science Association. At the time of its founding, it was the largest section in the Association. Professor Schechter is also committed to improving the social studies curriculum from kindergarten through high school in ways that engage student participation and reflect the latest scholarship.
This is one of the goals of the Council for Citizenshp Education whih he directs, and they have been very successful in receiving state and federal grants (including Goals 2000 and the U.S. Fund for the Improvement of Education) to work with teachers in professional developmnt and curriculum redesign in civics and history. He is also active in the New York State Council for the Social Studies (NYSCSS), and served as co-editor of the NYSCSS journal, The Social Science Record (1993-1996).
Professor Schechter is also very committed to advancing the use of democracy in Central Europe and the former republics of the Soviet Union. He has served as a semi-permanent advisor to the U.S. Information and continues to work for them on various projects that bring educators and public officials from around the world to the Sage campus. He is also involved in the newly established CIVITAS: An International Civic Education Exchange Program.
CIVITAS brings together a number of U.S. centers--including the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Center for Civic Education, the ERIC Clearninghouse and Social Studies Development Center at Indiana --University, the Florida Law-Related Education Association, the Mershon Center at Ohio State University, and the Sage Council for Citizenship Education--with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Each center works with partner organizations in an assigned country in Central and Eastern Europe. The Sage Council and the AFT are working with the Russian Association of CivicsEducation organized by the Uchitelskaja Gazeta (The Teacher's Newspaper) and Grazhdanin (The Citizenship Foundation). In its first year, 1995-1996, the Sage-AFT partnership has organized an exchange program including a 0-day American institute for ten Russian educators and Russian site visits by ten American educators. Educators will cooperate in producing a curriculum for Russian high schools on Russian federalism. The kick-off event for the international network was the Prague CIVITAS Conference in June 1995, sponsored by Presidents Bill Clinton and Vaclev Havel. Professor Schechter led a delegation from New York State to that event.
Finally, Professor Schechter has a commitment to community building in Troy and elsewhere He helped establish Covenant for a Better Troy--a collaborative project to help rebuild Troy as a civil community, sponsored by The Sage Colleges (including the Council for Citizenship Education) and the Troy Area United Ministries. Participating community organizations have covenanted with one another and pledged to identify specific ways in which they can help rebuild Troy through their individual and joint efforts. He also helped organize Rebuilding Civil Community--a series of three annual conferences bringing together community leaders from selected cities of the prairie to compare recent experiences in rebuilding their civil communities after the decline of their manufacturing base since the early 1980s. The conference series includes participants from approximately one dozen medium-sized cities which have been under study since the 1960s. The findings of that ongoing study have been published in Cities of the Prairie (1970) and Cities of the Prairie Revisted (1986). The serie is sponsored by the Bradley Foundation and the Center for the Study of Federalism at Temple University where the Cities of the Prairie Project is housed. Professor Maren Stein is also involved in this project.
