Sophie Sa, '65

( from the Wellesley College’s graduates brochure. )

Wellesley College - Education

Advanced Degree: 

Profession:

Distinctions:

Ph.D.,
Sociology and Chinese Studies,
Harvard University

Executive director,
Panasonic Foundation Board of Directors,

Grant makers for Education; Policy Review Board, Public Agenda Foundation; chair, The Center for Fair and Open Testing

About 15 years ago, a Soviet economist asked Sophie Sa, then a program officer for the Social Science Research Council, about her long-term ambitions. She said, "Gee, a small foundation might be nice." 

Today Sa is running her own small foundation - a foundation whose influence in reforming public school education dwarfs its relatively modest $24 million endowment. With a full-time staff of only five, but with a team of dozens of education consultants, the Panasonic Foundation now provides assistance to 11 school districts around the nation, from San Diego to Boston. Its approach of providing long-term expertise to districts, instead of short-term grants, was unique 14 years ago, and today it is emulated and admired by others. "I think we were the first national foundation to focus on both systemic aspects of reform and to approach it through technical assistance," Sa says.

The journey has been as far for the foundation as it has been for Sa. From 1950 to 1961, Sa lived in Japan, where her father served in the commerce division of the Nationalist Chinese government's diplomatic mission, as part of the Allied occupation of Japan. During her 11 years there, she attended a Chinese diplomatic school and later two English language schools. 

For a few years, her family had access to the U.S. Armed Forces PX and other privileges, as a result of which Sa was able to sam ple many aspects of American culture, including American movies and Sealtest strawberry ice cream. Because of her formal schooling in English, Sa's parents decided she should continue her education in the United States. 

At age 17, Sa came to the United States alone to attend Wellesley. She majored in chemistry but after three and a half years switched to history when she realized that "just because I was Chinese, I didn't have to be good at science." At graduation, with no marriage prospects on the horizon, she did the next logical thing - go to Harvard. 

In the 14 years that Sa has headed the Panasonic Foundation, she has designed and tended to its mission - the transformation of a public education system that has remained essentially the same over the last 100 years, while almost everything else in American society has undergone dramatic change. Sa believes, and several external evaluations confirm, that the foundation has achieved some success. "We know we have helped our districts to focus their effort on higher performance standards for all children, on more effective professional development for teachers and other educators, on providing better support to schools, on developing better relations between administrators and teachers unions so that management and labor become more partners than adversaries. But are all students learning better? Certainly not yet."