Gift Seeks to Distribute Educational Opportunity

When Lisa Egbuonu-Davis arrived at college in the 1970s, she had the benefit of a strong public school education, including multiple years of calculus, already behind her. She soon realized that many of her classmates were just as capable but had not had access to the same opportunities. She started running the Black Student Union tutorial program to help them catch up. 

“Talent is normally distributed; opportunity is not,” Egbuonu-Davis says. “That sparked my interest in supporting access to gifted education.” 

In 1983, Egbuonu-Davis earned a medical degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a master’s degree from the Bloomberg School of Public Health, then built a career in pharmaceutical clinical research, health economics research, and medical affairs leadership. But she says she never lost her interest in gifted education. As a member of the Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees from 2002 to 2008, she joined the School of Education National Advisory Council to support K-12 education. Subsequently, she sought information on advanced education research at the Johns Hopkins School of Education and discovered Jonathan Plucker’s work. 

Plucker’s research focuses on identifying gifted learners and expanding access to advanced courses in K-12 schools. These classes give students deeper, broader, and more challenging work than the standard curriculum. He says that even though researchers know how to deliver these learning opportunities effectively, equitably, and efficiently, implementing these discoveries in schools has been a challenge because advanced students often go unidentified and school districts lack funding for these programs. 

“We are really working hard here at Hopkins to find ways to get this information out on a broad scale to help people provide these opportunities for kids,” Plucker says. 

Egbuonu-Davis, who now serves on the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Board of Trustees and the School of Education National Advisory Council, was especially interested in Plucker’s focus on making advanced education more accessible to students from underserved backgrounds. She was also impressed by his ability to turn research into changes that school systems can put into practice. 

“There are a lot of times when research is intellectually interesting, but it doesn’t really change anything,” she says. “He’s able to apply his research, and I’m really wowed by his ability to actually move the needle in terms of public policy.” 

Plucker’s research has led to the implementation of automatic enrollment in advanced programs for qualified students in several states and the creation of a federally funded national center focused on advanced education policy. That impact motivated her to support his work financially. Plucker says that without philanthropic gifts like hers, it would be hard to conduct research into advanced education. 

“Lisa’s generosity allows me to not have to worry about whether I’m asking politically sensitive or popular questions,” he says. “It is immensely freeing to know that we have this support from people who really believe in this work, and we can just go ahead and do it.” 

The gift also gave Egbuonu-Davis the opportunity to name a new study lounge in the renovated School of Education building. She says that choosing the program she wanted to support was easy, but picking a name for the room was more of a challenge. 

“I really wanted to choose somebody who represented addressing the challenge of barriers in education,” Egbuonu-Davis says. “So, I started looking up different people in history, and I came across Anna Julia Cooper.” 

Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper was one of the first African American women to earn a doctoral degree. As an educator, she developed a philosophy rooted in classical study and education as a means for social transformation and resistance to oppression. She encountered resistance to her methods, especially from those who only wanted to teach Black students to be servants, but she never gave up on her efforts to educate. It is a legacy that Egbuonu-Davis wants students using the Anna Julia Cooper Study Lounge to learn from and build upon. 

“My hope is that the students who use the room are inspired by Cooper’s vision and her determination to access opportunity and leverage education to drive freedom and transformation for herself and others. I hope they’ll be inspired to continue that tradition,” she says.