From Sesame Street to Dubai’s Highways

During his 50-year career, Sam Ball (PhD ’64) has chosen many different paths, including elementary school teacher, researcher, university administrator, and head of curriculum and assessment for Victoria, in his native Australia. Nevertheless, he just as easily could have thrown his lot in with Big Bird.

After teaching elementary school for 13 years in Australia, Ball decided to pursue his graduate education in the United States. In 1964 he earned his Ph.D. in educational measurement at Iowa, where, he says, “the hospitality, friendship, and intellectual treasures laid before me in Iowa City were to be the watershed of my life.”

Early in his career, he and Big Bird worked together for three years when Ball served as the first evaluation research director for Bird’s influential children’s television show, Sesame Street. Starting a year before the program aired, Ball worked with Sesame Street staff members, children’s authors, and developmental psychologists to design the program’s educational but entertaining content. Animators such as Chuck Jones, whose characters included Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner, and thinkers such as Buckminster Fuller also contributed to the effort. In addition to setting up the program’s curriculum content, Ball assessed the impact of the show on thousands of four year olds across the country. His research was instrumental in obtaining the funding that enabled the program to become one of the most influential, albeit nontraditional, teaching vehicles of the 20th century.

“Despite early critics,” he said, “we showed that children—even those from very disadvantaged backgrounds—could learn in their homes from excellent television programming.”

Although Ball eventually said goodbye to Big Bird, to this day, he refuses to divulge who or what is under those feathers.

During his 15-year tenure at the University of Sydney, Ball launched the school’s alumni association and annual fund-raising campaigns and convinced corporations to fund endowed chairs at “a few million dollars a pop.” The idea of reaching out to alumni and the private sector was a model he learned from his years working in the United States.

In 1993, Ball became the chief executive in charge of the Victoria Board of Studies, where he created a curriculum and standards framework for elementary and secondary education and broadened the scope and methods of assessment for some 60,000 students. He also established the country’s first statewide interactive computer-based testing program.

Ball says that while success often comes from being in the right place at the right time, it also requires “working as hard and as smart as necessary. It’s important not to get too involved in minutiae to the neglect of the big picture. And, of course, luck and good colleagues are essential.”

Today, Ball continues to shape education on a national scale—this time in the United Arab Emirates. As a consultant to the country’s Ministry of Education and Youth, Ball is overseeing the establishment of quality assurance programs for district education centers, the first national university entrance program for student and aptitude assessments.

“It’s important to remember that just 60 years ago, this country had no schools,” Ball said. “Now they have about 700, but the curriculum is heavily based on memorization and textbooks. I’m trying to help them set up curricula that stress not only content but also cognitive skills—how to use the knowledge, rather than just memorizing.”

Ball commutes between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, scooting along the eight-lane highway at 140 kilometers-per-hour, only to be passed by locals who drive 180 kilometers-per-hour.

As an educator and researcher who has bridged several generations and three countries, Ball can contemplate the broad sweep of change facing 21st-century educators. He believes that although specific skills and teaching contexts may change from one generation to the next, the basic challenge for educators of any generation is to activate a child’s potential.

An Iowa educator, Professor Ernest Horn, once told Ball that the members of society who are best prepared for the inevitable challenges of the future are those who are best prepared to meet the challenges of today. “It may be an arguable proposition,” Ball said, “but I’ve found he had an excellent point.” –by Jean Florman