Previous articleNext article FreeAwardGeorge F. Bereday Award for 2019PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreEach year the Bereday Award Committee selects the most outstanding Comparative Education Review (CER) article for the George F. Bereday Award. The selection committee includes scholars who are chosen for their breadth of methodological skills and intellectual rigor. This year’s committee was chaired by Thomas Luschei (Claremont Graduate University), and included Yi-Lin Chiang (National Chenchi University), Marlaine Lockheed (Princeton University), Payal Shah (University of South Carolina), and Rolf Straubhaar (Texas State University). From the 23 research articles published in volume 63 (2019) of CER (selected from almost 200 annual submissions), the Committee awarded the honor to Amy Jo Dowd and Lesley Bartlett for their article “The Need for Speed: Interrogating the Dominance of Oral Reading Fluency in International Reading Efforts,” published in May. The committee reported the following: “The article examines the use of correct words per minute (CWPM) as a measure of the impact of reading interventions. Drawing on reading assessment data from 11 country sites in monolingual and multilingual populations, the authors conclude that a global CWPM standard ‘rests upon untenable assumptions.’ … The committee noted the article’s clarity and strength of argument, rigorous conceptual framework, and the strong potential impact of the research on education policy and the field of comparative education.” The CER editors congratulate Amy Jo Dowd and Lesley Bartlett on this honor.The committee also noted the high quality of the other articles in volume 63 and offered an honorable mention to two articles: Tracy Brunette, Benjamin Piper, Rachel Jordan, Simon King, and Rehemah Nabacwa, “The Impact of Mother Tongue Reading Instruction in Twelve Ugandan Languages and the Role of Language Complexity, Socioeconomic Factors, and Program Implementation,” published in November, and Sarah Dryden-Peterson and Celia Reddick, “‘What I Believe Can Rescue That Nation’: Diaspora Working to Transform Education in Fragility and Conflict,” published in May.George Zygmunt Fijalkowski Bereday, born in Warsaw in 1920, was both the founding editor of CER and a cofounder of the Comparative Education Society, along with his close colleague William Brickman. A graduate of London and Oxford (while also serving in the British army during World War II), Professor Bereday subsequently arrived in the United States for PhD studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Later he received a JD from Columbia Law School, where he studied while teaching comparative education, sociology, and juvenile law at Columbia Teachers College from 1955 until his untimely death in 1983. William Brickman (writing in the fall of that year in Western European Education) called Bereday an extraordinarily talented and gifted personality: “A polyglot, he read, spoke, comprehended, and lectured in several Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages … and he attained a practical ability in the use of Japanese.” Brickman also enthused that “Professor Bereday represented a rare blend of the classical and the modern, of Eastern and Western European education and scholarship, and of the Occidental and Oriental cultures” and that he “exhibited endless evidence of humanism toward other cultures and humanitarianism toward persons of all ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds.” Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 64, Number 2May 2020 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708238 © 2020 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.