Back-to-Back Winners: Two Students Examine American Education’s Past And Future

When Owen Boxer ‘25 got a phone call from the director of Holy Cross’  Washington Semester Program during a midterm exam, he assumed it was a mistake. Listening to the voicemail after the exam, Boxer learned he had been awarded the Washington Semester Best Research Project Prize for his scholarship conducted during his spring 2024 semester while interning at the U.S. Department of Education. 

“It was the best phone call I ever received while taking a midterm,” Boxer said with a chuckle. He quickly informed his friend Edwin Ryan ‘25 who, as it happened, won the Best Research Project Prize for his work during the fall 2023 semester. Ryan also interned at the Department of Education. 

“I figured the selection committee would be subconsciously opposed to doubling up on education,” Boxer said. “So when I got the call, I was very surprised that they had gone in that direction.”

For more than 50 years, Holy Cross students have had the opportunity to apply to the College’s Washington Semester Program. A select group is chosen to spend a semester in the nation’s capital, interning at businesses, nonprofits and government agencies. In addition to the internship, every student participating must also complete an in-depth research project, the topic of which they choose at the start of their semester.

“This is top-quality work,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Washington Semester Program. “Whenever I read all these papers at the end, I’m frankly blown away.” However, only one student every semester is awarded the Washington Semester Best Research Project Prize. 

This assignment sets Holy Cross’ Washington program apart from those of other schools, Murray noted: “Very few [similar programs] require students to do a project of this scale and scope.”

The project is centered around a fundamental research question the student is trying to answer, relevant to their internship and public policy. 

“Here we have two winners working in the same agency, but doing very, very different projects,” Murray said. “Projects can take different forms, even though Edwin and Owen walk in the same door every day at the Department of Education.”

Past and future

While their research projects both dealt with the country’s education policy, the two went on widely diverging paths, with Ryan looking to better understand the past and Boxer having an eye toward the future. 

Boxer, a political science major and education minor, chose to examine family engagement — interactions between public schools and students' families — specifically through the lens of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, a follow-up to the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. 

Congress periodically authorizes grants by the Department of Education to create Statewide Family Engagement Centers (SFEC) in a given state. SFECs are usually run by private organizations, such as universities and advocacy groups. 

“[Boxer] wanted to look at the variation in implementation across the states at the grassroots level,” Murray said. “He asked, ‘All this work that my department is doing, what does it look like out in the real world and what can we learn from this and conclude whether or not this is working?’”

“It will never be the same approach for Massachusetts versus California, and Hawaii has challenges due to being islands,” Boxer said. “How did the federal law impact [the SFECs]? It was incredibly vague.”

In fall 2023, he took a course at Holy Cross on family engagement and connected it to his own teaching experience as a science camp counselor. “Those 30-second conversations with parents when they’re signing in their kids is the most interesting part,” Boxer recalled. “If I’m talking to a parent and it randomly comes up that a student learns better when you write on a whiteboard, that takes out some of the guesswork on how I can do my job better and can positively affect that kid’s week at summer camp.”

The topic seized Boxer’s interest, and he pursued it through his internship and research project to understand how the concept of family engagement could be best used to benefit students: “When family engagement is used effectively, test scores go up and students become more emotionally mature.”

Education as a civil right

Ryan is a history major and education minor, and a student in Holy Cross' Teacher Education Program (TEP); he plans to teach history at a high school level. His research project reflected that by re-examining a key period in American history. “The typical narrative of the Civil Rights Movement is about the passage of the [Civil Rights Act], voting rights and accommodations,” Murray said. “What [Ryan] argued is that what it was really about was education.”

In 1964, a demonstration in New York in favor of school integration drew more than 400,000 people. “It was the largest protest of the Civil Rights Movement and almost no one knows about it,” Ryan said. “I found it fascinating that we don’t talk about that. We don’t give the Civil Rights Movement enough credit [in education].”

Ryan’s work began with studying the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), which he considered one of the first major pieces of federal legislation regarding education. One of the most well-known aspects of the ESEA is Title 1, which provides need-based funding to low-income schools. 

Researching the law’s origins, Ryan saw that it was largely attributed to President Lyndon Johnson, who as a former teacher prioritized education legislation. “As I’m looking through this literature, it’s all about Johnson, but I’m thinking of all these things going on in the country aside from his presidency,” Ryan said. “I felt there was something missing.”

It would be easy to assume this was spearheaded by Johnson’s desire to improve the nation’s schools. “But the public policy course in D.C. taught that these [laws] don’t come out of nowhere,” Ryan said. “There are interest groups and organizations that push this agenda and encourage executives to take action.” This left Ryan with an intriguing question: Who were the groups?

“A lot of Title 1 funds were going to schools with a majority Black student body,” he said. “I was sure that community organizations pushed for these funds.” He confirmed his suspicions through primary sources such as news articles, school board reactions and testimonies from civil rights activists. 

“What I ended up finding was that a lot of leaders in Black communities were talking about education prior to 1965 and had been demanding equal and integrated education for a long time,” Ryan said. “Part of what Title 1 did is that schools could not receive funding unless they were integrated.”

Citizenship is best exemplified through the process of education, Ryan asserted in his project. Without equality in education, citizenship is never fully achieved.

“Civil Rights should affect how we look at the history of education legislation,” Murray said when describing Ryan’s project. “Those bills were a reflection of the Civil Rights Movement as well. He reshaped the broader discussion of the topic and dedicated his project to showing that to us.”

Separating the good from the great

The Washington Semester Best Research Prize committee evaluates each project on multiple criteria, including sound methodology and originality. However, what truly elevates a project is the process, specifically how the student has integrated their internship experience with their research, Murray said.

“We want this to be a project that is representative of the Washington program, not just being a Holy Cross student,” he said. This means a winning project must show a student took full advantage of the resources only available in Washington, D.C.

In Boxer’s case, these resources took the form of the access afforded him by his internship to evaluate how the approach of SFECs varies by state. “He built his research around what he was doing [at his internship],” Murray said. Boxer was able to interview officials from four state SFECs and view their grant proposals to the Department of Education. 

A consistent point noted in his interviews with SFEC officials was the difficulty of working with schools. “As the hardest part of family engagement, the universal answer was changing the attitude of the schools to be more approachable to families,” Boxer said. 

In his report, he suggested that new teacher training be changed to ensure they are more receptive to family engagement. “It’s hard going into [teachers’] workplace and questioning their methods, saying ‘I know you’ve been doing this for 40 years, but your methods aren’t working and aren’t reaching parents,’” he said.

Additionally, one SFEC per state is not enough in some cases. Larger states should have multiple centers that serve several regions. “Ohio has a population of six or seven million, so working at the ground level is hard,” Boxer observed. 

Ryan’s research relied heavily on the Library of Congress as a resource. “I downloaded all of the thousands of pages of documents to see exactly what was being talked about as the ESEA made its way through Congress and who was at the hearings,” Ryan said.

In the records, he found parallels between what lawmakers discussed in Congress and what Black activists wrote in newspapers regarding education and its importance to equality. “There was a lot of rhetoric that was very similar,” he said. “The bill is about granting citizenship and acknowledging Black students around the country.” 

The new perspective, supported by curated primary sources, is what caught the committee’s attention, according to Murray: “This is a unique way of thinking about a topic, and normally at the undergraduate level you don’t get that.” 

What it means to win

For Murray, the projects and the award are as much about the skills demonstrated by students throughout the semester as the actual research and findings. 

“It’s very different from what they experience on campus. They’ve got to manage their time really diligently,” he said. “Both of them worked four days a week [at the internship]. It could be very easy to take that remaining day to travel, but they have to say ‘I’m going to treat that Friday like a work day.’”

The winner traditionally presents their work the following semester on campus. Boxer presented his project at Rehm Library in early November 2024, with his advisor, classmates and family invited, along with future Washington Semester students. 

Both students were quick to say that they were far from alone in their project and accomplished what they did with the support of others. 

“I’m proud to have won it, but I realize it comes from the supervisors in D.C. who got me access [to research material],” Boxer said. “[Lack of access] almost derailed the whole thing, but they were just so great. So many people last semester helped me to win this.”

Ryan echoed this sentiment: “It was a really amazing experience and I wouldn’t have gotten there if it weren’t for the people I worked with in D.C.”