Three is the smallest number needed to create or discover a pattern. Three voices singing in harmony create a chord. And when those voices have a common language and a shared vision, sometimes, lighting strikes thrice.
After committing their lives and careers to improving the lives of countless early learners through reading and language arts, a trio of Gevirtz Graduate School of Education experts have established philanthropic legacies that reflect their shared passion for education and pave the way for the future of literacy instruction and research. Their combined gifts of over $2 million have reinvigorated a long-held School of Education commitment to the field of literacy that is both forward-thinking and built upon a deep academic lineage.
That lineage begins in 1973, when the School of Education launched the first iteration of the UCSB Reading Clinic under the direction of Dr. Carol Dixon. Now an emeritus faculty member of the Gevirtz School, Dixon was a leading voice of the movement to reimagine literacy as a social accomplishment, rather than a “set of rules” about reading. Over the course of 20 years, before the clinic closed in 1993 due to state budget cuts, an entire generation of literacy experts were trained in the clinic under Dixon’s wise and caring mentorship. Many of Dixon’s students went on to become influential teachers, researchers, and clinical practitioners, and two such notable alumna, Ann Kaganoff and Tina McEnroe, have carried on Dixon’s work at UC Santa Barbara in ways all three could have never imagined.
Ann Kaganoff, among the first of Dixon’s graduate students to cut her teeth in the UCSB Reading Clinic, started her Ph.D. training in 1973. Drawn to books and reading from an early age, Ann’s first job was as a reading teacher.
Years later, newly divorced and a single mother of two young daughters in Santa Barbara, Ann was making ends meet with tutoring and support from her parents. She took a job as a teacher in a local school, where she observed a major shift in the field of reading. She explained, “I really didn't know very much about the current language that they were using to talk about reading.” Naturally inquisitive, she found herself in pursuit of a graduate degree at UC Santa Barbara’s School of Education under the mentorship of Dr. Carol Dixon.
Reminiscing on what it was like to work in the clinic at that time, Ann said, “I felt like I was part of an era of discovery…the language of the field seemed new and groundbreaking, and I wanted to be a part of that.” Finally, Ann had found her voice in the conversation about reading instruction.
Kaganoff excelled in the study of child behavior and language development, ultimately receiving the California Reading Association’s dissertation of the year award for the culmination of her research. After completing her Ph.D., she applied her hard-won expertise to establishing UC Irvine’s Reading and Neurolinguistic Clinic, which provided reading instruction to educators and support to local families and children. While very successful, the Reading and Neurolinguistic Clinic ultimately shut its doors in the early 1990s due to the same round of budget cuts that forced the closure of UCSB’s own reading clinic.
Ann returned to her work in schools, specializing in staff development and assessments, where she discovered her passion for educational therapy. Eventually she pivoted her focus toward private practice, and for the next 30 years helped children with learning delays and disabilities to reach their educational goals. From 1998-2000 she served as President of the Association of Educational Therapists.
Now in her early 80s, Ann has kept busy in her retirement - publishing two books, including the recently released There’s a Writer in Our House!, which provides parents with research-based and simple strategies for supporting early literacy.
After moving back to the Santa Barbara area, Ann found that there would be significant tax benefits to making a charitable gift after the sale of her Irvine home. In 2022, she and daughter, Rachel Kaganoff Stern, decided to endow the Ann Parkinson Kaganoff Family Endowment for Literacy with part of the proceeds of the sale. “We decided to go big!” Ann laughs, including her daughters Rachel and Tessa in her plans. “I remember sitting on the patio [with Rachel and Tessa] and I was starting to get a little bit anxious about whether I could really afford to just give that much money. And Rachel asked me, ‘What can you afford?’ and after I named a number I was comfortable with, she said, ‘then I’ll match that!’ And I cried.”
When it came to the question of where the donation would go, the answer was clear. Ann had seen James D. and Carol N. Dixon Graduate Fellowship Fund on a list of Gevirtz School student fellowships. “I said to myself, I could do that,” she recalled. “It was that simple, you know. I saw my friend Carol. Her name was on something. I thought, well, I could do that.” The Kaganoff Family Endowment for Literacy provides a fellowship for literacy scholars, like Ann, pursuing graduate studies at the Gevirtz School of Education.
Ten years after Ann’s exploration of paradigm-shifting ideas at the UCSB Reading Clinic, another of Carol Dixon’s students was having her own awakening. Tina Hansen McEnroe came to UCSB in 1987 from a fourth generation farming family in Monterey County, CA, to earn her Master’s in Education under Carol’s mentorship at the UCSB Reading Clinic. She had been dreaming of becoming a teacher since the age of 11. “Reading is the crux of all learning and one’s ticket to a better life,” Tina explained about her decision to pursue graduate work in literacy. “In order to help my students achieve their fullest potential, I wanted to become the best professional I could be in a field I deeply loved.”
With her childhood dream honed and burnished by a world-class education, Tina went on to be recognized at the state and national level for her work as a reading specialist and special education teacher. She is known on the Central Coast as a master teacher, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo in 2016.
Tina’s parents modeled the importance of community and giving back, and her drive to find a purpose in life became even more urgent after surviving a near fatal horse accident when she was 16 years old. “I knew for certain, then, that I had a job to do on earth, a responsibility to help others using the talents I had, a contract I had been given,” she said.
By the early 2000s, Tina had become a community pillar in her own right with her husband Paul. She knew that in order to sustain a much-needed reading clinic that could effectively train literacy scholars while serving local youth, philanthropy was necessary where the state budget had left a void. To that end, in 2011 Tina and Paul made their first of many annual gifts to reestablish a reading clinic in the Gevirtz School – the McEnroe Reading and Language Arts Clinic. Dixon approved of adding “Language Arts” to the name. “In my mind you can't separate reading, writing, and thinking from each other,” she reasoned. “They're all interrelated… It's the language arts approach that I think is the key.”
For over a decade, Tina has served as the McEnroe Reading Clinic’s Associate Director, working one-on-one with grade school students in the clinic, collaborating closely with the clinic’s faculty directors, and with her husband Paul, even helping to design and furnish the clinic spaces in the Education building in her signature style. McEnroe is constantly amazed at what has been accomplished. “It took a team of can-do people,” she said. “People who are professional, who care, who persevere, who don't take no for an answer, and who have the vision that…we can help others in achieving their success by reaching out and helping them learn how to read.” In recent years, Tina has shifted her efforts toward sharing this vision in the local community as a fundraising ambassador and UCSB Foundation Trustee.
Now a veteran educator, McEnroe, like Dixon, sees the challenges in literacy as timeless. “It doesn't mean that what we did yesterday trumps what we do today in terms of different strategies that one might create,” she explained of the McEnroe Clinic’s approach. Instead, the Clinic continues to be rooted in what research tells us is the most successful method of literacy instruction: to look at each individual child and to understand how they learn best. “Education really is the intersection of science and art,” McEnroe added. “I truly believe that.”
While this story would be complete if it ended here, it thankfully does not. Carol, Ann, and Tina have gone far beyond their initial callings to literacy, and have now begun dreaming of a future that will, by design, outlive all of them. Together, through a combination of annual and planned gifts, these three champions of education have committed over $2 million in future support to the Gevirtz School of Education’s time-tested and child-focused approach to literacy.
Tina McEnroe’s substantial estate commitment establishes an operating endowment for the McEnroe Reading and Language Arts Clinic, providing crucial support for the clinic’s vital work in perpetuity. When asked how she came to the decision to include the clinic in her estate plans, Tina said, “Former Gevirtz School Dean, Jane Conley, told me many years ago that we would need two essential commitments to ensure the success of the clinic: First, the buy-in of supportive faculty, which I am very proud and thankful to say we have, and second, an endowment.” The latter took a decade to achieve, but with some creative planning with her husband, Paul, and financial advisors, Tina finalized her gift last year.
McEnroe hopes that her commitment will inspire others to share how they, too, have included the Reading Clinic and the Gevirtz School in their plans for the future.
She is joined in this effort by Carol Dixon and her husband, who first endowed the James D. and Carol N. Dixon Graduate Fellowship Fund in 2016, and recently made their own significant estate commitment to build on this vision for literacy scholarship. The Dixon fellowship will support Gevirtz School graduate students with a primary focus on reading and literacy, particularly those working in the McEnroe Reading and Language Arts Clinic. Why fellowship support? “It turns out that we're going to have resources left behind when we're gone… and we got to that point because of the fact that we were able to go to universities and get educations,” Carol explained matter-of-factly “The main reason we got educations was because we had fellowships or scholarships ourselves. So, something important needs to happen with that money.”
Considering the careers of the hundreds of students Carol mentored over the years, including Tina and Ann, the “Why” is even clearer: “The bottom line is that [my students have] made a difference in a lot of lives. Teaching, in general, is a way to make a difference in more lives than pretty much any other profession you could have.”
Others can’t help but get on board when the impact is so clear. Recently, Ann Kaganoff, solidified her own estate plans to generously expand her Kaganoff Family Endowment. She recently reflected on why literacy was her focus throughout her life, career, and now philanthropy. “The answer is easier to see now that I have the perspective of 60 years of practice,” she explained. “Literacy is so important. It is the foundation of all education.”
When Dixon was asked what she thought the significance of this trio of commitments was, she replied, “If people care about something and they realize that other people also care about it, then I think there's more incentive [to give back] because you don't feel like you're alone… together we can have more of an impact than any one of us could by ourselves.”
Kaganoff added, “I suppose we all inspire each other...You know, when I think about what I learned from my family and from my college and all my training, it's important to leave the place better than you found it. And so [this gift is] a way of inspiring people to leave the place better than they found it.”
For Carol Dixon, Tina Hansen McEnroe and Ann Kaganoff, creating a legacy for literacy based on shared values, language and lived experience is its own form of social accomplishment, just as Dixon theorized about literacy itself over three decades ago. While paving the way for others was their philanthropic intention, Dixon, McEnroe, and Kaganoff will now have the chance to celebrate and be recognized for their commitments as members of the UCSB Legacy Circle. They continue to stay actively connected to the McEnroe Reading and Language Arts Clinic by serving as members of its advisory board. Indeed, lightning did strike thrice and, through a shared vision, and a pattern of philanthropic legacy is paving the way for the future of literacy.