Obituary of Iris C Rotberg

Iris Comens Rotberg was the world’s most supportive contrarian, a relentlessly original thinker with a laser focus against misguided education policy that might bully children into failure, combined with her tireless cheerleading for the happiness and fulfillment of her eight beloved grandchildren and great-grandchild. 

Iris reveled in investigating the politics, history and scenery of dozens of countries, from Iceland to China to Russia to South Africa, while exulting in countless opera performances with her lifelong seatmate, Gene. In her purse was a note-crammed black book detailing birthdays, graduations and gift suggestions, right next to a phone ready to sound the first alert in the family text string that would celebrate the day. 

Colleagues celebrated her, meanwhile, as a research professor in education at George Washington University with boundless energy to help improve Ph.D. candidates’ dissertations through warm and knowledgeable critiques.

She authored two acclaimed and prescient books challenging conventional wisdom in education academia, while contributing frequently to journals from The Washington Post to Education Week with provocative titles like “I Never Promised You First Place.” At age 91, she remained a sought-after thesis advisor at her university. 

Whether coloring with grandchildren or debating in doctoral oral exams, Iris believed not in teaching people what to think, but how to think; to reject quick fixes from bad-faith politicians; to insist on quality research; and to resist bullies wielding racist tropes or shoddy statistics. Her status as a kindly, razor-sharp critic was not a matter of opinion — when a leading education journal named its national list of “Five Contrarians in Education Policy,” Iris Rotberg was on it.

The first Iris Rotberg question for her children, her students and her grandchildren was never “What have you accomplished?” Instead, she wanted to know whether what they were doing made them happy. Untold students said they would never have finished their graduate degrees without Iris’s good counsel. But she never gave advice unless asked. Iris Rotberg was a first friend, not a second-guesser. 

There was not a single grandchild graduation ceremony she did not attend, even if it required flying halfway around the world to get there. Preschool graduation. Kindergarten graduation. Suzuki recital. 6 year old soccer championship. 8th grade graduation. Red Cross Training graduation. High school graduation. College graduation. If it took three connecting flights from the Milan opera house to get there, so be it, so long as the onboard entertainment system had foreign films with subtitles. 

Husband Gene would brag to friends that Iris had graduated first in her class of 500 at a Pennsylvania high school. And that she was awarded her Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Johns Hopkins at age 24, only the second woman to have received that degree in 50 years. Iris, with a sly grin, preferred to point out a lesser-known fact: That when she’d first applied to Johns Hopkins, the graduate school catalog sniffed in unmistakeable italic print, “Men preferred.”

Iris was born in 1932 in Bethlehem, Pa., to steel town family doctor Samuel Comens and Golda (Shuman) Comens. Her perceptions of class, racial, ethnic and religious discrimination began early, with her father serving working families at $5 a house call as Iris went to school with the children of steel executives living in horse country.

Although her family rarely went to synagogue and she was not a believer in higher authority, she had great respect for quiet believers; she had quiet, unassailable contempt, however, for the Moravian nuns running her elementary school who told her that Jewish people would be going to Hell. She knew her Jewish family that enjoyed Pocono Mountains summer resorts was barred from the fanciest WASP resorts, and also keenly observed that the black staff serving the Jewish hotels would not have been allowed to stay in the rooms. 

“I feel fortunate to have had a rather unusual mix of experiences. I was Jewish and, therefore, a minority, which I have always enjoyed,” she wrote, in a family memoir. At the bigoted Protestant school her parents unwittingly sent her to, she wrote that at age six, “conversion seemed like the safer option—after all, the Jewish religion did not threaten Hell for Christians. At seven, I decided they did not know what they were talking about.” 

When Iris was just 17, she suddenly lost her mother Golda in an unforeseen mishap during a minor surgery, and her father married the beautiful and beloved Louise (Adler) who was a close friend of the family and whose first husband had also passed away. Louise was a wonderful stepmother to Iris and later, an amazing grandmother, adored and cherished by all who knew her.

Iris received both her undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, meeting aspiring lawyer and financial engineer Eugene Rotberg on a blind date while still in college. 

“Our first date was at the opera ‘Othello’ in Philadelphia,” Gene said. “She didn’t like opera at the time but of course grew into it. Later she told me she was not so sure it was a good first date when at the very end of the opera, the hero strangled his wife.”

Also, Gene said, “She thought Maria Callas was overrated.”

As Iris and Gene’s opera-fueled romance continued on from Philadelphia, to Baltimore, to Washington, D.C., they married in 1954. Daughter Diana Golda Rotberg (Bray) arrived in 1960, and Pamela Lynn Rotberg in 1964. Iris and Gene continued to travel on their own and with their children, and later as their greatest delight, with their growing brood of grandchildren. Nothing pleased her more than talking about the London Blitz in the underground Churchill War Rooms during a London tour, or asking a grandson how a Japanese elementary classroom looked different from one in Denver. 

When a granddaughter asked Iris to start taking notes on her experiences being Jewish, Iris first responded that she wouldn’t have much to say, since her family was not religious. She then proceeded to write a memoir that a friend called “utterly extraordinary,” ranging from pogroms in Lithuania to her favorite cantors to standing on the beaches of Denmark in the spot where Swedish rescue boats picked up Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany. The memoir was 48 pages, a number significant only in that it was 10 pages longer than Gene’s. 

Iris did not have a fear of missing out — she had the joy of joining in. Sleep was optional: From Silver Spring to St. Petersburg, Iris was reliably awake at 2 a.m., ordering a birthday gift or asking Wikipedia if she was right and Gene was wrong about whether Puccini finished “Turandot.” She was right. 

“Over more than 70 years, we saw literally hundreds of operas together,” Gene said. “Verdi was beloved because he was the one who could put the most subtle personality characteristics into song. I cannot even now remember Iris being impressed with anyone — including me — except Bishop Desmond Tutu.”

At work, Iris quickly switched from the early, abstract frustrations of experimental psychology to the fast-moving, sharp-elbowed world of the politics and policy of education. She began at the National Institute of Education and the National Science Foundation, with a stint as principal investigator for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology. After continuing to stir up the education policy debate as a senior social scientist at RAND Corp., she found a decades-long home at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Education. 

Her persistent questioning of American politicians’ glorification of rigid foreign school systems led to co-authorship of the book "Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform.” As politicians continued to short-change funding for local primary schools in favor of trendy but unproven charter schools, she edited the book “Choosing Charters: Better Schools or More Segregation." Her private conclusion, based of course on facts: More segregation, which was not to be tolerated by any educator worth their diploma. 

One colleague echoed many others in a late-career assessment of Iris’s work and friendship: “From the time we began working together late in '82 you have seemed like a rock to me, anchored in the shared commitment that we all should have to each other, and to making things better for all, not just for ourselves.” 

Iris is survived by her husband, Eugene Harvey Rotberg; daughter Diana (Bray) and her husband, Leigh; daughter Pamela and her husband, Michael Booth; grandchildren Maya, Sam (Casey), Eva, Madeline, Tess, Emma, Quinn and Hayden; and great-grandson Harvey. 

Her only regret, Gene said, was that she couldn’t go back and do it all over again — only this time with all of her grandchildren alongside, from the very beginning. 

Funeral service on Monday, 1/6, at 1:45pm MST at Emanuel Cemetery within Fairmount. Service live streamed via Feldman Mortuary YouTube channel #2.

Donations in her name can go to the Southern Poverty Law Center  

May her memory be a blessing.