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A Day in the Life of an Online Master's Student

mjorgensen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 13:16:41 +0000

A Day in the Life of an Online Master's Student mjorgensen Thu, 10/08/2026 - 09:16 Student and Alumni Stories school leadership OEL Stories Carolina Ruggero

October 8, 2026

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The latest research, perspectives, and highlights from the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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What is it really like to earn an online Ed.M. from Harvard Graduate School of Education?

We spent the day with Jake Sumner, an online master’s student at HGSE and a middle school leader, as he balanced classroom observations, coaching lacrosse, and family responsibilities with his graduate coursework in the Online Master's in Education Leadership Program.

Designed for educators from a range of backgrounds, HGSE's online master's in education is built around the work you already do.

Introduce yourself to receive more information

A glimpse into how middle school leader Jake Sumner balances work, family, and the graduate school at HGSE

ChatGPTeach?

mjorgensen — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:43:31 +0000

ChatGPTeach? mjorgensen Wed, 10/07/2026 - 08:43 Student and Alumni Stories books artificial intelligence Kimberly Ashton

Illustration: Dominic Kesterton

October 8, 2026

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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The debate over AI in education often falls into binaries: pro or anti, ban it or embrace it. But Maya Bialik, Ed.M.'12, thinks both camps are looking at the technology the wrong way.

The best approach, she argues, isn’t to debate whether to embrace or shun AI, but to evaluate when and how to use it. In her book, Irreplaceable: How AI Changes Everything and Nothing in Teaching and Learning, which came out in February, she and coauthor Peter Nilsson offer teachers a framework for deciding when AI enhances learning and when it short-circuits it.

“Part of the idea of this book was to help expand people’s imagination into what could even be possible, and what could be exciting, and what could be effective,” she says.

In the book, Bialik breaks down these possibilities according to three educational contexts that she says are here to stay: teachers preparing for class, students learning, and teachers and students working together.

With these givens, Irreplaceable examines how AI can support teachers, acting as an aide for research, planning, and giving feedback. As a research and planning assistant, AI can help teachers study curricular requirements and develop lesson plans. For example, Bialik writes in the book, a teacher might ask AI, “What kind of problem or challenge would naturally require students to use [this skill]?” or “Which aspects of this goal could students personalize based on their interests, perspectives, or prior knowledge?”

And as a feedback assistant, AI can help teachers grade assignments and generate immediate, high-quality comments on student work.

Bialik advises teachers to use AI to enhance their agency. “Teachers are the most creative people in the world,” she says. But they need high-quality AI that helps them elevate their ingenuity rather than give them more slop to wade through, she adds. She encourages teachers to treat AI less like a tool and more like a collaborator or an agent that works on their behalf.

For students, Bialik distinguishes between AI as a “learning assistant,” like an on-demand tutor, and a “doing assistant” that helps them complete tasks not central to the learning goal. Much like calculators allow students to focus on complex mathematical concepts after mastering basic computation, AI can help them tackle higher- order challenges once they’ve developed basic skills.

In the classroom context, the book explores how AI can take on administrative tasks like attendance and data tracking while also serving as an instructional coach that provides teachers with insights during and after lessons.

“Part of the idea of this book was to help expand people’s imagination into what could even be possible.”

Maya Bialik, Ed.M.'12

While Bialik highlights AI’s usefulness, she also acknowledges that it can hamper learning if used incorrectly. “It’s really tempting to use it for cognitive offloading because that’s how our brains are designed … we try to conserve our energy,” she says. To guard against this, teachers will need to emphasize student accountability and encourage students to reflect on their decisions about when and how they use AI.

Bialik started thinking about how AI is changing education when she was working as a researcher at the Center for Curriculum Redesign, tackling the question of what students need to know to be prepared for the 21st century. The first book she coauthored, Artificial Intelligence in Education, came out of that work and focused on the history of AI in education and how the technology might transform curriculum.

In 2020, she became a middle school science teacher at Boston College High School. When ChatGPT launched two years later, she co-created Question- Well, an AI tool that helps teachers create and export instructional materials to platforms such as moodle, Kahoot!, and Quizlet as a way to make lesson planning more time efficient. To date, the tool, which has free and paid options, has generated nearly 8,400 questions from more than 5,000 teachers based in 185 countries.

Around the same time, Bialik was invited to present on a panel for EdWeb, a free online learning community, about the ethics of allowing students to use AI. That led to her writing Irreplaceable and deciding to pursue a Ph.D., at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, studying how AI can enhance teacher agency.

Bialik is reluctant to make sweeping statements about AI’s impact on education.

“I love nuance, and I think every technology comes with tradeoffs,” she says. Her favorite example is Socrates’ opposition to writing; he feared it would weaken memory and cause people to misinterpret his words. He may have been right, but it’s hard to imagine the information age without the written word. The same might hold true for AI and the world of tomorrow, she says.

Kimberly Ashton is a freelance writer and editor whose work focuses on storytelling for educational institutions

When to use AI in the classroom — and when not to

The AI Cheating Crisis in Schools Isn’t (Only) What You Think

nschulmeyer — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:40:15 +0000

The AI Cheating Crisis in Schools Isn’t (Only) What You Think nschulmeyer Mon, 10/05/2026 - 12:40 artificial intelligence Center for Digital Thriving social media public schools Ryan Nagelhout

October 6, 2026

Usable Knowledge

Connecting education research to practice — with timely insights for educators, families, and communities

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New research from the Center for Digital Thriving (CDT) highlights the growing tension between teachers and students as suspicion over the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom grows.

Written by the center’s three co-founders, Beck Tench, Carrie James, and Emily Weinstein, along with researchers Allison Starks and Sara Konrath, An AI Policy Isn’t A Playbook highlights the vast impact AI has had in classrooms as more students use the technology to complete their schoolwork, whether allowed to or not. Based at Project Zero, the center focuses much of its research on the shifting waters of artificial intelligence (AI) and the impact the use of large language models (LLMs) have on students and classrooms.

The report draws on a national survey of more than 1,000 U.S. public school teachers and principals, along with interviews with educators and 31 students, to examine how generative AI has reshaped relationships in the classroom and offers suggestions for teachers who are now playing a major role in a game many didn’t know they signed up for.

A quarter of teachers and 29% of principals surveyed said the use of AI has created “dilemmas or difficult decisions” in their schools and classrooms. The findings are especially stark when it comes to students using AI to “cheat” on assignments: 74% of teachers and 69% of principals who reported a “dilemma” described situations where students were suspected of using the technology to either help or do their work for them entirely.

The Two-Way Suspicion Problem

A lack of AI policies in schools is another big issue for educators. Just 18% of teachers and 24% of principals surveyed said their school had specific policies governing generative AI use. This puts teachers in charge of creating their own rules for AI use in the classroom, further making the landscape uneven for students regarding what’s allowed and what isn’t.

Researchers in the report describe the current situation in schools as a “Ted Lasso moment,” a reference to the TV show where an American football coach finds himself in charge of a soccer team in England. In other words, teachers are now forced to coach a game they don’t know how to play themselves. As AI tools arrive inside and out of the classroom, educators must learn about these new tools, decide whether to embrace or restrict their use, and combat new ways the student learning experience changes in real time.

"Just 18% of teachers and 24% of principals surveyed said their school had specific policies governing generative AI use. This puts teachers in charge of creating their own rules for AI use in the classroom, further making the landscape uneven for students regarding what’s allowed and what isn’t."

The CDT describes this “mind shift” to that of a referee rather than a coach: constantly on the lookout for work that may be made with AI and forced to make up rules along the way. Interviews with teachers and students, however, reveal a “two-way suspicion” problem: teachers are suspicious of students using AI to cheat, and students fear teachers will accuse them of using AI whether they are or not. Along the way, researchers argue, both lose sight of the student-teacher relationship that learning and connection depend on.

Tools For the Times

Researchers at CDT worked with educators, students, and technologists to create tools to help wrestle with the impact of AI in the classroom. For example, one way to bridge the communication gap is creating words for new problems the rush of AI adaptation in the classroom has created. A teacher’s perceived ability to detect AI use in a student’s work is “AI-dar,” while “chatplomacy” describes using AI to soften the tone of a message to sound more diplomatic.

The words are part of a tool the center created, “AI To Z,” which encourages people to work together to describe the cultural shifts AI is creating. It’s one of a number of the center’s signature set of tools — Imagine AI classroom practices — which the center hopes can help teachers and students develop AI literacy, find agency in defining how it should be used, and maintain human connection between teachers and students amid the changing classroom norms.

“At Center for Digital Thriving, we think a lot about the design of resources that are pedagogically powerful. But we also know that educators’ mindsets make a massive difference in whether any kind of experience falls completely flat or truly engages students,” says James, co-director of Project Zero. “We have been very interested in the kinds of mindsets and even mind shifts that are necessary for students and teachers to embrace to support agency around AI.”

The center’s agency-centered AI literacy framework is the basis for these tools, along with a collection of “mind shifts” their research recommends adults consider when encountering technology in the classroom. An AI Policy Isn’t A Playbook also offers a set of five sports-focused “plays” adults can “call” with young learners to address AI dilemmas and build trust in classroom settings.

Five Plays Teachers Can Call

Find Your Feet - Reset the playing field by helping students sort their values regarding AI use with the Tech + Values and Values Bridge tools.
Scout The Field - Name pressures to hide AI use and look for patterns in your students with the Making AI Pressures Visible tool.
Align On the Line - Brainstorm AI uses and help students clear up gray areas or unclear rules with the Align on the Line tool, which helps map AI use and classroom norms.
Watch The Replay - Reflect on a moment, maybe a “fumble” or new AI dilemma, with the Map a Moment tool to come up with a plan to respond the next time a problem comes up.
Name The Game - Create and define words to talk about AI with others using the AI to Z Workshop and the AI to Z Glossary.

Highlighting Youth Voice

The research is the latest in a body of work the CDT has amassed in an effort to monitor real-world developments in how students and teachers are experiencing generative AI’s takeover of the educational experience.

An earlier youth advisory memo released this spring highlighted findings from a survey of teens and young adults who have used AI for emotional support. The findings, made in partnership with Hopelab, offered new insight into why young people seek out and use AI in different, and sometimes surprising, ways worthy of deeper youth-engaged research.

“It’s really worth bearing in mind that young people have different views, and we think it makes sense to really lean into individual perspectives,” Weinstein said at a center-led AI event earlier this year. “These feel to us like early indicators that warrant some thoughtfulness as we contend with the rapid adoption curve [of AI].”

As educators race to keep up with the pace of AI adoption in the classroom, so, too, do researchers try to keep up with the larger impact the technology has had across the educational landscape and in the lives of individual young people.

“We keep thinking about what would be different with the current moment with social media if we had been listening more closely in 2012 or 2013,” said Weinstein, noting research into the potential harms of social media platforms on teens came well after its widespread adoption. “We’re trying to avoid sleepwalking to the same set of mistakes and missteps because we weren’t listening closely enough.”

Key Takeaways

25% of teachers and 29% of principals surveyed say AI usage has created ‘dilemmas or difficult decisions” in schools and classrooms, mostly concerning suspected cheating
Just 18% of teachers and 24% of principals say their schools have specific AI usage policies
Cheating concerns cost more than student learning, but puts strains on the student/teacher relationship.
Using tools to have conversations about AI usage and building accepted frameworks can improve communication between teachers and students about what’s acceptable and reduce grey areas of uncertainty.

The AI Cheating Crisis in Schools Isn’t (Only) What You Think New tools for navigating AI usage from the Center for Digital Thriving focus on building understanding and trust 

A New Pathway for Public Service Leaders

mjorgensen — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:30:22 +0000

A New Pathway for Public Service Leaders mjorgensen Fri, 10/02/2026 - 10:30 alternative certification teacher education teachers and teaching Susan Flynn

October 2, 2026

News

The latest research, perspectives, and highlights from the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Christina Grant never intended to pursue a career in education. After college, the political science major landed a job working for an international law firm in downtown Manhattan with sights set on law school. During that time, Grant was assigned pro bono work, preparing New York City high school students for mock trials.

Christina Grant

Photo courtesy of Christina Grant

While not exactly in line with her normal day-to-day responsibilities, she nevertheless became invested in their lives, and they in hers. She wrote college recommendations and helped them find prom dresses. “You should be a teacher,” they told her. Her initial scoff eventually led to researching alternate ways into teaching.

The more her students encouraged her, the more she began to consider a different path for herself. Then, on the morning of September 11, 2001, she was on the subway headed to the office when the Twin Towers collapsed above her. Everything changed. With the country in mourning and her own disillusionment with corporate law growing, she began to reassess her career trajectory. Before the school year ended, Grant had applied to Teach For America (TFA) and was assigned to a middle school classroom in Harlem.

Grant, now a Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty member and executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR), will be reunited with mentors and peers at the Teach For America 35th anniversary summit in Las Vegas held the first weekend in October. She will serve as the moderator for a session titled “What Happens to Teachers Now?” with a focus on how AI will impact the classroom. More than 20 HGSE community members are slated to serve on the broad range of panels.

This week we spoke to Grant about what she gained from public service, what she would tell others who might be considering a similar path, and how HGSE continues to strengthen its connection with Teach For America, including through the newly launched Public Service Priority Pathway.

Why did you join Teach For America?
For 23 years I’ve said it was because I had always wanted to teach. But that’s not the true story. The truth is I wanted to be a corporate lawyer. When I first got the assignment at the law firm to prepare students for mock trial, I didn't want it. But by that spring, we were kicking butt. I had partners, very senior partners, who were coming to help because we were going up against our true competitors in business and my kids were winning. September 11 was a Tuesday and I was headed to the office because we had planned to kick off the new season as school had just started. And then, all of it happened. It was an incredibly difficult time for the whole city. Despite everything that was happening, my kids were like, ‘When do we get to come back?’ They wanted to debate, engage, and continue learning. As a systems leader, I have always remembered that. The children expect us adults to have a plan and show up.

So education was never your long-term plan?
I knew if I wasn’t going to law school, I had to tell my parents I was doing something because I had very strict parents. I figured I’d teach for two years, get my master’s degree, and that would give me time to figure it out. Maybe I would return to law school, but I knew my parents expected me to go further in my education.

Where were you placed?
I ended up teaching middle school English and social studies at IS172 in Harlem. That school was about a 25-minute drive from where I grew up on Long Island. They weren’t two completely different worlds, and yet they were. I was grounded very early in the reality of how much zip codes determine your destiny in this country, and I started to ask what role we play in disrupting that. After I completed my official commitment, I became a teacher at KIPP Academy in the Bronx. I would say that's where I fell in love with teaching and the art of teaching. To me, seventh grade middle school is where it's at; I’d stake my career on it. If students fall in love with learning by the end of middle school, there is nothing they can’t do.

It must have been challenging having never led a classroom before.
I think I was fortunate that I had a lot of wraparound services from coaches and mentors by virtue of being in Teach For America, and I had 20 other first-years who locked hands and taught alongside me. I always joke now that I wasn't fully baked at the time. I was 23. You're only starting to understand your identity as a leader. I needed to find the balance between being warm and strict. I didn’t want the kids to not like me. And then you have to realize that if you're doing your job well, on certain days the kids are not going to like you — and that's OK. Over time, they will come to trust you, respect you, love you.

How did the experience inform how you work today?
I am someone who leads through the lens of asking a question central to the original mission of TFA: How do we make sure that all children in this country get access to a quality education? To me, it's akin to a national security risk. We've got to make sure our children have a quality education so that they can contribute to society and live the lives they've been called to live. It’s why I’m so passionate about the work we do at CEPR today, using research and evidence to answer the big questions shaping the future of education. We must make sure that all the resources that are in a school are being used in service of what adults need to teach kids. That was an eye-opening moment for me, one that I still carry to today. I don't think any teacher wakes up and says, ‘Hey, you know what I want to do today? I want to fail kids.’ They both want and need resources, tools, and support that continuously prepare them to meet their students’ ever-evolving needs.

Do you keep in touch with fellow teachers?
Yes, there are still people at TFA and in the alumni network that I consider my personal board of directors. Someone in TFA later told me about a leadership fellowship through Teach For America that matched me with the school district of Philadelphia, which is where I started as an assistant superintendent. Every place I've moved, one of the first people to reach out has always been the TFA executive director of that region.

What would you say to people thinking about Teach For America?
I am not the person who will say, “Do it, it’s going to be so great.” I’m more likely to say, “It’s going to be really, really hard.” But I also think it’s a privilege to teach, and I’m really grateful I chose Teach For America and that they chose me. I think it is one of the best pathways to become a teacher because a lot will be asked of you in terms of your growth and your development and even the way that you understand content. But a lot will be given to you in return.

That sounds like an endorsement.
One thing I’m not sure people realize is that when you join TFA, you're joining something that will be a part of you throughout your career. This is a network of tens of thousands of folks who have been at this work for some 35 years. Think of a path you want to travel and there is likely someone in Teach For America who has gone before you. You can be a part of that community, including the one that has been built and continues to grow at HGSE. It's been amazing to see how graduate schools of education like HGSE have come to embrace Teach For America and embrace what was once a non-traditional pathway, which now has become a very well-respected way to enter the profession of teaching. Instead, we are saying: “We want to welcome you to this most amazing and sacred profession and here are the many ways we can ensure that you are able to see yourself, grow, and fall in love with teaching.” It's exciting to hear that the Ed School is deepening their partnership with TFA through the new Public Service Priority Partnership because public service matters. I may be extreme, but I think that every citizen should be required to engage in a year or two of public service regardless of which side of the fence you land on.

New Admissions Opportunity: Public Service Priority Pathway

The Harvard Graduate School of Education has introduced a new admissions route for prospective students who have completed volunteer service.

In a pilot program launched this fall, anyone who completes any AmeriCorps programs such as Teach For America and City Year or serves internationally through the Peace Corps or Teach For All, can apply to the new Public Service Priority Pathway. By doing so, students can receive an admission offer before or during their service term, then enroll at HGSE in the academic year after their service ends.

“What we heard is that students wanted a clear path, a plan for their continued professional growth,” says HGSE Senior Associate Director of Admissions Stanislav Rivkin. This way, a prospective student could apply to HGSE and Teach For America at the same time, securing an admission spot three years into the future. The Public Service Priority Pathway is the only option available for such a deferred admission.

Another aspect of the program is Continued Candidacy, which gives students more than one opportunity to be considered for admission. If an applicant has demonstrated potential, they will have an opportunity to update their application to meet the threshold of admission. Traditionally, students were either admitted or denied.

The program, available only to residential Ed.M. students, also waives the admission application fee.

Historically, Rivkin says, HGSE students who arrive on campus from public service roles have received excellent preparation for the rigors of graduate work.

“We know that students who have done service bring a lot of experience to the table. They have completed consequential work, often in high-needs districts, in direct education settings,” says Rivkin, who is excited about more cross-promotion opportunities for HGSE and public service programs. “We see this as a way that we could mutually encourage people to get into the field of education through service followed by graduate studies.”

CEPR's Christina Grant reflects on how her experience in Teach For America shaped her career in education — as HGSE introduces new admissions pathway for students who have completed public service 

Direct Admissions Pilot Makes College More Attainable

mjorgensen — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:03:20 +0000

Direct Admissions Pilot Makes College More Attainable mjorgensen Tue, 09/29/2026 - 09:03 Making Caring Common college access college admissions direct admissions Lory Hough

Scates Hall at the University of Memphis

Photo: Bubbahotepblues, Wikipedia

September 30, 2026

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This past December, 45,000 seniors from 230 randomly chosen public high schools across Tennessee received a letter from a pilot initiative called TN Direct Admissions. The personalized letter included a list of in-state colleges and universities that were offering them early admission — automatically. No application to fill out. No fee to pay. No mystery. If a student was interested in attending a school on the list, they just scanned a QR code and claimed their spot. The initiative sends their student information to the college for them.

For almost half of that group, the letter also let them know upfront how much state financial aid and college-based merit aid they could get, based on grades, test scores, and other criteria.

The goal of the pilot, run by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, is to make the process of applying to college more equitable and informed — and less daunting.

Mark Photivihok, the project manager for the initiative, said his son was visibly relieved when he received a letter.

“We have had many conversations about college throughout his time in high school, but he was still so overwhelmed,” Photivihok says. “When he got his letter, I could see the stress leave him.”

The Ed School’s Making Caring Common (MCC) has been partnering with the Tennessee Higher Education Commission on the pilot since it was just an idea a few years ago. Their initial work involved actively helping the state formalize and set up the program. This included figuring out the four student treatment groups: get a letter, get a letter with financial aid information, get a letter with financial aid informaion and a series of text messages, and get a letter with financial aid information and “high-touch” advising from a school counselor.

“None of this could happen without Making Caring Common,” says Photivihok. “They have been there from the start, helping us create this program. Working with them and being able to collaborate and bounce ideas off them has aided us greatly. They have provided us with so many resources, from connections to other direct admissions programs to supporting us in our communication efforts. We are so grateful for their partnership.”

Trisha Ross Anderson, the college admission program director at Making Caring Common and the liaison to the Tennessee pilot, says that now that the letters have gone out, the commission is analyzing the quantitative data while MCC gathers qualitative data from the treatment groups through a survey and small in-depth focus groups in schools. Eventually, they’ll use the combined data to determine whether direct admissions and early financial information increase the likelihood of college enrollment compared to receiving only direct admissions information, or no letter at all.

“So much of what we’re going to collect is short vignettes and that’s going to paint the picture of what’s going on in Tennessee,” she says. “A lot of this is student reactions to the letter. What did you think when you got this letter? What did you do with this information? Do you think that you’re going to enroll in one of these colleges? How did that financial aid information affect you, if at all?”

MCC also posed additional questions to students who received personalized counseling or text messages, such as did you open those texts and did the texts affect your behavior in any way?

“We want to see the impact of a text message campaign on students to see if that affects how and if they are enrolling in higher ed opportunities,” she says. Even within the group who received texts, there is variation. Some students are just receiving general text message blasts. For others, there are specific messages related to deadlines they need to remember and tasks they need to do. Some parents are also getting texts. “We’re looking at the impact of text messaging students alone,” Ross Anderson says, “versus messaging students and their parents simultaneously.”

The last group, the students receiving one-on-one advising from a school counselor, is touch-model where advisers meet with students in person,” she says. “They send personalized texts where they’re inviting students to meet with them. They’re calling parents to talk about Jason or Jessica and what their choices are.”

“Even if they don’t end up going to a particular college [listed in the letter], that message itself is important. 'I have what it takes. Colleges want me. And maybe I can afford this.' Those messages are really important.”

Trisha Ross Anderson, college admission program director, Making Caring Common

A full analysis of the data and feedback they are now collecting won’t be known until later this year, as some students don’t commit to a college until as late as September of their freshman year, but numbers-wise, as of late April, more than 7,000 students who received a letter had completed the TN Direct enrollment form and another nearly 2,200 were in the process of filling it out.

Anecdotally, Photivihok says even before letters went out, he started getting good feedback.

“Since the beginning, there was excitement for the program,” he says, especially among school counselors, and a few of the schools that were part of the control group — their students did not get letters — “were not happy that the randomization left them out.” Encouragingly, Photivihok says they are also seeing students express interest in schools that they had never heard of before the pilot started or that are located across the state.

In an Ed School news story about the launch of the pilot that ran last fall, Ross Anderson said they have their sights set on exploring the impact a program like this could have on students beyond those in Tennessee.

“We want to learn how successful aspects of this project may be replicated in other states,” she said. “We will conduct a series of interviews with administrators and educators across the state who are implementing and impacted by this intervention to understand what aspects of implementation are most useful, effective, and scalable.”

Not long after the letters went out in December, the team started working on a plan for year two. A few changes, Photivihok says, include opening up direct admissions to all high school seniors, including private and home school students, and offering the application sooner, in the spring of junior year. A year-two goal is also to grow the number of higher education institutions participating in the program. During the first-year pilot, 57 colleges, universities, and technical schools participated. TN Direct Admissions also hopes to see the early sharing of financial aid being adopted by colleges and universities in other states. “Having that information early in the process changes everything,” Photivihok says.

Ross Anderson says new pilots like this are critical for student success and fit perfectly into the work that Making Caring Common has been doing for years with their Turning the Tide Initiative, which focuses on promoting access and equity in the college admission process. The TN Direct Admissions initiative is another step in breaking down barriers to admission and financial aid.

“For so long, [higher education] has made this so difficult for so many students, and this initiative is making college accessible for every student,” she says. “It’s taking away the barriers. It’s taking away the fees. It’s taking away a lot of the anxiety about money because so many of these students are going to know exactly, or at least know a part of, the financial aid that they’re going to receive. For so many kids, they look at that price tag of $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 and they say, no, I can never afford it. But maybe now they’re thinking, oh, I thought it was way more expensive. And that’s essential when we talk about higher education.”

Receiving a direct admissions letter that lists the schools that already want you to attend is also an important signaler to high school students that they are college material.

“Even if they don’t end up going to a particular college [listed in the letter], that message itself is important,” she says. “I have what it takes. Colleges want me. And maybe I can afford this. Those messages are really important.”

Direct Admissions Takeaways

Direct admissions is a way for colleges and universities to proactively offer admission to students before they apply, based on academic data like GPA and test scores, reversing the traditional application process. The next step being piloted is to also offer an estimate of how much a student could receive from state financial aid and college-based merit aid.
The goal is to make the process of applying to college more equitable and less daunting. There are no complicated applications to fill out, application fees to pay, or stressful essays to write.
Messages matter. Receiving a direct admissions letter that lists the schools that already want you to attend is also an important signaler to students that they are “college material” and that colleges want them. Paired with a financial estimate, it also tells a student that college might be more affordable than they assumed.

By pairing automatic admission offers with early, personalized financial aid information, Making Caring Common is helping Tennessee students see college as both accessible and affordable

Building an Online Community — In Person

nschulmeyer — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:18:39 +0000

Building an Online Community — In Person nschulmeyer Fri, 09/25/2026 - 15:18 OEL Stories online learning HGSE community Ryan Nagelhout

The online master's students took advantage of being on campus and joined lecturers Jim Honan and Rob Jenkins for a morning workout at Harvard Stadium

September 25, 2026

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Last week, students from the first two cohorts of Harvard Graduate School of Education’s International Education Policy and Management (IEPM) pathway traveled from around the world to Appian Way for a three-day forum — bringing the school’s on-campus experience to life for students in its online master’s program. The gathering offered students opportunities to learn in person, build connections with classmates, and collaborate with peers and faculty across the HGSE community.

“I’m very happy to see these two cohorts come together and connect not only with each other across cohorts and within the cohort, but also connect with faculty,” said Professor Fernando Reimers, faculty co-chair of IEPM.

The two-year, part-time online master’s pathway allows students to deepen their expertise in systems, policy, and leadership while not leaving their current roles, expanding their professional networks across borders and offering global perspectives to their work shaping education worldwide.

“It’s incredible. It’s like seeing everybody in 3D, and an amazing opportunity to deepen those relationships,” said master’s student Rafael Monteforte, who traveled to Cambridge from Brazil. “It’s so amazing to finally meet incredible people you’ve been working with the last few months.”

Students were given time to meet in person with their advisers, take in faculty panels about their work across the educational spectrum, and even host panels to showcase their own work. A workshop from HGSE’s Career Services Office, free professional headshots, and plenty of time to network with peers and faculty were included throughout the weekend. The two cohorts also shared a colloquium with Stefania Giannini, former minister of education in Italy, who is at HGSE as a Chen Yidan Visiting Global Fellow.

“For them, it is clearly valuable,” said Reimers. “There are things we can do on campus that are not impossible, but more challenging to do online. So I’m glad we can do this.”

Reimers noted the three-day forum is an optional experience for those in the IEPM pathway, but provides the opportunity for students to take advantage of the vast resources on HGSE’s campus.

“They get to see and feel what the school really is about,” said Professor Karen Mapp, who spoke to students in a faculty panel. “It’s a real thing, with real people. And I do think that being able to come to campus sort of knits together this community in a way that’s really special.”

Mapp’s panel, co-led by Harvard Kennedy School’s Marshall Ganz, focused on community-based change and social impact. At one point, Ganz asked the students to say hello in their first language, suddenly filling the room with a mix of greetings he called “the music of the future.”

Many students took the weekend in Cambridge to engage in on-campus traditions like stocking up on school gear in Harvard Square, exploring Gutman Library, and taking a guided campus tour through Harvard Yard.

Some students even squeezed in a longtime aerobic tradition at Harvard as well. On Sunday morning, Senior Lecturer Jim Honan took a group of IEPM students across the Charles River to Harvard Stadium for a workout, climbing up and down the concrete steps of the historic stadium which opened in 1903.

“You can only see the difference when you come here, but we are lucky because we have an incredible cohort,” said Alina Grigore, who traveled from Romania. “We’re all very empathetic, and the teachers are all amazing.”

She did note one big advantage of the cohorts coming together on Appian Way, something you can’t do online.

“The hugs,” Grigore said. “Because we were able to hug each other.”

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The forum was a reminder of HGSE’s strong sense of community — whether online or in person
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The two-year, part-time online master’s pathway brings together professionals with deep expertise in their fields
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Panels were led by HGSE faculty and current online master's students
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Students traveled from around the world to meet in Cambridge for the weekend
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The three-day forum was an opportunity to strengthen connections with fellow peers and faculty
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For students and faculty alike, one word captured the experience: “amazing"

Building an Online Community — In Person Students from HGSE’s online International Education Policy and Management pathway gathered on campus for three days of learning, connection, and collaboration

Pilot, Test, and Assess Ideas First

nschulmeyer — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:12:50 +0000

Pilot, Test, and Assess Ideas First nschulmeyer Thu, 09/24/2026 - 12:12 data Center for Education Policy Research education reform Research Lory Hough

Professor Tom Kane

Photo: Veasey Conway/Harvard University

September 25, 2026

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Pilot, test, assess. It's not the obvious answer to the question: How do we help students succeed? But as far as Professor Tom Kane is concerned, it’s one of the best answers.

When asked why, he says, “Because student behavior and teacher behavior are really complicated and it’s impossible to anticipate every unintended side effect. It’s impossible to anticipate how people are going to respond when you impose a cell phone ban or you propose a change in the teacher evaluation system. We have ideas about how people will respond, and that’s what leads people to advocate for these kinds of policies, but actually we don’t know. I have multiple times seen things that I was really optimistic would work that turned out not to work.”

One example happened a few years ago when Kane and his colleagues at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR), which he founded, did a study of elementary math textbooks. Prior studies suggested that certain textbooks would be more effective than others. CEPR collected data from textbooks being used in six states and measured differences in student math skills. Kane assumed they’d find big differences and then redo the study annually to assess if that held.

“We worked on that for weeks and weeks and weeks before we decided there are few, if any, differences in student achievement gains for people using different textbooks,” he says. As a result, they didn’t repeat the study.

Another project they took on in 2005, the year CEPR started, was in collaboration with Joel Klein, then-chancellor of New York City Schools.

“Joel had made a big bet on the New York City Teaching Fellows program. They were recruiting a quarter of their new teachers through this alternative route program,” Kane says. Klein asked CEPR to evaluate the program, which was created to train professionals and recent college graduates to teach in high-need, low-income public schools. Klein was optimistic that CEPR would find big differences between the teaching fellows and other novice traditionally certified teachers.

“And that’s not what we found,” Kane says. “Actually, there was little, if any, difference once we controlled for students’ baseline achievement. There was little, if any, difference in the efficacy of the average teaching fellow versus the average traditionally certified teacher. That was not something Joel Klein or we were expecting.” To his credit, Kane says, Klein “basically shifted on a dime” and said, “Oh, OK. So this isn’t about recruitment. It’s about assessing people’s performance on the job in the first couple of years of teaching and making sure we keep the really great teachers.”

It’s these kinds of unexpected results that make piloting, testing, and assessing critical in education for student success, Kane says.

“There are ideas that sound good on paper, but it’s just impossible to anticipate all the ways in which it can go wrong,” he says. “Think about your home improvement projects. The way you think something is going to work never does, but what’s different is that in a home improvement project, you get to see that it’s not working because the lamp won’t turn on or the paint job looks horrible. In the case of education, we don’t get to see that our ideas don’t work because we don’t always have comparison groups. We see, oh, test scores went up or test scores went down, but that may be happening for reasons that have nothing to do with what we just did. And the only way we know that is if we have a comparison group, if we tried it in some classrooms and not in other classrooms and then compared.”

This doesn’t happen in education as much as it should, he says, because practitioners can be “overconfident” that their great ideas for improvement will work.

“It’s just human nature to be overconfident. That’s sort of built in,” he says. And unless you have a conversion experience, like Kane has had over the years with projects like textbooks and teaching fellows, “it’s very hard for people to let go of the assumption that this idea you have will work.”

"It's impossible to anticipate how people are going to respond when you change the curriculum or when you impose a cell phone ban or you propose a change in the teacher evaluation system."

Professor Tom Kane

Luckily, says Kane, it’s easier these days to pilot, test, and assess ideas and assumptions because more data is available to use. In the past, he says educators needed a Ph.D. or an expertise in something like program evaluation to figure out what was going on with students. But since 2005, robust state data systems have become widely available, making it easier to compare data points, such as the achievement gains of students who get a given intervention against those who don’t.

“They’re tracking students over time,” Kane says. “Actually, it’s part of the reason why we started CEPR. We saw that there was now a chance to learn a lot more.” This emphasis on student data collection came out of the No Child Left Behind Act, which said states had to start testing in grades three to eight. “After a few years, this made it possible to follow student progress.”

Kane stresses, though, that just having more data isn’t enough — it has to loop back to pilot, test, and assess and these actions need to become habits.

“The problem is [some educators] haven’t taken the extra little step to say, OK, we have this data and we know which kids are, for example, getting tutors,” he says. “Why don’t we put these two things together and see if the kids who are getting tutors are seeing faster gains than the kids who are not getting tutors? Let’s not just assume that tutoring must work.”

In fact, he says, using the tutoring example, districts spent a lot of money after the pandemic on tutoring, assuming that high-dosage tutoring was the answer to making up lost learning. The assumptions were based on pre-pandemic research that suggested that high-dosage tutoring would lead to large gains.

“Lots of people were arguing, OK, this is how we’re going to rebound from the pandemic. We’re going to find the kids who are furthest behind and assign them tutors,” he says.

CEPR started working with several school districts that poured money into tutoring, only to discover that gains were small. “It turns out there were all sorts of implementation problems. Rather than three sessions a week for a whole school year, or 108 sessions, which is what the pre-pandemic research was based on, we were discovering kids were usually often attending for five or 10 sessions total.”

Kane said the idea behind high-dosage tutoring wasn’t necessarily bad, but the implementation of it often was. “Many districts were walking around thinking, ‘We’re solving this problem. This worked. All this prior research told us it was going to work. We’ve done our part.’ But they didn’t bother to track or ask, how many sessions are kids getting? What are the achievement gains the kids are getting? Instead, it was, ‘Well, we spent our money on the tutoring, so now let’s work on the next problem’ without realizing what you tried didn’t work. The thing that was missing was they didn’t track the data to compare what happened to the people who got the tutors versus the people who didn’t. If they had, they would’ve learned, as the districts that worked with us learned, ‘Gosh, many fewer kids than we thought are showing up for these tutoring sessions.”

Using the retail sector as an example of a sector that has figured out the importance of tracking data, Kane explains that checkout scanner software eventually made it easier for stores to gather data on every purchase — how many units of fuji apples sold versus macintosh — and they no longer had to “guess” at what worked.

“All of a sudden people said, ‘We don’t have to make these big bets anymore because we’re seeing that some of our ideas are not working,” he says. “We’re doing these market tests and something we’re pretty sure was going to work, turns out not to work. Now everything needs to be tested in retail before it’s scaled up. Walmart doesn’t scale up anything across the chain anymore without doing a pilot test.

“That hasn’t happened yet in education, but we’re close,” Kane says. “We’ve got the equivalent of the transactions database in student test scores. What we lack is just that last little bit, which is using those things to do pilot tests. And honestly, that’s what we’re trying to do at CEPR. We’re trying to provide that last little bit.”

Pilot, Test, Assess Takeaways

Ideas in education often look good on paper but the behavior of humans — students and teachers — is complicated so it’s hard to know how people will respond and nearly impossible to predict what could go wrong.
Educators need to pilot, test, and assess ideas more than they currently do before jumping into making changes in their districts or at their schools. They shouldn’t assume that ideas will work just because past research says they will or because those ideas have worked in other districts or at other schools.
The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 mandated that schools start testing students annually. Within just a couple of years, robust data sets at the local, state, and national levels became available to schools, districts, and researchers. Nowadays, it’s much easier to pilot, test, and assess ideas and assumptions because of that data.

Pilot, Test, and Assess Ideas First Professor Tom Kane explains why schools should measure what works before scaling new programs

HGSE Community Celebrates 2026 Honors

mjorgensen — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 18:11:56 +0000

HGSE Community Celebrates 2026 Honors mjorgensen Wed, 09/23/2026 - 14:11 HGSE community Honors and Awards News editor

September 23, 2026

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Below is a look at a small portion of the prestigious honors awarded to members of the HGSE community:

FACULTY AND RESEARCH

Associate Professor Bianca Baldridge delivered the AERA Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture at the organization's 2026 Annual Meeting.
EASEL Lab's SEL Kernels of Practice was selected among HundrED's Global Collection 2026, which celebrates 100 of the world’s most impactful and scalable innovative solutions in education.
Professor Nancy Hill received a 2026 Mittal Institute Faculty Grant for her research, Can the World be Your Oyster?: Parenting Adolescents for Adulthood in a Globalizing Sri Lankan Economy.
Professor Andrew Ho was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Associate Professor Gabrielle Oliveira was honored with the AERA Outstanding Book Award for Now We Are Here, an examination of migration and schooling.
A team from the READS Lab, including Jackie Relyea; Joshua Gilbert, Ed.M.'17. Ph.D.'26; Mary Burkhauser, Ed.M.'15, Ed.D.'16; Ethan Scherer; Douglas Mosher, Ph.D.'24; Ph.D. student Zhongyu Wei, Ed.M.'19; Johanna Tvedt; and Professor James Kim received the Outstanding Article Award: Reading Research Quarterly from the International Literacy Association.

ALUMNI

Detris Adelabu, Ed.M.'93, Ed.D.'97, professor of counseling psychology and applied human development at Boston University's Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, was awarded the 2026 Undergraduate Academic Advising Award.
Shireen Al-Adeimi, Ed.M.'16, Ed.D.'18, and Rebecca Lee, Ed.M.'22, from Michigan State University, won the Outstanding Article Award: Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy from from the International Literacy Association.
Lily An, Ed.M.'18, Ph.D.'25, assistant professor at Georgia State University, received the National Council on Measurement in Education's Brenda H. Loyd Outstanding Dissertation Award for Measurement in K-12 Policy Analysis.
Miriam Archibong, Ed.M.'10, was named to Atlanta Business Chronicle's 40 Under 40 list.
Mildred Boveda, Ed.M.'11, an associate professor of special education at Penn State University, received the 2025 Social Justice Award from the Teacher Education Division (TED) of the Council for Exceptional Children.
Dorian Burton, Ed.L.D.'15, was selected for a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency. Burton also joined the Aspen Global Innovators Group at a fellow last year.
Christopher Cleveland, Ed.M.'19, Ph.D.'23, received a NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship for his research, Understanding Special Education at Scale.
Amy Crosson, Ed.M.'00, Ed.D.'10, of Pennsylvania State University; and Michael Kieffer, Ed.M.'06, Ed.D.'09, of New York University, won the Dina Feitelson Research Award from the International Literacy Association.
Tony Delarosa, Ed.M.'18, was named a 2026 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellow. He was also named a UW-Madison EdGRS Fellow and a 2027 NYU Faculty First Look Fellow.
Thomas Dingman, Ed.M.'73, was honored with the 2026 Harvard Medal for exceptional service to the university.
Vani Gupta, Ed.M.'26, and Perpetua Muthoni, Ed.M.'26, were among the 26 Harvard graduate students and recent grads to be selected as summer fellows by the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.
Aaron Jennings, Ed.L.D.'19, chief of staff of Chelsea (Mass.) Public Schools, was honored as a recipient of the Black Excellence on the Hill award, bestowed by the Massachusetts Black and Latino Legislative Caucus.
Weijing “Vickie” Liu, Ed.M.'23, was named a 2026–27 Schwarzman Scholar.
Carmen Lopez, Ed.M.'97, executive director of College Horizons, was given the Ongoing Commitment Award from Dartmouth College at its 2026 Social Justice Awards.
Yifei 'Eiffy' Luo, Ed.M.’22, was recently named one of Training magazine’s Top 5 Emerging Training Leaders for 2026.
Shikha Mangalick Malhotra, Ed.M.'06, co-founder of IFNet, was chosen as an Outstanding Women of 2026 by India New England News.
Gabriela Nguyen, Ed.M.'25, was selected as one of Forbes' 30 Under 30 for her venture, Appstinence.
Kanto Raveloson, Ed.M.’26, was honored with the Titus Award at Harvard Black Graduate 2026, which recognizes graduating students for their leadership, service, and contributions to the Harvard community and beyond.
Joseph Reimer, Ed.M.'71, Ed.D.'77, professor emeritus and former director of the Hornstein Program at Brandeis University, received the Bernard Reisman Professional Excellence Award from the Hornstein Program.
Michelle Rinehart, Ed.L.D.'22, superintendent of Alpine ISD, is one of five state finalists for the 2026 Texas Superintendent of the Year award.
Margaret Wang, Ed.M.'20, was named a 2026 Ashoka Fellow for her venture, Subject to Climate.

If you are a member of the HGSE community and recently have won an award or achieved a special honor, please email marin_jorgensen@gse.harvard.edu.

So far in 2026, numerous faculty, students, and alumni have been recognized for their hard work and achievements with awards and fellowships

It’s Pay, Yes, But Other Things Also Matter

mjorgensen — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:53:28 +0000

It’s Pay, Yes, But Other Things Also Matter mjorgensen Tue, 09/22/2026 - 14:53 teacher retention wellness teachers and teaching nonprofits Kimberly Ashton

Illustration: Dominic Kesterton

September 22, 2026

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Tyler Hester, Ed.L.D.’20, says he’ll never forget how a Boston Teachers Union (BTU) leader reacted to seeing dozens of teachers arrive on a wintry night in 2018 for another of Hester’s sessions about improving well-being: These shouldn’t be so popular.

The BTU veteran had seen professional development programs fizzle out over the years, but demand for Hester’s sessions showed no signs of abating — and that revealed a problem. Teachers were struggling. It’s a problem that Hester, as co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit Educators Thriving, has spent the past several years studying, with the aim of offering solutions school systems can implement to boost teacher resilience, morale, and retention.

“Mister Rogers said, ‘Whatever is mentionable is manageable.’ And I think too often, because we can’t measure some of the things around people’s experience, we don’t even mention it. And when we don’t mention it, we don’t even attempt to manage it,” Hester says.

Last fall, Educators Thriving released its latest measure of how teachers are faring. The second annual Educator Well-Being Report Card is a comprehensive look at how teachers feel about their work and workplaces. The report is based on a survey that nearly 9,000 educators took during the 2024–25 school year, and it focuses on seven factors that Educators Thriving, in collaboration with the American Federation of Teachers, have found to be predictive of job, satisfaction and mental and physical health. These factors include school- and system-wide concerns such as having responsive leadership, a supportive culture, and foundational necessities such as adequate compensation and sufficient staff. But the factors also include personal capacities such as the degree to which an educator is flexible, oriented toward growth, accepts difficult emotions, and practices well-being outside of work.

Lessons Learned

A few themes stood out in the survey’s results. One is that the most predictive factor of educator well-being is the degree to which they feel backed by leadership. This support may take the form of principals seeking teachers’ input, taking their concerns seriously, and including them in decision-making. It’s also expressed as a willingness to be responsive to faculty needs and to keep lines of communication open.

For example, the report found that a little more than half of educators feel administrators back them in dealing with student behavior, mental health, and discipline. (Such student problems are the second-leading reason, behind compensation, that teachers leave schools, the report says.) Many teachers say they’d like principals to clearly communicate shared values and apply a consistent discipline process.

A second major theme that emerged from the survey is how more time spent collaborating with one another affects well-being and teacher retention.

“Teaching can be so isolating,” says Hallie Fox, Hester’s fellow cofounder of Educators Thriving. “You are with a group of young people all day but don’t have a lot of time with other adults to problem- solve and collaborate. And when that time is structured and given to teachers, and they’re authentically sharing problems and working through strategies together, everyone benefits.”

“This is work where it’s not all that common for people to wake up in the middle of the night wondering whether their work matters."

Tyler Hester, Ed.L.D.'21, co-founder and CEO of Educators Thriving

Collaboration with peers is only part of the picture. Well-being flourishes when collaboration happens up and down the educational organization, again underscoring the importance of supportive leadership. The data from the report bears this out: About half of the variance in well-being from one educator to the next is predicted by how they answer questions about their administrators.

This finding points to a bright spot in the report, and perhaps its biggest takeaway — teacher well-being can be improved. “The idea that you actually can create conditions for … flourishing is so encouraging,” Hester says.

Another positive finding is that teachers report a high sense of purpose and making a difference.

“This is work where it’s not all that common for people to wake up in the middle of the night wondering whether their work matters. We see on a regular basis, a daily basis, that it does,” Hester says.

Despite that sense of purpose, the challenges are real. Hester experienced them as a middle and high school teacher for four years, then spent five more leading a teacher training program where he saw the prevalence of burnout.

His career has been driven by a commitment to creating school systems that honor every child’s potential, and along the way, he had a realization: You can’t build excellent outcomes for kids without attending to the adults who teach them. “It’s actually at the level of the adults [teachers] that I think I want to work, and that we must work,” he says. The report card gives school leaders data to create conditions where teachers can thrive and, in turn, serve students better.

“I can’t think of more important work,” Hester says.

Kimberly Ashton is a freelance writer and editor whose work focuses on storytelling for educational institutions

New report card looks at how teachers are faring

Center for Digital Thriving Receives $3 Million Grant

nschulmeyer — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 13:20:22 +0000

Center for Digital Thriving Receives $3 Million Grant nschulmeyer Thu, 09/17/2026 - 09:20 Project Zero Center for Digital Thriving artificial intelligence foundations donors News editor

September 17, 2026

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The Center for Digital Thriving (CDT), a part of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has received a $3 million grant from Bukhman Philanthropies, a London-based foundation focused on improving the mental health and well-being of children and young adults. The two-year investment will deepen the center’s work to support agency with AI for both youth and educators.

The grant builds on momentum from CDT’s first three years as a public research center toward its vision: a future where every educator coaches students toward digital thriving through joyful, connected learning — guided by research, shaped by youth voices, and tailored to their communities.

“Working closely with youth and educators has only strengthened our belief that AI literacy isn’t just about understanding technology. To have agency with these tools, we need to also understand the business models behind them, and who we are becoming in relation to them,” said Beck Tench, co-founder and principal investigator at Center for Digital Thriving. “Educators can feel on their back foot with Al, but we've found that they already have what they need in this moment: social emotional skills to anchor their relationships with students, and a deep sense of care. What’s missing are the structures, resources, and support to reinforce those relationships and meet their students where they are with AI. We're grateful Bukhman Philanthropies shares our aspiration to fill those gaps through research that supports agency with AI.”

“One of our primary aims as a philanthropic organization is to help build a brighter collective future, and we know that youth must be included at every step to make that possible,” said Daria Bukhman, co-founder and chair of Bukhman Philanthropies. “As an educator myself, I believe in the power of literacy to light the path forward. CDT's work lets educators and students walk it together, especially when so many are feeling in the dark with AI.”

With Bukhman’s support, CDT will continue to grow its agency-centered portfolio of work on AI in education, including:

“On-the-ground” community engagement in classrooms: CDT will work directly with schools and communities using its agency-centered AI resources to iterate and expand them in real classrooms so they remain grounded in truth and can meet rapidly evolving experiences.
Youth advisory to include young people as co-creators of their own futures: CDT’s listening-fueled design cycle guides its research and resource development — always with young people as collaborators. This new support will sustain the center’s direct engagement with youth advisors through listening sessions, co-design, and research co-interpretation.
Creation and dissemination of free and public goods: Last year, CDT released five free, co-designed classroom practices to help educators and students explore AI together. This new funding will expand the development and dissemination of more, free research-based public goods.

“Project Zero has a long history of ‘making thinking visible’ in classrooms. We need that kind of shared exploration now more than ever with AI,” said Carrie James, co-director at Project Zero and co-founder at Center for Digital Thriving. “One of the best ways to do that often starts by talking to each other and listening with curiosity.”

“Conversations about AI in education need to center people instead of policy alone, which is why listening to educators and young people is the heartbeat of our work,” said Emily Weinstein, co-founder at Center for Digital Thriving. “We’re grateful for the support of Bukhman Philanthropies to continue to shape a better future for, and with, the next generation.”

Every resource and effort made possible by the grant is designed around the same goal: to foster meaningful choice, intention, and control over how AI shapes our lives and learning. With Bukhman’s support, CDT will continue the work of helping young people and the adults who care about them to navigate AI together.

About the Center for Digital Thriving

Center for Digital Thriving (CDT) is a research and innovation center based at Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education. We create knowledge and research-based resources that help youth thrive in a tech-filled world — and we believe educators are essential partners in making that possible. CDT works through a listening-fueled design cycle that guides research and resource development through discovery, development, and deployment, always with young people as co-creators.

Learn more at centerfordigitalthriving.org.

About Bukhman Philanthropies

Bukhman Philanthropies was founded by Dmitri and Daria Bukhman, reflecting their diverse philanthropic aspirations driven by a shared commitment to creating meaningful change and building a brighter collective future. Their core focus areas include Neonatal and Maternal Support, Mental Health and Wellbeing of Children and Young Adults, and Literature.

For more information visit bukhmanphilanthropies.org.

The grant from Bukhman Philanthropies will expand agency-centered AI literacy in schools 

Harvard and Hamilton Create a 4+1 Collaboration

nschulmeyer — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:04:02 +0000

Harvard and Hamilton Create a 4+1 Collaboration nschulmeyer Mon, 09/14/2026 - 16:04 HGSE admissions higher education Lory Hough

September 16, 2026

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A couple of years ago, John McLaughlin, Ed.D.’14, vice president for enrollment and dean of admission at Hamilton College, had an idea: Since Hamilton was an undergraduate-only institution, it couldn’t offer students the option of adding a fifth year to get a master’s degree. But if Hamilton partnered with a handful of top-ranked graduate programs like the Ed School, he thought, it could help students seamlessly add that fifth year — before they even set foot on the Hamilton campus.

McLaughlin’s idea eventually became the early assurance graduate pathway program, which launched this year and includes collaborations with graduate programs at Harvard, Duke, Vanderbilt, and others. The process starts when high school students are applying to Hamilton. Through the Common App, they indicate their interest in being considered for a particular “pathway” at a partner graduate school — the Ed School for education or Duke for business, for example. Accepted students (about 5–10 per partner each year) receive a welcome letter from Hamilton and an “early assurance” letter from the graduate school for their master’s. As long as students meet program requirements and benchmarks throughout their four years at Hamilton, they are recommended to the graduate school. The first group of students will begin at Hamilton in the fall of 2027.

Frank Arce, assistant dean for admission and financial aid at the Ed School, says this collaboration is a new, creative way for Harvard to expand their pipeline, especially at a time when the number of high school graduates peaked in 2025 and the looming “demographic cliff” shows a continued decline through at least 2041. But other factors also make this close collaboration with an undergraduate institution timely, he says.

“At the Ed School, we’ve noticed that more parents are getting invested a lot earlier in their young adults' higher education journeys and they like the idea that for their student, it’s an opportunity to finish their undergrad and then, instead of taking a gap year or taking a couple of years off, going straight into graduate education,” he says. “That's where this ‘four plus one’ idea comes into play.”

McLaughlin acknowledges that the transition from undergraduate to “what’s next?” can be uncertain and stressful — for parents and students — but programs like early assurance help undergraduates better envision their future, which in turn eases anxiety.

“Increasingly, there is recognition on the part of students and parents that the bachelor's degree is often not the end,” he says, “and so the idea of what follows, that can be a daunting proposition for students and families who have just navigated the already daunting process of getting into a great undergraduate college. There’s a dimension of uncertainty of what comes next, of what follows college.”

This could explain why, in part, Arce is seeing an increasing number of applicants to the Ed School coming straight from earning their bachelor’s degree.

“Increasingly, there is recognition on the part of students and parents that the bachelor's degree is often not the end."

Frank Arce, assistant dean for admission and financial aid at HGSE

“HGSE students are getting younger,” he says, “and this kind of collaboration is another opportunity for us to build that pipeline, but also, if we know applicants are already coming directly out of undergrad, be proactive with students earlier.”

For Hamilton students in the early assurance program that leads to the Ed School, that means taking education courses while they are at Hamilton, creating a cohort with other students also in the Ed School pipeline, and having access to special programming and engagement activities on Appian Way. Some partnerships also include fee waivers, guaranteed interviews, and accelerated timelines.

McLaughlin says he’s excited to tie this new program back to the Ed School, “a place that is very near and dear to my heart.”

He says, “the idea of being able to come up with an academic innovation around a transitional moment in education between two layers of the educational system — undergraduate and graduate institutions — is really exciting from an academic standpoint, especially thinking about what this might look like and how this may shape students' experiences.”

From a professional standpoint, McLaughlin says “it’s exciting to consider how it may help support enrollment goals, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. And from a personal standpoint, the lessons that I learned in Gutman and Longfellow and up and down Appian Way I draw upon every day in the course of my work, uniting aspects of theory and scholarship and practice to try and make an impact in the work that I do. I'm so grateful that I'm able to continue to engage with HGSE in this way.”

Arce says he’s also grateful to be part of this partnership, not only because it creates a clearer pathway for Hamilton students already thinking about how they can make an impact in education, but also because it amplifies something he and the Ed School hold sacred: access and opportunity.

“How do we reach talented students earlier, help them see graduate education as possible, and remove some of the uncertainty around what comes next?” he says. “I’m excited to see what we learn from this partnership and how we can build similar opportunities with other institutions in the future.”

Harvard and Hamilton Create a 4+1 Collaboration The liberal arts college in upstate New York will now be an “early assurance” pipeline to the Ed School

Kyla Johnson-Trammell Appointed as Joint Senior Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Education Initiatives

nschulmeyer — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:15:49 +0000

Kyla Johnson-Trammell Appointed as Joint Senior Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Education Initiatives nschulmeyer Thu, 09/10/2026 - 10:15 civics EdRedesign The Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader appointments News editor

September 10, 2026

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The EdRedesign Lab (EdRedesign) and the Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader (ISCL) at Harvard Graduate School of Education announced the appointment of Kyla Johnson-Trammell as a joint senior fellow.

Kyla Johnson-Trammell

Photo: EdRedesign

Over the course of two years, Johnson-Trammell, CEO of Oakland Thrives and former Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) superintendent, will engage with the Harvard community and draw on her decades of experience in education, governance, and systems change to share lessons on how education leaders can work across sectors.

Born and raised in East Oakland, Johnson-Trammell is nationally recognized for her work improving outcomes for children, youth, and families. As Oakland Unified School District’s longest-serving superintendent in five decades, she mobilized more than $300 million in aligned public and private investment, led the district out of a 22-year state loan, and helped drive significant gains in student outcomes, including an 8.8% increase in graduation rates and a 14% rise in college-ready completion. A longtime champion of cross-sector collaboration, she also served for eight years as co-chair of the Youth Ventures Joint Powers Authority/Oakland Thrives Leadership Council, helping build public-private partnerships across Oakland.

“Johnson-Trammell has been an important thought partner in the work of EdRedesign for many years and exemplifies how local leaders can champion cradle-to-career change,” says Professor Paul Reville, EdRedesign founder and faculty director. “Oakland was one of the inaugural members of our By All Means Initiative and was an early adopter of efforts to connect city-wide resources across sectors to move the needle on issues ranging from mental health to college readiness.”

Today, Johnson-Trammell serves as CEO of Oakland Thrives, the collective impact backbone organization that convenes and staffs the Youth Ventures Joint Powers Authority (YVJPA), uniting public sector, private sector, and community leaders around a shared strategy for Oakland's children and families. Founded in 2015, Oakland Thrives drives cross-sector collaboration across health, wealth, education, safety, and housing, anchored in a deep commitment to equity and the community's long-term well-being. Its signature initiatives include the $100 million Rise East initiative, a place-based, systems-level response to food insecurity and the creation of a citywide youth mental health landscape analysis to increase access to care for young people across Oakland.

“During her eight years leading OUSD, Johnson-Trammell demonstrated what it means for a superintendent to understand the health and well-being of an entire community as integral to the work of public education,” says Senior Lecturer Jennifer Cheatham, ISCL lead and faculty chair of field engagement at HGSE. “The role of superintendent has shifted over time, and we know that improving outcomes for students requires working beyond the boundaries of the school system. Johnson-Trammell brings a powerful perspective on what that kind of civic leadership looks like in practice, and we’re excited for her to help shape how we prepare the next generation of education leaders.”

Johnson-Trammell also serves on the boards of The Oakland Reach, Women Leading Ed, and the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at University of Pennsylvania.

Insights and Research on Cross-Sector Collaboration and Superintendents

In her role as a joint senior fellow, Johnson-Trammell will lead work at the intersection of the superintendency and place-based, cross-sector collaboration, examining how system leaders can more effectively engage community partners to improve outcomes for children and families from cradle to career. Through the partnership with EdRedesign and ICSL, her work will directly inform practice, policy, and public understanding.

“EdRedesign is committed to advancing systematic, mutually beneficial exchanges between exemplary cross-sector leaders and the Harvard community. I’m thrilled to collaborate with ISCL, Johnson-Trammell, and Oakland Thrives’ coalition of community partners,” says Lecturer Rob Watson, executive director of EdRedesign. “Johnson-Trammell’s vast experience advancing cradle-to-career solutions at the intersection of K–12 education and place-based partnerships will enrich our university’s learning environment and help us translate that learning into practical tools and insights that communities and schools can leverage to improve outcomes for children and families at scale.”

“I've seen firsthand how much place shapes opportunity, and I've built my career on the belief that cross-sector, community-grounded leadership can help close that gap,” adds Johnson-Trammell. “I'm honored to bring that practice-based expertise into dialogue with Harvard's scholarship and equally eager to draw on the depth of thinking this community offers.”

Johnson-Trammell will join Russell Booker as a joint senior fellow of EdRedesign and ISCL. Together, they will serve as advisers to EdRedesign and ISCL, offering their unique expertise to shape how both initiatives support cross-sector leaders as they tackle the pressing challenges facing children, youth, and families.

Johnson-Trammell’s appointment will begin in August 2026 and extends through June 2028.

Oakland education leader and longtime champion of cross-sector collaboration will join The EdRedesign Lab and Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader to advance learning on place-based systems change and civic leadership 

The Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader Launches at HGSE

nschulmeyer — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:07:58 +0000

The Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader Launches at HGSE nschulmeyer Fri, 09/04/2026 - 09:07 The Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader civics field engagement Ryan Nagelhout

September 8, 2026

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The Harvard Graduate School of Education has announced the Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader (ISCL). The Initiative aims to build the capacity of superintendents to steward the future of public education with civic imagination, democratic purpose, and political skill at a time where their roles are increasingly challenging and politically complex.

The Initiative was founded by Senior Lecturer Jennifer Perry Cheatham, HGSE’s faculty chair of field engagement, whose work dedicated to leading for equity and transformational change in school districts serves as the foundation for ISCL.

“HGSE is stepping up as a powerful partner to every organization that works with superintendents nationwide,” says Cheatham, who will serve as the Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader’s faculty chair. “The future of public education in our country is crucial for the future of our democracy. After all, our schools provide the fabric that binds many of our communities together. The people who lead these institutions need our support.”

ISCL’s goal is to help position superintendents as civic leaders responsible for the future of public education in America. Integrating research, practice, and public voice, ISCL aims to better equip district leaders by serving as a hub for field-building and partnership to strengthen the leadership pipeline and support stable, values-aligned leadership in communities.

“The superintendent’s role has changed, and support for the superintendency must change as well,” says Cheatham.

Development, Tools, and Field Building

ISCL’s focus is a three-pronged approach to supporting superintendents in their roles, starting with the development of a high-quality professional development suite for executive learning. Cheatham and ISCL will lead a three-day professional development course, Superintendent as Civic Leader, from November 12–14, designed to help sitting superintendents navigate their roles amid intense change.

ISCL has also published a series of research-based tools and resources developed and tested with national partners to support superintendents and organizations who serve them. The free-to-download case studies and simulations are featured on their website, along with guides to help build foundational civic leadership skills through frameworks and field books. ISCL will also publish a biennial Report on the Superintendency to highlight promising practices, emerging insights, and trends that can guide the field.

Upcoming Events

The Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader has also formed a robust field-building strategy to further its work and build leadership networks around the country, starting with two events that will celebrate the formal launch of the Initiative on October 6. An Askwith Education Forum highlighting ISCL’s first three senior fellows will use HGSE’s signature events series to inspire a growing community of practice to advance the field. The cohort of senior fellows — distinguished former superintendents with diverse backgrounds and track records of civic leadership — will work with ISCL for a two-year tenure where they select an aspect of the superintendency for further study.

Cheatham will also take part in a Gutman Library Book Talk and workshop for her recent book, Superintendent as Civic Leader: Stewarding the Future of Public Education, before the Askwith Education Forum. The panel discussion will feature Cheatham along with her coeditors, Christina Grant, executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) and Ross Weiner, the former executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Education and Society Program who now serves as senior advisor for ISCL.

Cheatham noted ISCL also plans to hold a symposium in the spring semester and stressed that the goal of these field-building events is to continue the work of bringing people together in the service of educating with relationship building and community engagement. By mobilizing educators across the field, ISCL serves as a catalyst for a more coherent and connected field of civic leadership in public education.

Transforming the Field Together

The ISCL leadership group includes a steering committee to help ISCL assess strategy and sequencing, partnerships and field positioning, and funding and operating approaches. Composed of operating partners whose work is aligned with ISCL’s efforts, the committee ensures that the work is responsive to real needs in the field, connected to complementary efforts, and positioned for practical impact.

A number of affiliated HGSE faculty members bring expertise to ISCL as well, ensuring the work of teaching, research, and field-building are anchored by field leaders with deep experience in strategy development, organizational change, and movement building. ISCL has secured funding from the Spencer, Barr, and Hewlett foundations, generous gifts which will support the Initiative’s foundational work over the next two years as it focuses on its three pillars of professional development, research-based tools for superintendent support, and field building.

“Superintendents who function as civic leaders can help create the coalitions necessary to move our school systems forward,” says Cheatham. “They know that they don’t work alone. By working in collaboration with their communities, they can meet the challenges, seize the opportunities, and chart a path to a better future for our nation’s schoolchildren.”

The Modern Superintendent: School and Civic Leader | Askwith Education Forum

Explore the evolving role of the superintendent as a civic leader at the Askwith Education Forum on October 6.

The Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader Launches at HGSE The new initiative will strengthen superintendents’ civic leadership through executive learning, research-based tools, and field-building partnerships aimed at advancing the future of public education

What Can Schools Learn from Artists?

nschulmeyer — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:40:03 +0000

What Can Schools Learn from Artists? nschulmeyer Thu, 09/03/2026 - 16:40 arts education civics Project Zero field engagement museums Lory Hough

September 14, 2026

Usable Knowledge

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The world and its challenges are complex, says Flossie Chua, Ed.M.’08, Ed.D.’16, a principal investigator at Project Zero, and it’s not always easy to make sense of these challenges and act constructively to address them. But, she says, as interconnected members of society moving through the world as both individuals and as members of communities, we have a responsibility to figure it out.

And looking to artists and the way they approach their work could be a good starting point. Artists, she says, question the world around them and create ideas that can inspire people to consider the world in new ways.

With this in mind, Chua co-created Cultivating Creative & Civic Capacities (C4), a project in collaboration with Cindy Foley, the director of education at the Columbus Museum of Art, and K–12 public school teachers. The project offers a set of classroom-ready ideas and resources for teachers to explore with students as they think about negotiating the complexities and tensions of living together in shared societies.

“We hypothesized that creativity could empower us to imagine how our world could be otherwise, explore and uncover the complexities of living together in society, and help bring our ideas into the world in thoughtful and sustainable ways,” says Chua. C4 is organized around four “I” words: investigate, imagine, influence, and interconnect that should help students “push beyond business-as-usual ways” and nurture civic-mindedness. “The idea is not to just keep making things,” she says, “but to slow down the thinking and doing processes so that whatever we create is sustainable and just.”

C4 resources are offered on the Columbus Museum of Art website, including this exercise for teachers to help students reflect on their assumptions, beliefs, and values regarding the purpose of school — not just for themselves, but for society overall. The exercise starts by exploring the question, “Why do you go to school?”

Towards the beginning of the year, ask students, “Why do you go to school?”
- Individually write or draw responses on large post its (hard-copy or virtual).
- Brainstorm and record answers in groups, followed by individual written responses.
- Interview each other and record each other’s answers.
Facilitate a discussion using something called the “see-think-wonder” routine:
- What do you notice about the different responses?
- What do they make you think or wonder?
- What makes you say that?” Record the responses on chart paper.
Ask students to create a map or other visual representation of the answers.
- Post the map in the classroom with the date. Occasionally return to the map throughout the year as ideas or questions arise that either support or challenge the ideas represented. Post them in a different color or using a post it
On another day, facilitate a discussion along the lines of, “Why are there schools?” or “What would society be like if most of us didn’t go to school?”
- Record highlights from the discussion and post them next to the map.
At the end of the year, revisit the earlier responses with the students.
- What do they notice? Ask them to complete the prompt, “I used to think the purpose(s) of school was … Now I think the purpose(s) of school is …”

Variations for this exercise:

If students would be more comfortable responding anonymously, ask them to choose an
alias to identify their responses.
You can also respond to the same question from the perspective of your role as teacher
and/or learner.
Share the responses of one class with another (grade, subject) and ask what students
notice.
Ask caregivers to respond to a similar question. (“Why does your child go to school?”) In
advance, ask caregivers to predict how their children would respond to the question about
why they go to school, and ask students to predict what their caregivers would say.

Questions for teachers to ask one another about this exercise:

Is it important to have a conversation with students about why they go to school? If so,
why?
What do you want students to see as the purposes of schooling, and how might you help
them see it that way?
Is there a connection you want students to be aware of between why you teach and why
they go to school? If so, what is it?
How important is it that students and teachers share similar purposes for being in school?
How does compulsory education change the context for thinking about this question?

Additional resources:

What Can Schools Learn from Artists? Project Zero helps teachers help students make sense of complexity

HGSE Selects 2026 Education Entrepreneurship Summer Fellows

rnagelhout — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:21:40 +0000

HGSE Selects 2026 Education Entrepreneurship Summer Fellows rnagelhout Mon, 08/31/2026 - 12:21 entrepreneurship Student and Alumni Stories Ryan Nagelhout

August 31, 2026

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The Harvard Graduate School of Education has announced its Education Entrepreneurship Summer Fellows for 2026. Launched in 2013, the program provides funding to allow students and alumni to work full-time on their entrepreneurial ventures during the summer months.

The Education Entrepreneurship Summer Fellows program is designed to support transformative change in the field of education by encouraging innovative ventures aiming to reshape and reimagine the educational landscape.

This summer’s fellowship awards were available to current master’s and doctoral students at HGSE, along with alumni with graduation dates of November 2025 or May 2026. Winning fellows submitted a reflection about their entrepreneurial efforts and how a fellowship grant would benefit their venture moving forward.

Applications were reviewed by a committee of HGSE faculty and administrators based on the project’s demonstrated interest and commitment to education entrepreneurship, the viability of the venture and identified success measures, its potential impact, and progress that proved the summer months would advance its mission and impact.

The four alumni receiving fellowship awards of $10,000 for their projects are:

● Ph.D. student Krista Galleberg and Nanvi Jhala, Ed.M.'25, for Emergent Inquiry Studio (EIS), a venture focused on bringing affordable, project-based learning into early childhood classrooms (ages 2–8) in India. EIS offers a scalable, cost-effective way to expand access to high-quality learning in underserved schools by using recycled materials to create structured “learning ecosystems” where children develop creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving skills through hands-on exploration.

● Livia Fares, Ed.M.'26, for Opta, an AI-powered career development platform designed to help underserved Brazilian university students transition into the workforce. Opta aims to improve social mobility by replacing biased hiring filters with a competency-based pipeline that prepares students through a four-step process where they complete a self-assessment, explore career matching and opportunity mapping, and evaluate overall job readiness.

● Daril Ndodjang, Ed.M.'26, for Village Labs, an AI-powered simulation platform that allows educational organizations to test programs and policies before implementing them in the real world. Grounded in emerging research on AI agent simulations, Village Labs simulates how different groups will react to proposed changes, highlighting potential conflicts and failure points early in the process. This approach helps organizations anticipate human dynamics, reducing costly implementation failures and improving program design.

● Purva Parwani, Ed.M.'26, for Young Founders Lab, a school-based entrepreneurship program designed to equip secondary students in underserved communities with real-world problem-solving and leadership skills. Using a hands-on curriculum, students identify local challenges, conduct research, and build ventures with mentorship support. Young Founders Lab aims to create a scalable model for embedding entrepreneurial thinking in low-income education systems by emphasizing learning through doing, culminating in student-led projects and presentations. The program plans to pilot across multiple schools in India.

HGSE Selects 2026 Education Entrepreneurship Summer Fellows Awards of $10,000 went to four students to work on their ventures this summer

HGSE One Community Day Marks the Start of Fall Semester

nschulmeyer — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:10:02 +0000

HGSE One Community Day Marks the Start of Fall Semester nschulmeyer Fri, 08/28/2026 - 11:10 dialogue HGSE community Ryan Nagelhout

One Community Day, a new HGSE tradition, brought everyone together to welcome the new students and celebrate the start of the semester

Photos: Jill Anderson

August 28, 2026

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New traditions and a renewed sense of community marked the start of the fall semester as the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) gathered on Monday to welcome its newest students.

Incoming students, faculty, and staff marched together from Appian Way and assembled at Harvard’s famed Sanders Theatre for One Community Day, with the school’s online master’s students enjoying the festivities remotely as music and messages of hope marked the beginning of a new semester.

Dean Nonie Lesaux welcomed HGSE’s incoming class of students, who join the nearly 1,500 who make up the school’s collective community. She noted the event was one of just two times every academic year that the entire school gathered in one place. The other, graduation festivities in May, serves as the culmination of the school’s shared commitment to education and improving outcomes in classrooms and communities far beyond Appian Way.

“Everything that happens between those two moments — the teaching, the research, the late nights, the hard-won learning breakthroughs and insights, the difficult conversations, the small kindnesses, the celebrations — that’s the real work of building community,” said Lesaux.

Lesaux’s welcome speech highlighted the impact HGSE’s faculty make on the educational landscape, the expertise and skills the school’s staff brings to campus, and the many different journeys incoming students have taken to join the Ed School community.

“We have students for whom this is the first chapter after college, and others in their 70s for whom this may be what the esteemed Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, professor emerita and beloved colleague, refers to as 'The Third Chapter,'” said Lesaux.

The dean also noted the diverse backgrounds and experiences of HGSE’s incoming class – 55 percent are first-generation graduate students, a third were first-generation undergraduates, and the class boasts students from across the United States and 60 different countries.

“That kind of geographical, linguistic, and cultural range, that is the very essence of HGSE,” she said. “You have traveled far and wide and that is wonderful. A warm welcome to each of you.”

Lesaux laid out the year ahead for students and staff, including a number of events such as the Askwith Education Forum, a continuation of HGSE’s Dialogue Across Differences initiative, and opportunities for connection for students, faculty, and staff in the months ahead. She noted these community-building efforts are intentional, and part of the school’s collective core values moving forward.

“You might reasonably ask why at a moment when so much can happen over a screen, our community is doubling down on presence. None of this is about nostalgia for an easier past or a rejection of our technological reality in the future,” said Lesaux. “Instead, it is a bet that in this era of AI and acceleration, the schools that combine cutting edge tools with an unshakable commitment to the humans in the room will be the ones that lead in what comes next.”

A trio of performances also featured on Monday, showcasing unique talents of staff, alumni, and incoming students. Soprano Janet Ross, senior coordinator of HGSE Career Services, performed a soaring rendition of the nursery rhyme "Old Mother Hubbard," set in the manner of Handel. Impressively filling Sanders Theatre with her voice, Ross’ rendition was juxtaposed by a spoken word performance from Trey Baker, Ed.M.’26, which punctuated a meditation on education with silences so heavy that creaks of movement on the well-worn wooden benches became part of the performance.

Both earned standing ovations from the assembled crowds, as did a performance from one of the newest members of the HGSE community. The event program closed with a jazz quartet performance led by incoming Education Leadership, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship student Jonathan Dely before the assembled community journeyed back to Radcliffe Yard for a celebratory barbeque.

One Community Day also featured four HGSE faculty members each delivering brief talks about their work, spending seven minutes each to address a subject they hope will inspire incoming students to make the most of their time on Appian Way.

Professor Nadine Gaab advocated for a preventative education mindset to help support learners before they begin struggling to read, while Professor Tom Kane shared insights from the Education Scorecard. Assistant Professor Ying Xu shared findings from her Child-Centered AI Lab, which detailed research on the relationship children have with artificial intelligence. Professor Shawn Ginwright, meanwhile, shared a message of hope inspired by his research into healing-centered leadership. Recalling a friend’s story about a trip to Europe where he toured cathedrals that took centuries to build, Ginwright reminded those assembled in Sanders, a cathedral of learning, that their work will have an impact experienced long after they’ve left HGSE as students.

“We’re all cathedral builders,” said Ginwright. “Each conversation we have this year, each relationship you have with your faculty and students and colleagues: We’re all trying to create this cathedral of hope, and that each conversation that you have and everything you do is contributing to that.”

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Trumpetist and ELOE student Jonathan Dely performs a jazz quartet with his band
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Professor Shawn Ginwright was one of four faculty members who delivered messages of hope and inspiration to the new students
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Sanders Theatre was filled with excitement and joy as it marked the start of the semester
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Dean Nonie Lesaux welcomes everyone to HGSE's One Community Day
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A community-wide cookout concluded the day's festivities
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Janet Ross takes the stage to sing "Old Mother Hubbard"

HGSE One Community Day Marks the Start of Fall Semester Music and new connections bring students, faculty and staff together at Sanders Theatre and Radcliffe Yard 

Focus on Culture, Not Strategy

nschulmeyer — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:52:57 +0000

Focus on Culture, Not Strategy nschulmeyer Mon, 08/24/2026 - 10:52 school culture school leadership Indigenous populations Professional Education at HGSE turnaround schools rural education Professional Education Participants Gary Miller

August 28, 2026

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Jerusha Ignacio

Photo courtesy of Jerusha Ignacio

Having taught and worked as an administrator for more than 16 years in settings including private schools, public schools, charter schools, and Head Start programs, Jerusha Ignacio has seen any number of education strategies come and go. Known for her affable, adventurous, and dedicated approach, Ignacio often felt frustrated that the strategies she and her colleagues employed seemed to fall short.

For Ignacio, this impact was disheartening. In 2024, she started her second stint as an elementary teacher at Ojo Encino Day School, a Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) school in Cuba, New Mexico, where she grew up. Students and faculty there were struggling: test scores were low, chronic absenteeism was high, ongoing staff changes were taking a toll, and the school was in turnaround.

Today, Ignacio’s outlook is more positive. Led by a focus not on strategy, but school culture, Ojo Encino has successfully moved out of turnaround. And Ignacio says her experience at Harvard Graduate School of Education’s School Turnaround Leaders (STL) professional education program played a key role in making that progress.

An Adventurous Spirit Meets Strategic Issues

An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, Ignacio grew up in Cuba, about 1.5 hours northwest of Albuquerque. After earning a bachelor’s degree in education, she started work at the Ojo Encino School in 2007. Ignacio left Ojo Encino in 2012 to pursue teaching and education administration jobs in other parts of the state and in Arizona.

The health needs of Ignacio’s parents prompted a move back to her home, and in 2024 Ignacio returned to Ojo, which by then was in turnaround status. There, she watched both students and faculty struggle their way through a number of different education strategies. But progress, she says, remained elusive, and positivity became harder to sustain.

“We were just throwing different strategies at these issues in our school climate, and it wasn't really changing anything,” says Ignacio.

Professional Development Brings a New Perspective

In 2024, the BIE offered Ignacio the opportunity to attend HGSE’s School Turnaround Leaders program. Created to help educators learn to drive fundamental shifts in school culture and instructional practice that result in rapid gains and ongoing performance, STL brings educators from around the world together on the Harvard campus each summer.

“When I heard about STL, I definitely jumped in and wanted to get involved,” Ignacio says. “I’m a learner, so anytime that I can improve myself, my career, I’m totally for that. It also meant helping to turn around a school in my community, so that was a driving force as well.”

At Harvard, Ignacio says, the days were packed with critical learning. She loved having the opportunity to connect with and learn from educators from around the world. But, she says, the critical takeaway from the program for her was a simple idea: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

According to Igancio, in order to turn a school around, educators must first focus on culture change. And it’s only when the culture is ready to welcome improvement can strategy truly do its part.

“A lot of our work has been focused on our core values and trying to look at it through their indigenous lens. You know, ultimately, we don't want just smart kids. We want good relatives and great adults after they leave us.”

Jerusha Ignacio

Using Navajo Culture to Create Strong Educator Teams

So, how can educators focus on culture change? A good place to start, Ignacio says, is by building connections and trusting relationships.

“You can mandate initiatives and protocols,” she says, “but you can’t mandate trust among people. So, culture becomes this lens through which we begin evaluating any decision that happens in the school. And when you start thinking that way, then you approach things differently. You're able to connect with people better.”

For example, Ignacio and her colleagues have been putting a sharp focus on creating a strong, connected community of educators, drawing on Navajo culture to help make those connections.

“We are part of an indigenous tribe, and we look to our elders, because they're essentially knowledge keepers. And the culture of our school was trying to emulate that. We started doing icebreakers during staff meetings, being intentional with those questions that will open people up to what knowledge they bring with them.”

Simple questions like “What's your favorite memory of reading? How did you learn to read?” she says, “opened up this dialogue and we learned a lot about one another, and how we’re connected, even though we’re all from different areas. And we also learned the struggles. Doing that helps build a stronger team.”

Navajo Culture in the Classroom

Ignacio and her colleagues have also used Navajo traditions to try to build a stronger classroom culture, she says. “A lot of our work has been focused on our core values and trying to look at it through their indigenous lens. You know, ultimately, we don't want just smart kids. We want good relatives and great adults after they leave us.”

Some of this work includes bringing Navajo stories into the classroom. “We use the stories to talk about Navajo core values such as honor,” Ignacio says. “Then we explore questions to define and build on shared culture: What does honor look like in your family? What does honor look like in the community? What does it look like as a Navajo person? Why do, and how do, we honor people?”

Beyond Turnaround: A New Navajo Curriculum

All this focus on school culture has paid off. Ojo Encino is now out of turnaround. And Ignacio, her colleagues, and members of the Navajo community are working to build on their success by creating a K-8 curriculum program that teaches the Navajo language.

The program is scheduled for full release in fall 2026, but Ignacio and the team have already been testing the curriculum in the classroom. The results, she says, go well beyond teaching children Navajo. The work has helped connect elders and young people and build cultural pride. The curriculum used at Ojo is also being turned into an open-source template for other schools interested in building their own Indigenous culture-based language programs around the world.

All of these connections, says Ignacio, are reinforcing the school’s new culture. “People perform differently when they feel seen,” she says. “They’re valued; they're connected. And that's a big part of what I learned at Harvard. It all starts with people. Before you can reach any student's brain or mind, you have to reach the heart first. And that’s true with adults, too.”

For educators at HGSE's School Turnaround Leaders professional ed program, lasting change begins with a stronger school culture

What the Presidents Read

nschulmeyer — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:10:20 +0000

What the Presidents Read nschulmeyer Tue, 08/04/2026 - 14:10 Student and Alumni Stories history books politics civics Lory Hough

August 10, 2026

Ed. Magazine

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Teddy Roosevelt worshipped Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Barack Obama liked “adventurous series” like the Hardy Boys and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. William Howard Taft would sit around the fireplace with his family and read Aesop’s Fables.

"What the Presidents Read" was published by Rowman Littlefield Publishers

These are just a few of the tidbits in the new book, What the Presidents Read, by Elizabeth Goodenough, M.A.T.’71, a lecturer at the University of Michigan, and Marilynn Olson, a professor emerita at Texas State University. The idea for the book started back in 2017, when Goodenough heard a lecture Olson was giving at the Children’s Literature Association conference about Billy Whiskers, the story of a cheeky goat that was a favorite of John Kennedy and his brothers. Impressed by the talk, Goodenough proposed a collaboration, and the two began reading presidential biographies and combed through letters, speeches, and family libraries. The result is this collection of inside stories about the reading habits and favorite books of U.S. presidents, including original essays and commentary from historians, journalists, biographers, and some of the presidents themselves.

“As researchers of childhood studies,” they write, “we found that knowing what U.S. presidents read in youth offers fascinating insights into their personalities, era, and politics.” A childhood book, they add, “is much more than just a story — for the presidents, it may represent a turn in the course of history.”

It’s easy to imagine, for example, that the seed for Bill Clinton’s interest in world matters may have started when his Mammaw read passages to him from the World Book Encyclopedia. Or that Herbert Hoover’s life trajectory changed when a teacher, Miss Grey, introduced the high school dropout to the local library and to books like Ivanhoe.

As Ted Widmer, author of a biography about Lincoln wrote in the introduction to What the Presidents Read, quoting Harry Truman, “readers of good books, particularly books of biography and history, are preparing themselves for leadership. Not all readers become leaders. But leaders must be readers.” He added, “as this book shows, that has largely been the case. If a few of our leaders have been less bookish than others, it is still true that all of them thought deeply about the world around then, as children, and books were a part of that education.”

Goodenough warns, however, about making an automatic link between childhood reading and future presidential leadership.

“As children's literature people, we know that influence comes in many forms, depending upon a reader’s personality, situation, age, interests — there is no one influence from a book for everyone,” she says.

Dwight Eisenhower, she points out, was interested in military history. Lydon B. Johnson in governmental workings. Harry Truman in biographies of leaders. “It feels as though perhaps their reading enlarged their knowledge and ability to carry out something they were born to do,” she says. “For [Abraham] Lincoln, Aesop and the Bible spoke to how people behaved and informed his rhetorical style. In his youth, with less than a year of schooling, he drew crowds of listeners. [Gerald] Ford’s reading of Horatio Alger gave him encouragement to believe that he, too, could rise to honorable and serviceable positions with guidance in how to do it. A kind of blueprint: The books [he read] often featured boys born into positions like his own.” As essayist Claudia Nelson writes in the book, Ronald Reagan's preferred childhood reading often included heroes who lived by standards of morality and fair play, including the Count of Monte Cristo and Sir Lancelot.

What the Presidents Read doesn’t only cover the more voracious readers like Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. “It also goes deeply into the dark corners and interstices,” writes Widmer. “Our more obscure presidents are here, along with those whose presidencies were doomed by external events or their own shortcomings.” And although the word “presidents” appears in the title, the book also details the reading habits of some first ladies like Eleanor Roosevelt, Abigail Adams, and Hillary Clinton. First children are also highlighted, including one the White House’s most infamous young readers: Amy Carter, who would bring books like Charlie and the Giant Glass Elevator and The Story of the Gettysburg Address to state dinners. As her mother once wrote in a description of her husband Jimmy Carter’s inaugural ball, “Jimmy looked handsome in his tuxedo, Amy, adorable in her blue velveteen gown and cape, with The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler under her arm. She didn’t intend to be bored.”

What the Presidents Read New book by alum looks at childhood favorites of our commanders-in-chief

When Educators Lead, Their Professional Development Works Better

nschulmeyer — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:22:02 +0000

When Educators Lead, Their Professional Development Works Better nschulmeyer Tue, 08/04/2026 - 12:22 Student and Alumni Stories school districts district leadership professional education libraries teachers and teaching field engagement collaboration Lory Hough

(L-r): Mark Lonergan, Ed.M.'00; Paul Tritter, Ed.M.'12; and fellow Boston educators at a conference in 2025

Photos courtesy of Mark Lonergan

August 17, 2026

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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When Paul Tritter, Ed.M.’12, took on the inaugural role of director of professional learning for the Boston Teacher’s Union, the goal was clear: in collaboration with Boston Public Schools (BPS), figure out how to improve professional learning for educators across the district.

He started, as often happens when someone is new, by holding focus sessions to hear firsthand from educators about their professional learning experiences. A monthly working group followed, allowing teachers and administrators to share ideas and give feedback on district systems and initiatives. One strong and consistent theme emerged: “Educators wanted to be able to meet and share practices with people from other schools who did the same work they did,” he says. The need was especially acute in a city with many smaller schools, where an educator might be the only person in their building teaching a certain grade level or subject.

From this need, the Telescope Network was created. A collaboration of the union and the district, Telescope is a professional development (PD) initiative where educators lead their own professional learning. Instead of top-down training, teachers share what they do best and learn directly with and from their peers.

For the past seven years, Mark Lonergan, Ed.M.’00, a long-time teacher who taught at Boston Arts Academy for 14 years, has co-led the project with a small team, including several Ed School alums: Tritter; Shakera Ford Walker, Ed.M.’02, an assistant superintendent for teacher leadership and development; and Oluwanifemi “Nifemi” Kolayemi, Ed.M.’15, a “networker” and point person for the city’s Wicked Math project.

An important part of Lonergan’s work involves surveying educators every spring about what they want to be learning from their professional development and then diving into the data to figure out which topics “bubble up” as most needed.

“And then we go out looking for the bright spots — who's doing it well,” he says. This past academic year, for example, K–12 librarians said they struggled with creating spaces that were welcoming and inclusive. Telescope, with the help of BPS central office staff, identified who was doing this well — and then they visited their libraries.

“There is an assumption that if educators like a certain professional learning experience it must not have challenged them in any way. We challenge that culture and those assumptions by starting from the premise that educators want to do better for their students."

Paul Tritter, Ed.M.’12

“We used video to capture a tour of their spaces and interview them,” he says. “We then brought all of the K–12 librarians together to do a PD where we toured their spaces, in person or virtually.” More interviews and a debrief followed and each librarian picked one change idea — one thing that they were going to bring back to their own space to try out. The group continued to meet, allowing for check-ins, and then tweaked their change idea based on feedback.

“It’s really a different kind of PD, in part because the topic comes from what people want to be learning, and then also because it’s not just built on one expert telling you what you should do, but a real colleague who’s struggling in the same space as you are and showing you what they’re doing,” Lonergan says. “It’s also giving folks space to re-contextualize those challenges in their spaces and then offering follow-up support.”

Last fall, Telescope joined Wicked Math, an initiative that grew out of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s push to expand access to higher-level math for BPS students. Since then, Telescope has hosted 11 professional development sessions related to Wicked Math, and participants responded positively: Nearly 97% said they would recommend a Telescope session to a colleague.

Kolayemi, Ed.M.’15, is Telescope’s point person for the initiative. A former BPS teacher for eight years with a decade of experience in instructional design and teacher coaching, she says what excites her the most about Telescope’s participation in Wicked Math is the model of using teacher-to-teacher learning to improve students’ experiences.

Secondary librarians touring a colleague’s space as part of a peer observation

“Every math teacher I’ve met through this work genuinely wants to make math meaningful, empowering, and relevant for all their students,” she says. “As a teacher, I’ve participated in professional learning that didn’t always feel actionable within my own classroom context. Telescope’s Wicked Math learning sites are different because the learning begins by observing colleagues who teach the same student population, in the same district, with similar resource challenges. There’s an incredible sense of empowerment that comes from realizing, ‘This classroom looks like mine, and these students are like mine. I love what I’m seeing, and I can’t wait to try it on Monday.’” There’s also a benefit for the host teacher, she says, when they receive thoughtful feedback and affirmation from peers on their work.

For Tritter, this circles back to an answer he gave in an interview in 2012, when he was named an Intellectual Contribution Award winner at the Ed School. When asked to name something he learned getting his master’s degree that he’d take throughout his career, he said, “I learned that the only thing that needs to be brought to scale is the idea that the people who work and learn in schools can learn to solve their own problems.”

That mindset, he says now, is exactly what led to the Telescope Network being created — and what drives his work and the work of the other Ed School alums involved.

“Most systems operate from the premise that educators don't want to change or improve. This results in a traditional top-down culture around professional learning where the implicit goal is to force teachers to change their practice against their will,” he says. “There is an assumption that if educators like a certain professional learning experience it must not have challenged them in any way. We challenge that culture and those assumptions by starting from the premise that educators want to do better for their students. We design powerful learning with rigor and accountability that educators appreciate because it is deeply relevant and actually helps them help their students.”

When Educators Lead, Their Professional Development Works Better By centering teacher expertise and collaboration, the HGSE alums leading Boston’s Telescope Network are proving that peer-led PD can be relevant, rigorous, and effective

A Common Language for Improvement

nschulmeyer — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:47:42 +0000

A Common Language for Improvement nschulmeyer Thu, 07/30/2026 - 13:47 Data Wise data evidence professional education Professional Education at HGSE Professional Education Participants Megan Maffucci

Data Wise Workshop at HGSE, 2025

July 31, 2026

News

The latest research, perspectives, and highlights from the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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When Gustavo Luna, Ed.M.’22, Ed.L.D.’25, first heard about the Data Wise approach, he was intrigued, if a bit cautious. The term “data” conjured images of massive spreadsheets, regression analyses, and, of course, test scores — helpful for researchers but not something educators could use in their everyday practice. But after taking a Data Wise course at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and working with special education professionals at a school in New York City, he saw how much untapped, useful information was hiding in plain sight.

One teacher he supported, who was working with a young student with behavioral disabilities, kept a log of how many seconds the student was able to hold a pencil each day. She was collecting data to track his progress, Luna realized; she just didn’t call it data. “Teaching is a practice. We never master it. Every school, every student is unique,” he says. “Knowing how to recognize, use, and, importantly, share data is what allows us to improve.”

Today, Luna is one of more than 200 certified coaches who are qualified to teach the Data Wise framework. He mentors other educators to use evidence from a wide variety of sources — from simple classroom logs to observational data — to better understand what is happening with learning and teaching in their classrooms so they feel empowered to make meaningful changes.

Understanding Data

Data Wise first took shape more than 20 years ago, as schools were just beginning to wade through an influx of assessment data required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Professor Richard Murnane convened a working group at the time of educators from Boston Public Schools and researchers from HGSE to discuss what it would take to make use of that data in service of improving instruction. Over the course of two years, the group realized that what schools really needed was step-by-step guidance on how to use all this new information.

Looking back, Senior Lecturer Kathy Boudett, then an HGSE postdoctoral student and current executive director of Data Wise, recalls, “Nothing I had done professionally before then felt so important. I knew we needed to figure this out.”

Not long after, the now-iconic Data Wise “swoosh” was born, outlining the eight steps of the Data Wise Improvement Process, and the core habits that support this work. It may look a bit complicated, but educators like Andrea Kayne, Ed.M.’90, will tell you it works.

The Data Wise Framework

Source: Boudett, K.P., & Bocala, C. (2025). "Data Wise: Educators Collaborating So Each Student Thrives." Harvard Education Press (p. 7).

“Suddenly, data was central to how administrators, teachers, and school counselors were being evaluated, but almost no one had the frameworks to contextualize that data, challenge it, collect their own, or act on it without fear,” says Kayne, who was program director of educational leadership at DePaul University at the time. “Data Wise was the answer I had been looking for — it created real professional learning communities: collaborative rather than competitive, empowering rather than punitive.”

Two decades later, the Data Wise Project has built an international network of certified coaches who have supported schools and systems from Oregon to Maryland and Illinois to Florida, as well as in countries such as Australia, Chile, and Brazil. More than 5,000 educators have attended the Data Wise Leadership Institute on Harvard’s campus or on-site in school districts.

Led by Boudett, the team has released a host of new resources on the Data Wise website and is expanding professional learning opportunities to meet the evolving needs of schools and systems — with an eye to reaching even more educators in the coming years.

From Process to Purpose

As educators become savvier about data, the driving question behind the work has shifted from “How do we help educators make productive use of data?” to “How can we use a wide range of data to realize more equitable outcomes for students?”

And it’s not just about the technical use of data. “It's about getting teams of educators on the same page about what they see, what they want to improve and how, and then committing to doing it,” explains Lecturer Candice Bocala, Ed.D.'14, Data Wise research director.

That kind of collaboration is a rare antidote in a time of deep educator burnout and turnover. “Teaching can be really lonely,” Boudett says. “What we hear is that having this process allows educators to talk about work with colleagues in a way that's fun and exciting. They ask, ‘What can we do to really meet the needs of each of our learners? What are you trying?’ The framework deliberately connects educators to one another and to why they went into teaching in the first place.”

The result, she says, is that educators develop a common language for talking about improvement and decision-making. “Data Wise is meant to be done in teams,” Boudett says. “When you have multiple people looking at the same data, people will see different things, and the conversations about what to do about the evidence will be richer.”

As the network of coaches grows, they have helped the Data Wise framework itself evolve. One visible example is the “equity halo,” a series of reflective questions that now accompany each step of the swoosh, including “Whose stories do we tell/not tell? Are we measuring what matters?”

“Many of my former students, now working as principals and superintendents, speak about how central the Data Wise framework remains to their practice years later. That kind of staying power is not common in professional development. It tells you something real about the methodology."

Andrea Kayne, Ed.M.’90

Coaches saw teams working through the steps, but they often struggled to examine longstanding inequities in schools and, as a result, missed the needs of the most marginalized students. One coach, Darnisa Amante-Jackson, Ed.L.D.’16, provided a critical insight: You can’t have separate lessons about the importance of equity; you need to integrate it at every step. Other coaches echoed that it was time to position equity at the heart of the process.

Those conversations directly influenced the third edition of Data Wise: Educators Collaborating So Each Learner Thrives, which was published last year in time for Data Wise’s 20th anniversary.

A New Chapter

From its earliest days, Data Wise has been guided by this type of practitioner feedback. Its latest focus is creating local hubs of expertise — teams inside districts who can carry the work forward. In one local district, for example, Data Wise recently certified five district-level leaders who are now using data wisely in their own practice, supporting school teams in using the framework in their settings, and bringing school teams together to learn from one another about how improvement happens.

The project is also investing in new ways to reach educators. With the help of a recent philanthropic gift from Kayne, Data Wise is expanding its online offerings, including a free, asynchronous introductory module called Exploring Data Wise, launching later this year.

The new module — which replaces the massive open online course (MOOC) based on an earlier edition of the book — will ensure educators anywhere in the world can access an overview of the updated framework at any time. It gives teams a cost-free way to gauge how deeply their school or system is engaged in collaborative inquiry and to explore how Data Wise could be a resource if they choose to pursue more intensive professional learning.

“I invested in Data Wise because it works, because it is rigorous, and because it treats educators as professionals capable of deep inquiry,” says Kayne, who is now creating an edtech platform for international and independent schools. “Many of my former students, now working as principals and superintendents, speak about how central the Data Wise framework remains to their practice years later. That kind of staying power is not common in professional development. It tells you something real about the methodology. I see a gift to Data Wise as a gift with a very long half-life.”

One constant over 20 years, Boudett points out, has been educators' desire to improve outcomes. Coaches like Luna can attest that they are eager to change schools for the better and hungry for ways to do it well. As it evolves, Data Wise will continue to equip educators at all levels and around the world with a common language for turning data into action — and lasting impact.

“Deciding to use Data Wise doesn’t make the work easy. Working collaboratively to look at evidence of learning is hard, and looking honestly at your own practice is even harder,” Boudett notes. “But educators tell us that the ‘swoosh’ offers a roadmap, so when they hit bumps, they know where to check in and how to keep moving.”

Luna, pictured above, recently ran Data Wise workshops at schools in Arizona and New York City. He credits Data Wise for helping his own team at Kern Tutoring, where he is founder and executive director, embrace a culture of continuous feedback to better serve school districts in California. Photos courtesy of Gustavo Luna.

A Common Language for Improvement Now in its third decade, the Data Wise Project is innovating to help schools use evidence to improve learning, address inequities, and strengthen collaboration