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Trade Talk

nschulmeyer — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 19:27:02 +0000

Trade Talk nschulmeyer Thu, 11/05/2026 - 14:27 Harvard Education Press books Lory Hough

"Schooling Against the Prison" will be the first book released in the 8 Story Street trade series

November 6, 2026

News

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

When Harvard Education Press (HEP) decided to launch a new trade series called 8 Story Street after decades of publishing primarily academic-focused books, it was no surprise that their debut trade author would be someone who bridged both worlds: the academic and the public.

"Schooling Against the Prison" by Marc Lamont Hill was published by Harvard Education Press in 2026

The author, Marc Lamont Hill, is a professor of urban education and anthropology at City University of New York Graduate Center. He is also a host and commentator for media outlets like BET News and TheGrio, and the owner of a bookstore in Philadelphia called Uncle Bobbie’s. He even co-hosted reunion episodes of VH1s reality show, Basketball Wives. His new book, Schooling Against the Prison, comes out in November.

Steven Rodriguez, HEP’s marketing specialist, says an author like Lamont Hill — a renowned scholar and public intellectual — is ideal to launch the new trade series.

“His work reflects the qualities we hope will come to define 8 Story Street: intellectual rigor, accessibility, style, and a distinctive point of view,” he says. “Marc is also an amazing writer, and the book is really readable.”

The itch to start a trade series was something Jess Thomson started thinking about when she joined HEP as executive director in 2022 after more than 25 years in publishing.

“When I first came, one of the immediate things I recognized was this need to broaden the kinds of books we’re publishing because you just can’t keep preaching to the choir,” she says. “We have had a very clear, distinct market. It’s people who are interested in education. It’s teachers. It’s practitioners. It’s administrators in both higher ed and K–12. And it’s time for us, as part of our growth strategy, to expand our reader base. Going into trade is the biggest, broadest market that you can attempt to reach.”

This means bringing in a new audience: the general public, says Rodriguez. “The trade books are not aimed at specialists. You don’t have to be immersed in the literature yourself.” The goal is to publish books that avoid jargon and instead value prose and communicate ideas clearly. “That’s really key for the series.” Trade books will also be smaller in size and sold at a lower price. HEP will approach marketing and publicity differently, pitching reviews to mainstream outlets like The New York Times and Kirkus and working with literary agents.

“[This series is] trying to make knowledge accessible and available to everyone. This is not research that’s only accessible to people in the ivory tower — it’s responding to the current moment.”

Shannon Davis, executive editor of Harvard Education Press

Thomson says that doesn’t mean trade books won’t have heft.

“The books that are going to be on the trade list will be based on research,” she says. “They will have that foundation and won’t be straying too far from our regular mission.”

Shannon Davis, executive editor of the press, says they will initially publish two or three trade books a year before expanding. After Lamont Hill’s Schooling Against the Prison, other topics include liberating education from its past, gentrification and childcare, and good intentions and bad incentives in higher education. “That's part of the aim of the series as well,” Davis says. “To broaden horizons a little bit, step outside of just education research, and look at all of these other spheres that are impacting how children grow up and learn.”

And now is the right time to do this with a new trade series, says Rodriguez, noting ongoing public debates about the value of higher education, equity, and attacks on teaching.

“This new series is partially trying to respond to some of those discussions and trying to make the knowledge accessible and available to everyone,” he says.

“This is not research that’s only accessible to people in the ivory tower — it’s responding to the current moment."

Trade Talk Harvard Ed Press introduces new book series with the general public in mind

Tackle Chronic Absenteeism by Keeping Families Engaged

mjorgensen — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:37:48 +0000

Tackle Chronic Absenteeism by Keeping Families Engaged mjorgensen Fri, 10/16/2026 - 15:37 family engagement absenteeism Research Professional Education Faculty Lory Hough

Illustration: Eric Palma

October 28, 2026

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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During fall 2020, about six months after the pandemic shut down schools across the country, Professor Karen Mapp, Ed.D.’99, started hearing stories from her superintendent friends about drops in learning. Specifically, schools with a strong culture of engaging with families weren’t seeing the same drops that schools without were seeing. The stories didn’t surprise Mapp. They were proof of what she had been teaching and talking about for years: Family engagement matters.

But there was another piece of these stories beyond academics that began to pique her interest: Strong family engagement also seemed to be having an impact on student absenteeism once schools started to reopen their doors.

“Schools with strong family engagement didn’t see the same challenges around getting kids to come back to school,” says Mapp, a former deputy superintendent for family and community engagement in Boston Public Schools. “They didn’t see the same rates of chronic absenteeism. I was really interested in trying to figure this out.”

It’s a critical issue to tackle. The U.S. Department of Education defines chronic absenteeism as students missing 10% or more of school, or about 18 days. According to the American Enterprise Institute, a policy think tank in Washington, D.C., chronic absenteeism surged from 15% of K–12 students in 2019 to more than 28% in 2022. By spring 2024, that number was still around 23%.

With these sobering figures in mind, Mapp decided to join forces with TNTP (originally the New Teacher Project) and Learning Heroes, two national education nonprofits, as well as Eyal Bergman, Ed.M.’14, Ed.L.D.’21, a strategic adviser for Learning Heroes, and Todd Rogers, a professor at the Kennedy School, on a three-phase study to explore why — and how — schools with strong family engagement prior to the pandemic were seeing lower rates of chronic absenteeism.

In phase one of the study, the team analyzed data from more than 3,000 schools in Illinois — a state chosen because they believed “it strongly reflects the diversity of the entire country” in terms of race, income, age, religion, and education. To determine a school’s level of family engagement, the team used each school’s “family involvement” score from the state's 5Essentials survey, an annual survey of teachers, students, and parents. The survey measures five areas that impact student achievement, including: effective leaders, collaborative teachers, supportive environments, ambitious instruction, and involved families. The latter measures, among other things, how much parents are included in school decisions and the trust level between parents, teachers, and staff.

“What our study found was that strong family engagement is clearly associated with better student outcomes,” Bergman says. “Schools with strong family engagement scores pre-pandemic experienced a far smaller increase in chronic absenteeism post-pandemic. This is with more than 3,000 schools in our data set, and after controlling for dozens of school and community characteristics.”

For example, they found that schools with weaker engagement had a 15.95% increase in students’ chronic absenteeism when comparing outcomes from 2018–2019 and 2021–2022. This has an impact on state test scores: Schools with stronger family engagement, for example, performed 27% better in English and 37% better in math, on average, on Illinois state standardized assessment tests. As the team noted in a recent report shared on their website, “the difference we observe for schools with stronger family engagement is so large that it is comparable to having 114 additional days of in‑person learning in ELA and 96 additional days in math.”

For the second stage of the study, the team wanted to analyze and unpack what schools with strong family engagement were actually doing — the “how” of their success.

“What is it that those schools do when they say that they’re engaged more with their families?” Mapp says. “What does the ‘more’ actually look like? What is it that these schools are doing?”

"We know that these partnerships between schools and families really make a difference. And now we’ve got even more evidence about what those partnerships should look like.”

Professor Karen Mapp

She says so far what they are uncovering aligns with a document called Partners in Education: Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships that she helped develop in 2010 for then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The document’s framework was meant to help the U.S. Department of Education understand and develop ways for schools across the country to build stronger family relationships.

“What we’re finding out is exactly what’s in the dual capacity- building framework,” she says. “It’s absolutely perfectly aligned with what we say are the essential conditions for strong partnerships.” One common condition that schools with strong family partnerships have, for example, is being proactive, consistent, and persistent in how they communicate with families, and that doesn’t mean just translating material into various languages. Successful schools also offer student-led parent-teacher conferences and have families sign off on reading time and homework. Successful schools emphasize a schoolwide mindset that sees families as equal partners on the same team as the communischools. As one principal told them, “The ‘why’ is pretty simple: We don’t achieve our mission without our families. It’s as simple as that.”

For the final stage of the study, the team will design a new tool that educators, policymakers, and researchers can use to fully measure the strength of a school’s family engagement efforts. Currently, no reliable tool like this exists.

“In the first phase, we identified that yes, family engagement makes a difference; and here’s how during COVID these kids still had better grades and test scores and chronic absenteeism wasn’t as bad,” Mapp says, compared with schools with weaker family partnerships. “Phase two, we found out what exactly those schools did. Now we’ve got identifiers of what best practice looks like, and we want to develop a tool that schools and districts can use to actually measure the strength of their engagement.”

Bergman says the plan is to test the tool in a national sample of schools.

“Ultimately,” he says, “we hope this field-wide measurement tool will provide schools and districts with a practical instrument to support implementation of research-informed strategies that make a meaningful difference for students.”

Mapp says it’s clear that educators want and need this kind of tool because, without it, they are left doing what they have always done to engage families: the mandatory parent-teacher conference, for example, where teachers talk at parents for 15 minutes, or hosting monthly PTA meetings in person and at night that don't mesh with busy parent schedules.

“There are a lot of reasons educators keep doing what they do, but one is because they haven’t been trained on what effective practice looks like,” says Mapp. “So quite frankly, that’s why people like me are still in business: People have to unlearn a lot of the bad practices that they’ve learned over the years. The bottom line is they haven’t learned what works.

“What I’m trying to do and others are trying to do is both the prevention part, which is to make sure that our new teachers have this knowledge and the right mindsets, and then we’ve got to do the rehab part, which is taking the folks that are already in the field and providing them with professional development so that they don’t keep making the same mistakes around engaging with their families,” she says. “We know that these partnerships between schools and families really make a difference. And now we’ve got even more evidence about what those partnerships should look like.”

Learn more about Mapp’s upcoming institute (January 2027), Family Engagement in Education: Creating Effective Home and School Partnerships.

Family Engagement Takeaways

Schools that were doing a good job engaging their families before COVID didn’t see the same drops in learning post-COVID that schools without strong engagement were seeing. Those schools also had an easier time getting kids to come back to classrooms once schools started to reopen.
Key characteristics that schools with strong family partnerships have include: being proactive, consistent, and persistent in how they communicate with families beyond just translating material into various languages; offering student-led parent-teacher conferences; asking families to sign off on reading time and homework; emphasizing a schoolwide mindset that sees families as equal partners.
Teachers and other educators often need better training and professional development to “unlearn” what they’ve typically done in the past around engaging with parents and families in order to recognize that partnerships between school and families make a difference.

Research from Professor Karen Mapp and colleagues shows that strong family-school partnerships can help curb chronic absenteeism and improve student outcomes

A B(ee) Student

mjorgensen — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 18:51:35 +0000

A B(ee) Student mjorgensen Fri, 10/16/2026 - 14:51 OEL Stories Student and Alumni Stories Lory Hough

Tyler Hahn at work in his favorite sweaterat the Cherokee Public Library

Photos: Kathryn Gamble

October 30, 2026

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Current Online Master’s in Education student Tyler Hahn never expected to become a beekeeper. But then the bank across the street from the Cherokee Public Library where he works called one morning to say that thousands of bees were swarming in front of the building.

His first reaction was, “It’s rural Iowa. Things like that happen.”

Then he went outside.

That’s when he saw what had alarmed the usually laid-back bankers: A basketball-sized clump — upwards of 40,000 honeybees — was hanging off a giant Colorado spruce on the library’s property.

After consulting with city hall and the police sergeant (a beekeeper who was out of town), Hahn reached out to the county naturalist who told him to hold on, she’d be there in 10 minutes.

“She came in looking like a Power Ranger in her wide ensemble ready to go,” says Hahn, director of the library since 2020. A comedy of errors that started around breakfast and ended as people were sitting down to dinner led to getting the swarm out of the tree and transported to a local park where the bees would eventually become part of educational programming for schools and 4-H groups.

Tyler Hahn checks on his hives

Then something else happened: The adventure sparked Hahn’s curiosity. Could he keep his own bees?

“It led me down the road wanting to research everything about beekeeping and talking with local beekeepers,” he says. This included participating in his first honey extraction, where the honey is separated from the beeswax combs, and learning that local beekeepers had upwards of five or six hives in their backyards.

“I thought, this is bonkers. I would never have thought neighbors would be OK with that, and so a little part of me also got interested in the legal side of beekeeping and what different ordinances look like,” Hahn says. In true librarian fashion, he continued researching and joined beekeeping chat groups. He took an intro to beekeeping course online through the University of Montana. Then, during the spring of 2021, Hahn finally set up his own hive. Unfortunately, it died during a long cold snap, as did a second hive after skunks, with their sting-resistant coats, muscled in. His third and current hive has been thriving for more than two years.

Hahn says that when he checks on the bees daily, he wears a hood and gloves and has, thankfully, never been stung.

“I was honestly afraid at first, but there are a lot of different tools and precautions that you can use,” including a little smoker that he puffs to mellow the bees if they’re getting agitated. Overall, he says it’s a misconception that this type of bee is dangerous or a risk if your neighbors are beekeepers.

Hahn displays a bee frame

“The bees are so sweet and gentle,” he says. “Of course, I wouldn’t want somebody to accidentally get stung or misidentify a bee swarm for hornets, who can be zesty, but not all bees are going to get you like you’re in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.”

What bees will get you is … more bees. Or, more specifically, more bee swag. Since becoming a beekeeper, family and friends in his “hive” are constantly gifting him with bee-related items, like a bee spatula and bee potholders. He even has a bright yellow cardigan with bees all over it. Just about every bee-themed thing you can think of, he says he has.

“And the only thing that has stopped the onslaught of bee things this past year has been getting into Harvard,” he says. “Now, of course, it’s Harvard everything.”

Meet the OEL student who confronted a massive swarm and became a beekeeper in the process

From Australia to Appian Way

nschulmeyer — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:24:16 +0000

From Australia to Appian Way nschulmeyer Fri, 10/16/2026 - 11:24 Professional Education at HGSE professional education Principals' Center principals international development global education Professional Education Participants Gary Miller

Each year, Western Australia sends 20 K–12 principals to HGSE for The Principals’ Center’s flagship leadership programs.

Photo: HGSE Professional Education

November 2, 2026

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

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When 94 school leaders from more than a dozen countries gathered at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) last summer for Achieving Excellence: Leadership Development for Principals (AEL), the room felt less like a traditional course and more like a global summit for K–12 leadership.

Over the course of a week, principals, assistant principals, teacher leaders, and system‑level officials wrestled with challenges from student engagement and mental health to widening literacy gaps, as well as the funding shortages that define today’s education environment. The work was deep, focused, and collaborative, including Professor Monica Higgins’ Mount Everest case study, during which participants examined how leaders make high-stakes decisions under pressure, interpret imperfect information, and align teams around a shared goal.

Among the 94 participants representing 16 U.S. states and more than 12 countries was a 20‑person delegation from Western Australia, part of a decade‑long partnership that has reshaped how principals there see their role: not just as school leaders, but as system‑level change agents.

A Phone Call that Inspired a Fellowship

“At the end of 2015, we received a phone call from the Department of Education of Western Australia,” recalls Catherine Gardner, director of The Principals’ Center at HGSE. “They were interested in starting a fellowship program for principals at what back then was called the Independent Public Schools Initiative. They’re public schools within the public system, but with a little more freedom to chart their own pathways, similar to charter schools in the U.S.”

In Western Australia’s context, policies around curriculum, hiring, and budgetary decisions are set centrally, rather than by local school boards. Yet within this “connected autonomy” structure, principals still have meaningful influence over the culture, instructional focus, and improvement strategies within their schools and, increasingly, across the system.

The idea that emerged from that initial call between Harvard and Western Australia was straightforward: Each year, Western Australia would send 20 K–12 principals to Harvard to participate in The Principals’ Center’s flagship leadership programs. After the intensive summer program, each principal would return home to lead a year-long project aimed at a specific problem of practice, under the supervision of a senior system leader. They would also participate in the 12-week Developing Myself program module, helping them deepen their personal leadership development.

“The impact has been profound, and the contribution hasn’t been just to our schools, it has contributed to our systems thinking, policy, and practice. That’s why we made this commitment.”

Melesha Sands, deputy director general of people and student achievement for the Department of Education West Australia

From Leading Schools to Shaping Systems

In the first four years of the program, 80 principals from across Western Australia completed professional education programs in Cambridge, many of them making significant impact not only in their own schools but across the region through system-wide policy and practice.

One of those early participants was Melesha Sands, now the deputy director general of people and student achievement for the Department of Education West Australia. As a principal in the first cohort, she arrived at Harvard focused on her own school. Today, she helps steer education for nearly 355,000 young people across Western Australia, and last summer, she returned to Harvard to mentor the next generation of fellows.

“I was fortunate enough to be one of those very first principals who had the opportunity to come and study,” Sands says. “The impact has been profound, and the contribution hasn’t been just to our schools, it has contributed to our systems thinking, policy, and practice. That’s why we made this commitment.”

A Two-Year Learning Pathway

After an interruption due to COVID-related travel restrictions, the program, known as the Western Australia Public School Principal Fellowship Program, resumed in 2025. Since then, the learning experience has evolved to include four components that unfold over the course of two years.

First, participants attend Achieving Excellence: Leadership Development for Principals (AEL) at Harvard. The cohort learns alongside international peers, engaging in case studies and working sessions that push them to think simultaneously as instructional leaders and systems thinkers.

Next, after returning to Western Australia, they enroll in Developing Myself, a module within HGSE’s online Certificate in Advanced Education Leadership (CAEL). Upon completion, each principal then works under the guidance of a senior Education Department leader to design and implement a project targeting a system-level challenge such as creating more aligned pedagogical frameworks across schools or building sustainable supports for staff well-being as classrooms welcome more neurodivergent learners. Finally, many principals continue as mentors for future cohorts, bringing system-wide continuous and effective change.

“It’s about improving education for young people that we serve,” says Sands. “The expectation is that their learning at Harvard doesn’t stay within the walls of one school, it contributes to change across the system.”

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Steve Watson at the Achieving Excellence: Leadership Development for Principals institute at HGSE

Photo: HGSE Professional Education
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School leaders from around the world traveled to HGSE for a week of collaboration

Photo: HGSE Professional Education
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Professor Monica Higgins leads a case study that allows participants to closely evaluate how leaders make high-stake decisions

Photo: HGSE Professional Education

Inside Achieving Excellence for Leadership: A Global Learning Community

The Western Australia fellows are part of a broader AEL learning community that is particularly experienced and diverse. Last year’s participants averaged 16 years in the classroom, five years as assistant principals, and seven years as principals — with some bringing nearly three decades of leadership experience.

Their roles span the full spectrum of school leadership: 57% are principals, 22% assistant principals, 9% teachers or teacher leaders, 7% school administrators or instructional coaches, and 5% district‑level administrators. They arrive at HGSE with pressing, real‑world problems:

Rekindling student motivation in the wake of extended digital instruction
Navigating resistance to instructional change and aligning pedagogical frameworks
Addressing chronic absenteeism and deepening family engagement
Integrating AI thoughtfully into school operations and decision‑making
Sustaining staff well‑being amid rising complexity and need

These are the kinds of challenges Western Australia fellows now tackle not only for their individual schools, but also on behalf of the larger system.

The Power of Community and International Perspective

Like Sands, Steve Watson also knows the program from both sides. He first came to AEL as a school principal and returned in 2025 in his current role as deputy director general for Western Australia Schools to support and mentor the Western Australia cohort.

According to Watson, in addition to the skills and strategies learned in the program, the bonds formed among the team cohort and with international participants added an important element.

“It’s inspiring, it motivates you, and it builds a connection, a bond that’s hard to describe, with my colleagues from Western Australia but also with another 60 principals who have been through the same experiences,” he says. “I was learning alongside principals with all different levels of expertise and backgrounds, and that for me was just fantastic. Hearing the stories of people from other countries was an eye-opener. That international perspective has just been enormously powerful, and I realized that what I thought was really quite focused and narrow — just my lane back in Perth — is actually connected to a whole global community of principals grappling with many of the same challenges and working toward many of the same outcomes.”

For Western Australia’s principals, that global perspective is now built into their career pathways, and has impacted more than 800 schools, making a significant change to the public education system. Each cohort has traveled halfway around the world, joined a diverse international team at HGSE, and returned home equipped not only with new tools, but with a powerful support network and a broader sense of what’s possible when school leaders view themselves as system leaders.

From Australia to Appian Way Western Australia principals learn to become system leaders in program from The Principals’ Center

Twenty Years After High School, What Endures?

nschulmeyer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:58:44 +0000

Twenty Years After High School, What Endures? nschulmeyer Thu, 10/15/2026 - 12:58 Ed.L.D. Stories Student and Alumni Stories public schools student outcomes Andrew Frishman

October 19, 2026

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In late September 2026, I returned to Appian Way for a gathering of alumni from Harvard's Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) Program. At one point, we broke into small groups and were invited to share a particularly fond memory from our time at HGSE.

People remembered trips they had taken together. Sitting around tables wrestling with real problems. Supporting one another through difficult moments. Holding someone's baby so a classmate could participate. Visiting schools and communities and trying to understand how systems actually worked. They remembered being challenged, cared for, heard.

What also struck me was what nobody mentioned. Nobody said, "I remember a course reading packet that changed my life." Nobody named a particular assignment or recalled the grade they received in a course.

We talked about relationships, experiences, and the things we had the opportunity to do together. As I listened, I couldn't help thinking: I've just spent the past year hearing essentially the same thing from another group of former students, only this time, they were my students, and we were looking back across 20 years.

In 2002, almost 10 years before I came to Harvard, I became an adviser (teacher) at The Met, a Big Picture Learning public high school in Providence, Rhode Island. I worked closely with the same 15 students from ninth through 12th grade, “looping” with them for all four years of high school.

Andrew Frishman, Ed.L.D.'14, and his students in 2006

Photo courtesy of Andrew Frishman

On one of their first days of ninth grade, I asked them to imagine themselves many years after graduation. What would success look like?

Their answers weren’t particularly complicated. They wanted to be happy and healthy. They wanted to spend their time doing things they loved. They wanted meaningful work and enough money to support themselves. And they wanted to love and be loved by family, friends, and community.

Thirteen years later, while enrolled in an HGSE J-term course, I drafted an essay called “Ten Years After, Before You Begin.” I was wrestling with a question that has followed me throughout my career: How (and when?) should we measure whether an education has actually succeeded?

Schools and state accountability systems have become extraordinarily good at measuring things that happen while young people are in school or shortly thereafter: attendance, standardized test scores, graduation rates, college enrollment. Those things matter.

But they are limited in temporal scope; they aren't the same as a life. As one of my doctoral committee members, Clayton Christensen, so provocatively posed in a Harvard Business Review essay, “How Will You Measure Your Life?”

So last year, as the 20th anniversary of my students' graduation approached, I decided to go back to check on whether their own defined measures of success had come to fruition.

This time, I had help.

"I am more convinced than ever that we should keep asking questions, keep preserving relationships, and keep expecting that the good work we’ve done as educators should resonate well beyond graduation."

Andrew Frishman, Ed.L.D.’14

Samantha Broun, Ed.M.’96, an audio journalist, former Nieman fellow, and fellow HGSE alum, joined me in reconnecting with the students. Together we created The Advisory: Class of 2006, a five-part audio documentary built around a deceptively simple question: Twenty years later, what difference did your high school experiences actually make?

We arranged two-hour individual one-on-one conversations between me and each student. We met back in the same advisory classroom where we had spent time together 20-plus years before.

And we listened.

We heard about careers and marriages and children. We heard about losses and second chances. We heard people reconsider experiences that looked one way at 16 and quite another at 38. And again and again, we heard about relationships: advisers, mentors, internships, families, peers, and adults who knew them well enough to see possibilities they sometimes couldn’t yet see themselves.

Not everything worked out as they had planned. Not every memory was positive. And 20 years of adult life certainly can’t be reduced to what happened during four years of high school, nor where they seemed headed immediately afterwards.

That's precisely the point.

Education is a long-haul endeavor, but we mostly measure it in short intervals. Sitting back at Harvard with my Ed.L.D. peers recently, I was reminded that this isn’t only true for adolescents. Asked what endured from an intensive graduate program, we too reached first for the human experiences: the people who challenged us, the experiences that stretched us, the relationships that continued long after commencement.

It makes me wonder what would happen if more schools did something deceptively simple: call their alumni back. Not primarily to raise money. Not to collect a testimonial. Not to prove that the institution “worked.” To ask them what mattered. And what didn’t. And what they still carry. And what they wish had been different.

And then listen.

More than two decades after I first met my advisory, I am less certain than ever that educators can know, at graduation, exactly what they’ve accomplished.

But I am more convinced than ever that we should keep asking questions, keep preserving relationships, and keep expecting that the good work we’ve done as educators should resonate well beyond graduation. Our aperture needs to pull back from short-term “outcomes,” and we need to more longitudinally inquire as to what alumni are in the process of “becoming.”

Twenty Years After High School, What Endures? As Andrew Frishman, Ed.L.D.’14, has found, the measure of success for students is not in grades or credentials, but in the relationships and experiences that continue to shape who they become

HGSE Remembers Joel Monell

mjorgensen — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:34:23 +0000

HGSE Remembers Joel Monell mjorgensen Thu, 10/15/2026 - 08:34 In Memory staff News editor

Joel Monell

Photo: Lillian Kemp

October 15, 2026

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Harvard Graduate School of Education is mourning the loss of former administrator Joel Monell, Ed.M.'67. He passed away April 5, 2026, at the age of 86.

After completing his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College, Monell went on to receive his master's in education from HGSE and his Ph.D. from Stanford. He spent his career working at all levels of education, including as headmaster of the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona and as chairman of the Children's Montessori School in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Monell started his appointment at HGSE in 1986. He was dean for administration and academic services from 1986 to 2003, working closely with deans Patricia Albjerg Graham and Jerome Murphy, as well as interim deans Judith Singer and John Willett. In 2003, he took on the role as senior adviser to Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann until his retirement in 2005.

As administrative dean, Monell oversaw a period of growth for the school, often having to find creative solutions to space issues on campus. He also maintained positive relationships with the HUCTW, calling the union, after a period of negotiation in 1993, "good for the School of Education and good for the university." In 1995, he was appointed to a committee examining Harvard's central finances under President Neil Rudenstine. A supportive and valued collaborator and co-worker at HGSE, Monell was often tapped to offer his thoughts on the accomplishments of colleagues celebrating career milestones, as he did for both Graham and Murphy when they stepped down from their respective deanships.

Monell was a “live wire” and a “smart, sensible, and fun" person to work with, says Murphy, now Harold Howe II Professor of Education, Emeritus. "He loved the Ed School, and many here will remember his significant contributions."

After his retirement from HGSE, Monell remained involved in education by serving on several boards, including at the Waring School in Beverly.

Read Monell's obituary as it appeared in the Boston Globe.

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Monell meets with Professor Catherine Snow, 1990s

Photo: Lillian Kemp
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Monell, right, speaks with Harvard President Neil Rudenstine at a reception, 1992

Photo: Martha Stewart

The longtime Ed School administrator passed away in April at age 86

Power of Mentorship and Paying It Forward

nschulmeyer — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:33:35 +0000

Power of Mentorship and Paying It Forward nschulmeyer Wed, 10/14/2026 - 16:33 Professional Education at HGSE mentoring professional education Professional Education Participants Gary Miller

John Angelo Ramos, who participated in HGSE's online Instructional Leadership Certificate program, received the Teacher of the Year award in 2025

Photos courtesy of John Angelo Ramos

October 15, 2026

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When he arrived in Gaston County, North Carolina, from his native Philippines in 2021, John Angelo Ramos had already taught for several years. But he needed support to make a successful transition. As he had in the Philippines, Ramos found that support in teacher mentors.

Today, Ramos has five years of teaching experience in the Gaston County School District and has won school and district awards for his performance. But, he says, he understands that all of this wouldn’t be possible without the support of fantastic mentors and the professional learning they made possible.

“I had great teachers,” Ramos says, “and I am the person that I am today because these people influenced me to reach my fullest potential as an educator.”

That influence led Ramos to focus on giving back by inspiring others to become better teachers. To sharpen his mentorship skills, he decided to pursue professional development in the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s online Instructional Leadership Certificate [ILC] program.

A Childhood Dream of Being a Teacher

Growing up in the Philippines, Ramos got the teaching bug early. “I fell in love with teaching as early as, I would say, elementary school,” Ramos says. “I would lead my friends in a kind of play-teaching scenario. I would be the teacher and they would be the students, and I would teach them how to draw, how to write, and everything. I carried that passion to high school and beyond.”

Ramos with his certificate outside of Gutman Library

After high school, Ramos attended Philippine Normal University, his country’s national center for teacher education, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in science education. He taught high school in the Philippines for three years before signing up for an international teaching visa program, which brought him to Forestview High School in Gaston County, North Carolina, in 2021. There, Ramos faced all the challenges of living and working in a new culture and community.

The Support of Mentors Makes the Difference

Throughout his years as a student and a teacher, Ramos has relied on the support of mentors to help him overcome the challenges he faced. After he finished his education degree in the Philippines, for example, a mentor helped him make the transition from being a pre-service teacher into a classroom educator. “For me, mentorship is an important, critical relationship,” Ramos says. “It’s a two-way system between mentor and mentee, and there are so many things to learn from one another.”

The international visa program that brought Ramos to the United States required three years of monthly mentoring. “[My mentor] guided me in terms of pedagogies, classroom management, and standards-based teaching. She taught me a lot about strategy, such as how to approach a difficult conversation. And she showed me real-life examples of how to work effectively in the classroom.”

“The idea that really resurfaced for me during the [ILC] program is that I had amazing teachers. And… for me it's a life mission to pass that along to the younger generations. I think it would be a disservice to humanity if I wasn’t able to share that with other people.”

John Angelo Ramos

Ramos’ teaching and leadership skills grew, eventually earning him recognition as 2025-26 Gaston County School District Teacher of the Year for his work as a biology teacher. For Ramos, this work is not a singular effort.

“[The award is] a collective effort of the people that mentored, guided, and trained me in the past, along with my students,” he says. “It’s not only what I personally contributed, but what I’ve learned from all of the people around me.”

As a result, he says he found his purpose — the “why” that drove his passion for teaching: a desire to give back by guiding and supporting other educators as he had been via his mentors.

Learning the Leadership Skills to Give Back

As part of his journey toward becoming a better teacher and mentor, Ramos pursued professional development through the Instructional Leadership Certificate (ILC). The program is designed to help teachers build their leadership capacities and learn to provide the developmental support their colleagues need to become better classroom teachers. ILC focuses on leading adult learners, engaging with relevant problems of practice that address common challenges of instructional leadership, and applying knowledge, skills, and insights to practice leadership in the classroom and beyond.

“The idea that really resurfaced for me during the program is that I had amazing teachers. And… for me it's a life mission to pass that along to the younger generations. I think it would be a disservice to humanity if I wasn’t able to share that with other people.”

Ramos received a personalized note and jersey from the Carolina Panthers

Making Connections and Giving Back

When asked about his experience in ILC, Ramos describes it as transformative. “I was amazed by how carefully everything was woven and scaffolded. It keeps you on track, but you are also able to reflect and make connections from one topic to another and to the work you are doing in the classroom,” Ramos says. “People might not expect this from an online asynchronous format. But the full experience of this program is so much more robust than just another online assignment.”

Ramos also noted the importance of the connections he made with a motivated group of international peers. “These peer connections really enriched the perspective, the understanding, the concepts, the culture, and then the sharing of ideas and knowledge, because I was able to talk to someone from Australia” he says. “I was able to talk to someone from New England. I had some fellow participants from North Carolina, and we were able to connect about what is going on in terms of public education here in our state. It was an amazing experience.”

Ramos' connection to Harvard extended beyond the screen when he traveled to campus in December to attend an Askwith Education Forum, where he had the chance to meet Lecturer Noah Heller, faculty chair of ILC, in person. "Meeting Dr. Heller face-to-face after learning with him virtually was such a meaningful moment," Ramos says. "It reminded me that even in an online program, the relationships you build are real and lasting." The evening also gave Ramos the chance to hear Dean Nonie Lesaux speak in person alongside other distinguished voices in education. "Being in that room, hearing from leaders who are shaping the future of education, was incredibly inspiring," Ramos says. "It reaffirmed why I'm doing this work and why mentorship and continuous learning matter so much."

As a high school commencement speaker last year, Ramos was able to share the challenges of his education experience in the Philippines, as well as his pride in the opportunities he found in public education. The emotional reactions of parents and students in attendance were a testament to the power of mentorship, he says. “Just show up. Be a human. Teachers are now facilitators of learning and a resource - they no longer have a monopoly on knowledge,” Ramos says. “If you want to become a teacher-leader, a mentor, [the ILC program] is mandatory learning. You’ll build networks and learn from the powerful stories of others.

Power of Mentorship and Paying It Forward District Teacher of the Year John Angelo Ramos reconnects with his purpose

The Devil Is in the Implementation

mjorgensen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:17:18 +0000

The Devil Is in the Implementation mjorgensen Thu, 10/08/2026 - 14:17 Center for Education Policy Research Research education policy Grace Tatter

October 15, 2026

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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In 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, empowering states with a degree of latitude they hadn’t had for more than a decade, when the No Child Left Behind Act went into effect. But, according to Professor Tom Kane, faculty director at the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University, many states didn’t know what to do with this new level of autonomy. “There’s been a vacuum in leadership between states and the federal government,” he says. That vacuum has potentially contributed to a decade-long slump in national student achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress assessment, known as NAEP.

Last year, CEPR announced an initiative to fill the void: States Leading States (SLS). In November, they revealed the first cohort of states: Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Texas.

Kane says the initiative is building on work that was happening organically, with states taking notice of each other’s successes, and trying to replicate them. Take the “Mississippi Miracle,” in which Mississippi climbed from 49th in the country in fourth-grade reading scores in 2013, to ninth in 2025. Since Mississippi began its ascent, more than 40 states have implemented legislation focused on the science of reading.

“That’s what States Leading States is all about: to try to fan the flames,” Kane says. “Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once referred to states as like the laboratories of democracy. That analogy only holds if somebody’s measuring the effects of the experiments.”

It’s exactly the kind of work that attracted CEPR executive director Christina Grant to Harvard. In her previous post as the state superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C., she saw firsthand the benefits of partnering with researchers to isolate what was — and wasn’t — working. “The devil is in implementation, and right now we just celebrate when it works, but we don’t go back and necessarily say what happened,” Grant says.

Less than a year after announcing the first cohort, States Leading States has already begun to release findings. “We are trying to move all of the work as fast as we can because it is so important for states to get these lessons,” says Scott Sargrad, Ed.M.’08, SLS’s senior director.

The first report, published this spring, is a national evaluation of the impact of Yondr Pouches — neoprene pouches used to lock away devices during the school day — on academic achievement.

Cell phones are an urgent topic: While states could select any policy to examine with the SLS initiative, three — Ohio, Illinois, and Delaware — chose cell phone policies as they each consider statewide bans. Kane says there’s widespread speculation that smartphones contributed to academic decline in the United States and other countries and that the achievement slide coincided around 2015 with explosive smartphone growth, which gave students unprecedented social media access. The ability to look at policies curtailing cell phone use across states will be powerful, Kane says: “ I think it will be the strongest evidence yet on the impacts of reducing or eliminating social media use during the school day on student achievement, and not just student achievement, but some measures of student mental health as well.”

This report will be followed by one on a statewide summer tutoring program in Alabama. “Looking at data from Alabama will help states figure out how to invest in summer programming moving forward,” Sargrad says.

SLS is also already convening conversations between state leaders. For example, officials in Indiana and Texas have connected about outcomes-based contracting, where payment is tied to measurable results. SLS also includes support from CEPR’s Strategic Data Project in organizing data systems. This fall, several SLS states will have data fellows embedded in their education departments.

And SLS’s impact is poised to extend beyond its inaugural nine-state cohort. Leaders from across the country have expressed interest in learning from the current research projects, as well as in joining future cohorts. “We’re building as we grow,” Grant says. “With the right level of investment over time, we would love to be able to say that we do this work in every state in the union.”

As states implement more policies with even modest proven impacts on achievement, their results will compound to achieve massive results: a reason for optimism after years of what Grant calls “doom and gloom.”

“Every single day, kids are waking up and putting on their little backpacks and they’re coming to school, and they are expecting us to get it right,” Grant says. “It’s our job to leverage research and evidence to get it right for that child, and we should be excited about that. We should be excited about celebrating when it goes well and then being really curious and inquisitive when it doesn’t, so that we can course correct and make a new path forward.”

What Counts

THE PROBLEM: States are where education reform is happening and states wield a lot of power over policy, but the work they do and their influence isn’t always accompanied by insight. Sometimes, despite valiant efforts, state superintendents and commissioners enact sweeping new policies affecting millions of students with little immediate feedback about whether and how those policies are working for their students.

THE ANSWER: Have researchers like CEPR work side by side with state leaders to rigorously evaluate promising ideas and make those lessons rapidly accessible to policymakers and practitioners across the country through user-friendly research reports and with a list of practical policy solutions. This includes sharing what works and what doesn’t. The goal is to accelerate the spread of what works so that every state can help students succeed.

New States Leading States Initiative delivers first findings

The Community College Difference

mjorgensen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:37:40 +0000

The Community College Difference mjorgensen Thu, 10/08/2026 - 10:37 community college higher education Research Lory Hough

October 22, 2026

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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When Leticia Garcia, Ed.M.’26, was in high school in Petaluma, California, she internalized the narrative that going to a four-year college was out of reach. First-gen at all levels, Garcia lacked guidance on how to think about college, let alone apply. She also knew it was expensive, especially given the money she was making working part-time at the local IHOP. When she placed in the lowest level of math at her high school, she felt even more discouraged. Four-year college-level courses, she worried, were out of reach.

So when a representative from Santa Rosa Junior College visited her high school, and with dreams of a four-year college fading, she said, why not?

“Honestly, I did not know what else to do after graduation,” she says. “I felt directionless. I did not even know what a ‘major’ was.”

Lecturer Liya Escalera

Photo: Jill Anderson

That “why not?” turned out to be one of the best decisions made by Garcia, a new graduate in the Education Leadership, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship (ELOE) Program, and one of the big reasons she says she was able to succeed academically.

“Community college was transformative,” she says. “It gave me the space to explore and ultimately discover sociology, a field that helped me understand both myself and the world around me. During that time, I developed strong academic skills, built confidence, and learned how to navigate college systems.”

Community college was also transformative for Roxanne Claire Ramos, Ed.M.’26, also an ELOE graduate. As the eldest daughter of Filipino immigrants, she says she understood from an early age that higher education was not simply a personal goal, it was a pathway to opportunity for her entire family. She pushed herself in high school to be a high achiever and deeply involved in activities. Unfortunately, the pushing backfired and by the spring of her senior year, she found herself academically burned out and needing to rethink her college plans.

“When I was rejected from my dream school, I felt both discouraged and determined. I wasn’t ready to let go of that vision for myself,” she says. With the guidance of a college adviser, Ramos chose to attend two-year Ohlone College in Fremont, California. “She encouraged me to see it not as a setback, but as an opportunity: a chance to rediscover my love of learning, regain my balance, and root myself more deeply in my local community. That decision ultimately became one of the most transformative steps in my educational journey.”

After Ohlone, Ramos transferred to University of California, Berkeley, the dream school she was initially rejected from, and became a student organizer and advocate for fellow transfer students.

“I supported recruitment efforts that encouraged community college students to transfer to four-year universities and helped design retention programming for those already navigating the transition,” she says. “At many of these events, students would share, ‘It means so much to see you in these spaces.’ In those moments, I began to understand the power of representation in higher education. I often tell my students that although I didn’t choose community college at first, it has always chosen me. Over time, I learned to measure my worth not by accomplishments or outcomes, but by the dedication, perseverance, and resilience I brought to the process.”

Lecturer Liya Escalera, Ed.M.’09, co-chair of the Ed School’s Higher Education Concentration, has researched and worked with community college students since 2007 when she got a job as the assistant director of learning communities at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. The year before, she had earned a master’s in English at nearby Simmons College, with a goal to continue to a Ph.D. program in English.

Her initial experience at a community college rerouted that path.

“Immediately after stepping foot onto the Bunker Hill campus for my first interview, I knew this was the place for me,” she says. “It resonated with the experiences that I’ve had as a student, how I grew up, the multilingualism, the diversity, the community-oriented nature of community college, all of it just really spoke to me. I loved it. After I had been at Bunker Hill for about a year, I derailed all my life plans. I decided, ‘This is what I need to be doing.’”

“Over the last 10 years, between 40 and 50% of the total number of people enrolled in college in this country have been in community college, but we don’t spend 40 to 50% of the time talking about that."

Lecturer Liya Escalera

She began teaching and working full-time at Bunker Hill on a grant project. The following year, she came to the Ed School for another master’s, this time wanting to better understand the community college world, especially how to be a better leader, and continued teaching at Bunker Hill. Eventually, she got that Ph.D — not in English, but in education, looking at Hispanic-serving community colleges in New England. Now a lecturer at the Ed School, Escalera teaches a class called Opening Doors: The Future of Community College and Open Access Education and continues her research on culturally sustaining campuses.

When asked how higher education can better help students succeed, she says the answer isn’t by focusing only on four-year institutions. “Community colleges are the answer,” she says. “I think they’re the key.

“What has always really frustrated me when we talk about higher education in the United States, we are often talking about higher education spaces that serve very, very few people,” she says. “Over the last 10 years, between 40 and 50% of the total number of people enrolled in college in this country have been in community college, but we don’t spend 40 to 50% of the time talking about that. And we certainly don’t allocate resources to the community college sector in the way that we could if we wanted to prioritize access to higher education and equitable outcomes. I think that an investment in community colleges is the way to really create broad access and broad student success.”

Escalera says we also need to focus more on student success, not just access, when we talk about community college.

“When I started working in community college, all we talked about was access,” she says. “What has complicated the idea of access is, do you really have access and what do you have access to if we’re not creating learning environments where students can be successful and achieving equitable student outcomes?” Around 2010, she says the conversation started to shift, with input from national organizations like Achieving the Dream and the Lumina Foundation. “These national community college movement players helped really bring forward this idea that access without equitable outcomes is meaningless. You can open the door, but if you’re just churning people in and out who aren’t then completing those two-year credentials or who are not building the skills they need to be successful at the four-year setting, then it really isn’t access. So yes, I have seen a real shift in the field from access to outcomes.”

For Garcia, having access to community college was critical to her successful outcome, which included transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she got a bachelor’s in sociology before Harvard. At Santa Rosa, she says, she learned the “hidden curriculum” of higher education, such as how to network and build relationships with professors. Community college also gave her the space to make mistakes.

“And it nurtured my curiosity, resilience, and ambition,” she says. “I am at Harvard today because of community college. Without that foundation, I would not have dared to dream this big.”

Community College Takeaways

For many students, going to a community college is the key to their success in a career or later at a four-year institution. It gives space to explore career interests, often at a lower price point, and build academic skills and confidence. It offers a solid foundation for learning the “hidden curriculum” of higher education, like how to network or build relationships with professors.
Over the last decade, between 40 and 50% of the total number of people enrolled in college in the United States have been in community colleges, but we don't spend 40 to 50% of our time talking about community colleges or prioritizing funding.
Previously, discussions about community college focused on access — opening the door for students. The conversation has shifted to success: You have to help students stay in school and build skills that will allow them to transfer and be successful at a four-year institution or in the job market.

Lecturer Liya Escalera explores how community colleges can expand access, foster student success, and create more equitable pathways through higher education

So You Want to Write Kid Lit?

mjorgensen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:20:18 +0000

So You Want to Write Kid Lit? mjorgensen Thu, 10/08/2026 - 10:20 children's literature children's media books Student and Alumni Stories Elly Berke

Illustration: Luciana Navarro Powell

October 13, 2026

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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During the workshop on culturally responsive teaching, you perk up when they begin talking about children’s literature. A book can be a window or a mirror. At libraries, bookstores, and in your classroom, you thumb through pages, noticing where your students might see a reflection of themselves. You remember the books you used to teach with at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum — The Name Jar, My Name is Yoon — and the stories of immigrant neighbors connecting over shared experiences. You think, if you ever wrote a book, you’d want it to be part of this body of work. It would hold a mirror to some of your students and open a window onto others.

Elly Berke, Ed.M.'15

Photo: Anthony Grassetti

You’re teaching ESL now and you see your colleagues making and printing their own books when they can’t find the thing they need — a bilingual Spanish/English nonfiction text, an early reader in Haitian Creole. Your own book ideas percolate. The pandemic provides unexpected isolation and a quieting of the daily routine. This is the space you need to flesh out your idea. On long drives to Maine to see your family (your COVID bubble), you capture story ideas in your voice memo app. Later you begin writing a poem with rhyming verses about the different English learners you’ve worked with. You imagine them all meeting each other in a fictional city on the brink of spring. It flows like a song. This doesn’t surprise you. You’ve been writing poems since first grade and performing in musicals since second.

You try on the idea that your story could become a book in the hands of a child. You know next to nothing about the publishing industry, so you hire a coach from Grub Street Boston. On Zoom, she teaches you how to pitch your book idea in a few words and how a query letter should look. Subscribe to Publisher’s Marketplace, she tells you. Begin looking for publishers that are putting out books with a similar message to yours. For $30 a month you become a member and begin to send query letters. You tell them why your book will fit well among their other titles and how your values align. You get a lot of rejection, some personalized and some automated. There’s a mantra hanging in the air around you: You could be the one. It’s something your niece randomly screamed at you one day when she was two and you find it useful in so many scenarios.

You continue to send query letters and talk about your book idea. Another author you meet tells you that your story might find a home with Tilbury House Publishers in Maine. You send your manuscript and receive an email response which you don’t yet know is a turning point in your journey. They can’t publish your book, but they make suggestions: Lose the rhyme. Just tell your story, incorporate repetitive phrases, and add a surprise ending. Back to Grub Street where a new coach sends you helpful revisions. It sounds more like a story now and less like a poem.

You correspond with Tilbury House, politely, doggedly for a year. Any scrap of feedback they give you gets incorporated. Every new draft gets shared with them. You have nothing to lose and everything to learn. Rejection is a familiar colleague — you were an actor in NYC. You just keep going. You buy a copy of Writing Picture Books by Ann Whitford Paul and you decide to make a book dummy. You think of a quote from The Artist’s Way: “Trust that still, small voice that says, ‘This might work and I’ll try it.’” You print and cut the text of your manuscript and arrange it on pages of thick watercolor paper. You use a paint set you got in middle school to make rough illustrations. Your Grub Street coach asked you to imagine where there should be a page turn and how much text you’d want on each page. You read your book dummy out loud to kids. It’s your clinical trial or market research. They like the story and tell you which parts they find the most interesting.

After an exhausting day of teaching middle school social studies, you sit down in your still, dark classroom to check your personal email. There’s no one around to hear you squeal or see the tears well in your eyes when you read the words: We’re ready to offer you a contract. You call your mother and celebrate together over the phone.

It will take a year and a half for the book to come out. During that time, you email back and forth with the publisher about illustrators. I’d like the illustrator to be an English learner and an immigrant to the U.S., you offer. It must be an immigrant, they return. You find the talented Luciana Navarro Powell. Like the characters in the book, she has a coming-here story. Her illustrations are ornate but dreamy, offering the eyes a soft place to land while revealing the complicated journey of immigrants and refugees. On the dedication page she writes “... and may the United States continue to be welcoming.” It is 2023 and you and she share a dark foreboding and a sense of urgency to put this book into the world. In another two years she will receive an award from the International Latino Book Awards for these illustrations, but you don’t know that yet.

The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators holds a conference the following spring, and you talk with other authors about how to do a book tour. You begin marketing yourself to schools and bookshops. You look for businesses that will appreciate the message of your book. You make a postcard and business card. You re-open your Instagram account.

Another silent celebration happens when a box of 10 copies of your book arrives. You tear it open in the front hall of your building and sit on the stairs cradling your book in your arms. There are school visits, Zoom presentations, interviews, and many thank yous ahead. For now, you hug Listen, Wonder, Ask to your chest and relish the feeling of having made something good and useful and beautiful. You have made a book.

The roadmap one alum took when writing her first children’s book

Schooling Stories

mjorgensen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:05:02 +0000

Schooling Stories mjorgensen Thu, 10/08/2026 - 10:05 Indigenous populations Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Student and Alumni Stories higher education Ph.D. Stories Grace Tatter

Photo: Kevin Grady/Radcliffe

October 9, 2026

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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When Kemeyawi Wahpepah, Ph.D.'26, was growing up in the Bay Area in the 1990s, she loved playing The Oregon Trail on a bulky desktop in her school’s computer lab.

Wahpepah, who is Kickapoo and Sac-Fox, was a graduate student fellow at the Radcliffe Institute during her time at Harvard and is now a postdoctoral fellow in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s long since reconsidered the computer game she loved in elementary school, and how it elides a tragic history of “essentially the expansion of settler colonialism, which involved active warfare against Native peoples,” she says.

Still, she remembers her time in the computer lab fondly, which is why she included the vignette in her dissertation, Schooling Stories: Native and Indigenous Narratives of Settler Colonialism and Dislodgement. It raises one of the questions that motivates her research: “How can we create these kinds of positive schooling memories, while attending to the very difficult histories that we also need to learn in order to be an informed population?”

Wahpepah’s own school story started in private schools that her mom sought out for their quality of instruction.

“I loved school, and overall, it was a pretty good experience for me,” she says. “But it was also an interesting experience being a low-income kid and being a brown kid in these super white and wealthy spaces.” She explored those experiences while studying the sociology of racism and inequality as an undergraduate at Harvard College, which in turn inspired her to pursue a career in education. For 11 years, she taught middle and high school English and history. She enjoyed teaching but struggled to incorporate Native perspectives into her curriculum while simultaneously meeting state standards and navigating the expectations of parents, many of whom themselves learned a version of history that didn’t include Native perspectives.

In 2020, Wahpepah returned to Harvard to start her doctoral work. As part of her studies, she assisted former Ed School Associate Professor Tony Jack, now at the Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

“Part of what he looks at is the transition from high school to college and seeing how the factors and context that you deal with before college don’t magically disappear in college, even though you might be physically in a different location,” she says. For her own research, she decided to interview Native and indigenous college students about their educational experiences all the way back to kindergarten. In total, she conducted 133 interviews with 45 people at colleges all over the country.

Ultimately, she hopes that these students’ reflections can help Native and non-Native educators alike. “Part of why I wanted to do this study of gathering people’s schooling stories was not only so that we [Native people] could see ourselves reflected in each other’s stories, but also so that non-Native people could learn from these stories, and specifically, so that non-Native educators could have a source to go to and say ‘OK, this is what Native students are saying they experienced. This is what Native students are saying they want. How can I take this and apply this to my classroom setting?’”

Wahpepah is already drawing on her research by collaborating with Cambridge Public Schools educators interested in updating their curricula to address settler colonialism and Native history. She hopes to eventually publish her dissertation as a book so that it can be a resource for even more teachers.

“It’s just so clear that there are so many people who really want to know more about Native folks and how to better support Native students and teach Native history, but don’t often feel like they have the resources or the knowledge to do so,” she says.

Grace Tatter, Ed.M.’18, is a writer based in New York. Her last story in Ed. was about Professor Jal Mehta’s Free Range Humans podcast

Alum Kemeyawi Wahpepah helps educators learn from Native and indigenous college student stories

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

News

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

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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

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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

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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

News

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

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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