Now in its second year, this new degree, the Doctor of Education Leadership, or Ed.L.D., is steeped in practice like a J.D. or M.D. It includes a brand new, innovative curriculum that is grounded in education, but also includes much-needed policy and management training. During their third and final year, students are in a residency onsite with partner organizations pushing the boundary in education reform. This two-way pipeline culminates not in a formal dissertation, but in the creation of a professional reform project for the partner.

And the main idea behind the degree? Long before the first cohort of 25 students left their full-time jobs and arrived on campus, the idea was ambitious and clear: The Ed School was not going to develop leaders for the education system as it currently exists. It was going to develop leaders who will define the education system of the future.

“Throughout the years, our goal at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has been to prepare leaders with the skill sets, habits of mind, and dispositions to act in order to transform the education sector,” says Dean Kathleen McCartney. “With the introduction of the Ed.L.D. to our suite of degree programs, we are now poised to do much more. Transforming the sector is an ambitious goal, but through the work of our alumni, as well as our partners, we will succeed.”

View a timeline of the evolution of the Ed.L.D. Program

To make this happen, those involved in the planning of the degree knew that the entire program needed to be different, that they had to think outside the box when it came to what was taught, who was accepted, and how it would be funded (the program is 100 percent free for accepted students). For starters, a critical and intentional decision was made to connect the rigorous academics that you would expect from a doctoral program to the world of practice — not something previously integrated into a program at this level. As a result, the curriculum is concentrated in three basic areas: leadership and management (focused on real behavior that goes on in organizations), teaching and learning (focused on how successful learning and teaching happens and how to recreate it), and understanding and transforming the sector (focused on the history and politics that surround the sector). A fourth area, called Workplace Lab, includes personal executive-coaching sessions for students and intensive, team-based projects using case studies, simulations, and field-based work.

One of the most innovative pieces of the program is the interdisciplinary teaching model. However, “interdisciplinary” in the Ed.L.D. Program doesn’t mean students simply take courses at other schools. Instead, recognizing that education leaders can’t limit their expertise to just education, the Ed.L.D. fully incorporates faculty from the Business School and the Kennedy School in the first-year core curriculum. Early on, these faculty also helped develop the curriculum and continue to collaboratively teach classes.

The students, who all come with amazing credentials, also get that this new program is, first and foremost, a human capital initiative. That’s why when they arrive on campus, they are energized, ready to push themselves. They come willing to question assumptions — their own, each other’s, and the sector’s — as Executive Director Liz City, Ed.M.’04. Ed.D.’07, points out. The hope is that the students, clustered in small groups of only 25 each year, will build a cohort for life, a close network of leaders who are ready and equipped to transform the education sector as superintendents, chief academic officers, chiefs of staff, commissioners, executive directors, and more.

So why a new degree focused intensely on leadership? We asked a small handful of the many people involved with the program to help fill in the answer.

Fall 2005

The seed is planted. Acting dean Kathleen McCartney and her senior team begin conversations about leadership in education and the possibility of starting a new degree.

McCartney submits academic plan to Harvard President Larry Summers. Plan includes proposal for a new degree and argues that top education leaders need a unique interdisciplinary skill set that integrates instructional leadership, management, and policy.

May 2006

McCartney is named dean.

Spring 2006

Academic plan is approved. Wheels are in motion for Ed.L.D.

An anonymous donor endows the Herbert A. Simon Professorship in Education, Management, and Organizational Behavior at HGSE, which is later given to Professor Mark Moore in 2009.

McCartney recruits Professor Robert Schwartz to be her academic dean. Schwartz is charged with spearheading the planning for the new degree program.

Fall 2006

Three schools meet. Faculty from the Ed School, to include Kennedy School, and Business School explore potential degree program elements.

Leadership Degree Work Group begins to plan degree. Chaired by Schwartz; other faculty members include Robert Kegan, Richard Elmore, Jerry Murphy, Richard Chait, Monica Higgins, Robert Peterkin, and Janice Jackson.

Spring 2007

Market research begins with Boston-based Parthenon Group.

An anonymous donor endows the Henry Wyman Holmes Professorship of Education Leadership at HGSE.

Fall 2007

Administrative groups at the school begin logistical planning. Teams from the offices of admissions, the registrar, finance, student affairs, and development begin planning for the launch of the new program.

Leadership Degree Work Group expanded to include HBS, HKS. Renamed Exploratory
Committee. Kegan becomes the chair. New faculty members include Stacey Childress (HBS), Mark Moore (HKS), and the Ed School’s Nonie Lesaux, Thomas Payzant,
Harry Spence, and Lee Teitel.

January 2008

Parthenon submits final report. They find that the field is ripe for a new leadership degree program that combines selective recruitment; education, management, and policy content; robust internships; and in-field support.

Spring 2008

Senior faculty approve full proposal.

HBS and HKS leadership agree to faculty collaboration.

September 2008

Leadership Program Design Committee begins. Chaired by Spence. New faculty involved include Deborah Jewell-Sherman, Karen Mapp, and David Perkins.

May 2009

Harvard Corporation votes to approve the Ed.L.D., a new credential within higher education. A month later, Harvard Board of Overseers also approves the degree.

June 2009

Wallace Foundation pledges $10 million dollars for Ed.L.D. fellowships.

September 2009

Ed.L.D. Program is officially announced. The announcement is covered by the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the CBS Evening News, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The AP story is picked up by more than 220 news organizations.

New Ed.L.D. Work Group, chaired by Elmore and Spence, begins.

Student recruitment begins. More than 1,000 applications pour in for 25 slots.

December 2009

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes about the degree. Two weeks later, the Times writes a second story about the program.

February 2010

CBS News coverage. CBS story says that if the new program is successful, “school systems will end up with better leaders who hire better teachers, and American students may finally make the grade.”

August 2010

First cohort arrives in Cambridge for orientation. 35% male, 65% female, average age 33, average work experience 10 years.

September 2010

Harvard President Drew Faust praises the new students and the degree. “I love the Ed.L.D. … because it’s about building human capital to build human capital. It’s about that line of inheritance where we bring together … extraordinary individuals. … And we say we’re going to invest in them because they are going to invest in others.”

October 2010

Students visit three schools in Brockton, Mass. Students also visit the Met School i Providence, R.I., and Philips Exeter Academy to learn how high-performing schools operate.

November 2010

Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of D.C. schools, meets with Ed.L.D. students. Other visitors include Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City schools, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

January 2011

Foregoing long breaks, students spend their J-term touring effective schools systems around the world.

February 2011

As part of data curriculum, students consult with real-world education organizations to help them make strategic decisions with data. Organizations include district teams from San Antonio, Texas, and Evansville, Ind., as well as teams from SchoolNet and the Massachusetts Department of Education.

March 2011

Cohort 2 is selected.

April 2011

Harvard Graduate School of Design collaboration. Students from cohort 1 collaborate with GSD students to create proposals for ideal school buildings and learning environments for the 21st century.

Summer 2011

Cohort 1 students work at high-level education summer jobs. Range of job sites include state and federal departments of education, school systems, and nonprofits. They open new schools, craft policy and curriculum, and shadow superintendents.

August 2011

Cohort 2 arrives on campus. 32% men, 68% women, average age 32, average work experience 10 years.

December 2011

Cohort 2 students create reform plans for New Orleans. Proposals address school effectiveness, teacher quality, fiscal accountability, and community involvement.

January 2012

Students from cohort 2 do field work in Detroit. As part of their Workplace Lab core course, students collaborate with Detroit’s Education Achievement Authority to help underperforming schools.

March 2012

Placements for cohort 1’s third-year residencies, which begin in July, are announced. During their third and final year, students will return to Harvard periodically for intensive workshops.

Cohort 3 is selected.

April 2012

Prizes and awards start coming in. Students from cohort 1 and 2 are starting to be recognized for their Ed.L.D.-connected work, including a first-place award from the Yale Business Plan Competition and a $50,000 grant from the Harvard Initiative on Learning and Teaching.

It’s not the first question visitors ask, but you can see it in the darting eyes as folks walk through the halls teeming with students and staff. “What’s the secret?” they want to know. “How can Harlem Children’s Zone (HZC) get thousands of poor children to succeed academically where hundreds of programs and billions of dollars have failed?”

Visitors want to see “the curriculum,” the lesson plans, the data. They wonder if anyone can replicate HCZ’s work without our charismatic CEO Geoffrey Canada, Ed.M.’75. And, of course, a few folks are just plain suspicious and wait with knife and fork in hand for any morsel of bad news to satisfy their insatiable cynicism.

Well, there is a secret (spoiler alert): it’s hard work over the long haul.

The Harlem Children’s Zone Project targets a 97-blockarea of Central Harlem with an interlocking network of education, social service, and community-building programs for children, from birth through college, and the adults around them. As the communications director of the agency for the past eight years, my favorite description of the agency is from a friend: “They do everything but come and wake you up in the morning.” The truth is, I learned, that the staff would to that, too, if that’s what was necessary.

At HCZ we talk about a “pipeline” of services, but it is actually two parallel pipelines: One for children who go to our K–12 charter schools; the other for children who live in the neighborhood and go to traditional public schools. Both start with our early education programs. We have outreach workers scouring the neighborhood, looking for pregnant women and parents of young children for The Baby College, a nine-week series of workshops that teach a range of parenting skills. It’s a great program, but the outreach workers use all sorts of enticements — free childcare, a weekly raffle, free diapers — to get parents in because we want all of them, the good and particularly the bad. Then we have our hooks in them — and them in our database — hopefully for the next 20 years or so.

Whatever It Takes is the title of Paul Tough’s excellent account of the organization’s work, and it has become the informal motto of the staff, who say it with a smile and a roll of the eyes as they dive into the latest crisis. And the crises come with stunning regularity since we work with more than 11,000 children, many of whom face daily drama that would make grand opera seem drab by comparison.

A Baby College session.

“We’re trying to create a community where children are our permanent interest,” says Canada, “and a child who has struggled is connected to a series of adults who stay with the child over long periods of time. This idea that we’re investing in children as a team over time is central to our work.”

At HCZ, we just shake our heads when people criticize Head Start, for example, by saying it doesn’t make a difference for children ultimately. What do people expect when ontrack four-year-olds are tossed into substandard schools for the rest of their academic career, and with a battery of other disadvantages, including the ever-present threat of violence?

Although HCZ has been fortunate to receive glowing press attention, the coverage has sometimes highlighted our charter schools and obscured our work with children in traditional public schools. In fact, the original business plan of the HCZ Project did not include charter schools. When the opportunity arose, Canada, who had watched public schools fail for decades, jumped at the opportunity to deliver a great school to large numbers of poor children. The result was Promise Academy I, which opened in 2004, and Promise Academy II, which opened in 2005.

“We make the same guarantee to children in traditional public schools,” he says. “If you stick with us, you will get into and through college.”

Today, HCZ works with all seven of the traditional public elementary schools in the Zone, serving more than 2,400 students. We also work with more than 900 middle school students who don’t attend our charter school and 1,080 Harlem high schoolers. More than 700 students from these afterschool programs are now in college.

While some have painted Canada with a broad brush as “anti-union,” he is simply opposed to anyone and anything that does not put children first. That commitment defines him in the fields of politics and policy, but also makes him a relentless, no-excuses manager.

“If my mother worked here and she messed up,” Canada once told a staffer, “I’d fire her.”

This year marks a milestone for the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy I charter school: It graduates its first class of high-school seniors — and all of them will be going to college in the fall.

Recently I sat down with Principal Marquitta Speller in her office, which typically clatters with the daily drama and comedy of teenagers, and we looked through a list of her seniors. I asked what would have happened if these kids had not won the school admission lottery six years ago.

“We have 62 seniors,” she says, ruefully shaking her head. “You would have maybe five that on their own would say, ‘OK, I’m doing this, I’m going to college.’

“I don’t have a crystal ball,” she continues, “but if they didn’t have these services, they would not have made it. A few would have become pregnant. …Some boys would have been locked up.

A student gets free dental care.

Promoting the healthy kitchen and farmers' market

The school runs a longer school day and year, but that is just the beginning of the difference from a traditional school. There is an onsite health center that offers students free medical, dental, and mental-health services. There is a social work team, a comprehensive afterschool program, freshly made healthy breakfasts and lunches, a range of incentives to reward good efforts. But what it took to get some of this first graduating cohort to cap and gown illustrates why HCZ’s “wraparound” services, applied over the long term, were essential.

There’s Tameka, a special education student who was shot in the face while walking home through a playground in seventh grade. She and other students received counseling after the shooting, and staff made sure she stayed in school to get the academic help she needed despite the stigma of being left back due to the weeks she missed. As a senior, Speller says, “she jumped 320 points on her SAT because she had developed this determination.”

When Tyler arrived at the Promise Academy in sixth grade, he was a pudgy class clown who was at the bottom academically of a cohort that was 75 percent below grade level in English and 60 percent below grade level in math. While the staff immediately knew Tyler as a student who was more dedicated to getting attention for bad behavior than applying himself, they soon learned the reason: his “home life,” which in his case was a euphemism. His mother vacillated about keeping him in her home and so he bounced among family members, including his dad, who was struggling with drug addiction.

Tyler had an epiphany during an extended stay with family outside New York City. He said that seeing his family that summer — mired in a desolate world of crime, drugs, and unemployment — made him realize “the type of life that I want isn’t one spent in the basement of my mother’s house with kids I can’t support and an education that would leave me unqualified to even be a manager at McDonald’s.”

The lightbulb that went on was powered by the repeated messages he got from the staff, particularly one teacher who became a father figure to him. Tyler said the teacher joked with him but made clear there was also a time to buckle down and work toward his dreams.

He returned an earnest, hard-working student, looking to change the people and the world around him. As he tries to make up for lost time, he says, “I wish we had more time here. I wish there were a 13th grade.”

The lightbulb moment came even later for Crystal, another senior whose mom has struggled with crack addiction since before Crystal was born.

A Promise Academy Class.

Crystal arrived at the school behind academically, struggled with low self-esteem and hopelessness, and had a penchant for being involved in every “beef ” that erupted among her classmates. But staff stayed with her through every crisis.

A turning point, Speller says, was when Crystal was selected for a trip to Boston in 11th grade.

“She was fantastic,” Speller says. “That may have been one of the first times she heard something positive associated with her name.” On the trip, she visited a college campus for the first time. Suddenly, all the admonitions to get on track coalesced in her mind, and she realized there was an achievable and worthy goal within her reach.

“She’s going to struggle in college. I already know it,” Speller says. “In all honesty, she’s a student who will be in my life for the rest of my life.” Fortunately for Crystal, HCZ has a College Success Office (CSO), which continues our support of students when they go to college. The CSO became part of the pipeline when staff realized that our “successes” were sometimes dropping out in college; it helps students with everything from time management to getting internships.

Speller compares her time in Harlem with her prior school experience in Brooklyn. “Same kids, same issues,” she says. “But different resources make a huge difference, including staff with a genuine interest and love and passion for the kids and community. …If I had this in Bedford-Stuyvesant, I’d have the same results.”

People from outside the community may think that the only difference between a middle-class child and a poor one is money, but life in a devastated community is a minefield of potential setbacks for children. There is a toxic “gangsta wannabe” street — and popular — culture that encourages behavior that is ultimately self-destructive. There are ill-prepared schools, the threat of violence, inadequate health care, lack of resources for out-of-school time. Sometimes there are parents who are the very opposite of nurturing. “I think we are gathering a body of evidence that suggests the impact of really negative parenting is extremely damaging to a child’s learning capacity, emotional stability, and cognitive development,” says Canada. But, he adds, HCZ has the responsibility to educate children, no matter what kind of parents they have.

One of the saddest examples is Javier, currently a seventh grader at Promise Academy II.

Javier started at the school in first grade and was already “really way below” grade level, according to Principal Kathleen Fernald, but each year seemed to reveal a new problem.

At the end of third grade, because his mother could not adequately care for him, he was placed with foster families around the city. But the school officials fought to have him placed with his mother again so that he would have the consistency of the Promise Academy.

“He needed us desperately,” Fernald says.

One teacher took his uniforms home and washed them since his mother was not doing so. At one point, when asked about his weight loss, he said he was often walking to school because no one was waking him up in time to get the bus. At another point, a fire in his building forced his family into a homeless shelter.

Despite it all, Javier began to slowly make progress academically and began to improve his social skills. In sixth grade, he told Fernald that he had just seen his father for the first time in years; He had been released from prison. “He’s a survivor,” Fernald says.

Last August, Fernald recalls, she was looking at the grades for the statewide math exams that had just come in and she stopped when she saw Javier’s. Though it was late at night, she called Javier’s teacher, tears welling in her eyes, to give him the news: Javier had earned a 4, designating him “highly proficient.”

Read: Another Long Hall

“This child will still struggle,” Fernald says, getting teary again. “But if he continues to perform at this level, college will be a reality. …The whole cycle of poverty for this family will change.”

HCZ’s work with traditional public schools does not have the same number of hours each day as our work with our charter school kids, but the dedication is the same. Last year, more than 95 percent of the seniors in HCZ’s four high-school afterschool programs were accepted into college, helped with everything from SAT preparation courses to tutoring to counseling.

We track retention rates to make sure that children move from program to program through college. We have a database with basic information on every participant. And our academic case management system assigns a staffer to every HCZ student from fifth grade up to not just solve problems but prevent them; to make sure they get what they need, whether it’s grief counseling, chess lessons, or a weight-loss regimen — a Zone defense, so to speak.

Denise enrolled in a karate class at an HCZ middle-school program as an overweight fifth-grader who was having trouble at her school socially. “I was an insecure child,” recalls Denise, who is now 17, chatty, and obviously very comfortable in her own skin. “I couldn’t relate to anyone.”

She lost 20 pounds, but, more importantly, learned she had allies to push her to improve academically, socially, and to widen her world view.

Gradually, she says, “I realized that there’s not that much difference between me and the next person, and we just have to help each other out.”

Matriculating to the Zone’s TRUCE Arts program for high school students, Denise learned how to express herself in several creative disciplines. “I see things differently,” she says. “After taking photography here, I see things…” She holds up a small pad of paper and turns it slowly in front of her. “It’s all about light. So I see light in everything. When students don’t have that experience, they don’t see light in everything.”

The longterm relationship and trust that Denise had developed with HCZ staff over the years was key when her family split due, in part, to domestic violence.

“They encouraged me to make a change, not just dwell on it,” she says, noting she went on to make an award-winning public-service announcement on domestic violence.

Although the Harlem Children’s Zone Project is too new to have produced adults who have come through the pipeline, there are young people who grew up within the organization, stretching back to the time it was called Rheedlen.

James Washington, who is now 30, has spent 15 years in the agency. Although he was a “respectful” boy, he was an indifferent student and drifted into an ad-hoc apprenticeship in the neighborhood drug trade.

A neighbor told Washington about a job at the agency. In those days, young go-fers were taken under the wing of the older staff around them. They were employees, but they also were youths who needed to be saved from the street. They were regularly quizzed on school, their plans for life, and were given the loving kick in the metaphorical butt when necessary.

At one point, Washington recalls, he decided to take a year off before going to college. When Canada found out, he delayed a Board of Trustees meeting just to talk to the teen.

“He let me have it,” Washington says. He recalls saying to himself later: “They really care about what I do with my future. Maybe I need to start caring about my future.”

Washington went on to college and worked as a teacher’s assistant through HCZ. Seeing how the children took to him, Washington says, “I found the thing that I wanted to get up in the morning and do every day.” When he didn’t have a computer, a program director let him use hers after hours. When he had a crisis, he had HCZ elders with whom he could talk.

Now an assistant director, Washington has become a mentor to several tough cases himself.

“All I needed was someone extra to care about me,” Washington says. “[Kids are] reaching out to folks to put effort into them — and they may be making it more difficult by being disrespectful or doing all types of crazy things — but they just want someone to make the effort.

“At the end of the day, it’s just about really hard work and making sure every child gets the attention they need,” Washington continues. “I tell my staff all the time: ‘The most dangerous thing in the world is a bored child.’”

“To be very successful in this work you have to be on a mission, and part of that mission is that you have to be deeply concerned and care for young people,” Canada says. “But the care can’t be the evaluative tool that you use to determine whether or not your strategy is successful.

“We are determined to have hard evidence that this care and this love are being translated into significant growth in measurable ways in our children,” Canada says.

As the agency grew, he says, it had to be “fierce in the pursuit of the truth,” which sometimes meant telling staff a shiny new strategy was actually not working. Today, HCZ has a six-person evaluation department that creates, monitors, and evaluates criteria for each program.

“The data feedback loop became a monster,” Canada said recently at a meeting of HCZ’s senior managers. He acknowledged that trying to put order into the chaos of poor children’s lives is difficult at best. But acknowledging the difficulties does not mean accepting them. “The thing about a wake-up call,” he said, “is you have to wake up.”

The unforgiving evaluations, the intolerance for excuses, the talk of saving lives: These are the ever-present reminders that Canada and the staff are a band of rebels fighting against the corrosive culture of poverty laying siege to the families just outside our four walls. It’s as if Canada has lashed together anyone and anything in the neighborhood willing to fight the good fight, pulled in resources from outside to stop the gaps, then began ushering children in to the safety within and the hopes of a brighter future.

Canada reminds his managers that the agency, as it breaks new ground in the field, will always struggle with breakdowns.

“We have to fix the bike while riding it,” he jokes, then adds with a laugh that doesn’t diminish the timbre of determination in his voice, “We’ll get there on a wobbly bike.”

— Marty Lipp has been the communications director at HCZ for eight years. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Star-Ledger, and the Huffington Post.

— Photography by John Loomis

But as Paul Tough writes in his book, Whatever It Takes, about Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone, Canada had something growing up that a lot of other kids in the neighborhood didn’t: a mother with a couple years of college under her belt who realized that education doesn’t only happen in school. As a result, she “bombarded her sons with books and educational experiences before they could even walk.” Eventually, Canada realized he wanted to be an educator, especially for poor kids. After four years at Bowdoin College and a year at the Ed School, Canada taught in a Boston public school. He moved back to New York in the early 1980s to run the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, which focused on truancy prevention and antiviolence training courses for young people. Rheedlen eventually became the Harlem Children’s Zone.

These days, the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone goes hand-in-hand with Canada’s success, which, for a guy running an education nonprofit, has come in some surprising places. A starring role in an American Express commercial and the documentary hit, Waiting for “Superman.” Interviews with Charlie Rose, Jimmy Fallon, Anderson Cooper, Tavis Smiley, Oprah Winfrey, and Stephen Colbert (twice). Segments about him on NPR’s This American Life and, more recently, Saturday Night Live. A Richard Avedon portrait in the New Yorker. A Time magazine honor: one of the 100 most influential people in 2011.

Still, Canada remains grounded. He also hasn’t strayed from his original goal to help kids in every aspect of their lives, from the way their families raise them to the way they are taught in school. As he told an audience at the Ed School in March when he came to accept the school’s highest honor, the Medal for Education Impact, “People wonder why I supply all these supports to these kids. I found out early on in my career that this other stuff is important as human beings. It’s important to all of us,” he said. “Why would it not be more important to these kids who are growing up with nothing?”

Illustration by Natalie Kilany

Are children more Marie Curie or Margaret Mead when it comes to learning? Are they little scientists who learn best by experimenting and figuring things out for themselves, or little anthropologists who need to listen, observe, and rely on what others tell them?

Progressive educators who emphasize learning by doing would likely say Marie Curie. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, in writing about education and children in Emile, said, “Let him know things not because you have told him, but rather because he has understood it for himself. Let him not learn science; let him invent it.” Italian educator Maria Montessori, whose child-centered learning theories are used around the world, once said that when it comes to educating children, the teacher, or “directress” as she was called, should give “a hint, a touch” — just enough to get the child started. “The rest develops of itself.”

Or does it? After years of research, Professor Paul Harris argues that children need more than just a hint or a touch in order to learn about many things. As he writes in his new book, Trusting What We’re Told: How Children Learn from Others, “There is a profound limit to the role that first-hand experience can play in cognitive development.”

For example, how would a child know about a city or country never seen or visited if someone hadn’t told him or her about it? Or have an understanding of the past — that dinosaurs once roamed the world! — or the fact that Harry Potter isn’t real? How would he or she grasp that germs exist, or the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, for that matter?

“Children learn all sorts of things that are opaque to them” by being little Margaret Meads, Harris says, by listening to what others tells them — what he calls “testimony.”

“A dominant metaphor for young children’s cognitive development is that the child is a scientist who does handson experiments, such as with things that float versus sink, and revises his or her ideas about the world like a scientist,” Harris says. “By contrast, anthropologists don’t do experiments, certainly not on the culture they are studying; rather they master the language, observe carefully, and engage in long conversations with trusted informants, especially when they are puzzled. Children, like anthropologists, are trying to make sense of the culture they live in, including its beliefs and values.”

And it basically starts, he says, once they are able to combine their understanding of language with their powerful imagination.

“Once you put these two things together, you have a child who can listen to a scene he or she has never seen and build it in their minds,” Harris says. They can imagine unobserved things. “No other species is capable of this, as far as we know.”

For example, by 13 or 14 months, children show clear signs of being able to understand references to an absent object or person and are willing to alter their ideas based on what someone tells them.

In this way, Harris says, “children accept information that runs counter to their own ideas.”

He describes a scene where a toddler is told that a toy left behind is no longer in the original place. Without actually seeing the toy being moved, the little girl nevertheless looks for it in a new spot. She understands that what she thought about the toy isn’t necessarily true — another person’s testimony could provide an update. In another example, Harris talks about a 22-month-old girl who asks one night where the moon is. She is told that the moon is asleep; it isn’t out. A month later, when the adult asks the girl where the moon is, the girl replies, “Moon sleeping.” She hasn’t seen for herself that the moon is actually asleep; she learned and accepted this “fact” from another person’s testimony.

Harris’ initial interest in this work grew out of his earlier research on imagination. He found that in using their imaginations, children not only think through and act out fantastical possibilities they have never experienced — being a pirate looking for buried treasure or an alien flying through space — but they also, surprisingly, use their imaginations to think about real events and things that are not visible, like death or germs.

In a series of experiments with 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds, Harris and his team of Ed School research students asked children about familiar things, such as tigers and wolves. They were also asked about made-up creatures no one had ever seen, such as flying pigs. The children all agreed that tigers and wolves exist. No one believed there are flying pigs. The children were then asked about scientific things most had never seen, even in pictures, like germs. Based on the flying pig responses — we don’t believe what we don’t see — children should have said germs also don’t exist. However, since children do learn from what others tell them, from testimony, all of the children said that everybody believes in germs. At some point, the children had been told about germs — “germs exist” or “wash the germs off of your hands!” and had trusted the person who supplied the information. Another way to think about this, Harris says, is to think about the history of medicine. During the 1800s, microbiologist Louis Pasteur’s claims about the harm of germs were contested, particularly by doctors, and so the general public didn’t think much about the role germs played in the transmission of diseases like cholera. Today, the role of germs in spreading illness is widely accepted by doctors and parents and so, Harris says, “assertions made by other people are children’s main guarantee that germs really do exist.”

This cognitive leap that children make helps them understand that other people are an important source of information, Harris says. They understand that they need other people to make sense of the world. Once that leap is made, they then realize it’s worth asking questions, often an endless stream of questions. Questions, of course, have been controversial when it comes to learning. In Trusting What You’re Told, Harris tells a story about developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s response to his daughter, who, after twirling around and around and feeling dizzy, asked her father if his world was turning around, too. “What do you think?” Piaget replied. His daughter, frustrated, shouted back, “You always ask me that!”

Piaget clearly wanted his daughter to figure it out for herself. He feared, as others often do, “that when children ask questions, they will unthinkingly defer to adult authority,” Harris writes. “They will not check or test the answers they receive.”

However, this strikes Harris as simplistic.

“If a young child is puzzled about why it gets dark at night,” he says, “it’s not as if they are going to start figuring out the rotation of the earth.”

Plus, as Harris discovered, children don’t blindly defer to adults. Often, they think about what they have been told and then ask more questions. This is especially true when, in response to an original question, children are given an adequate explanation, such as “birds can fly because they have wings” (when the child asks how birds can stay in the air), as opposed to a vague answer like “I don’t know.”

Harris found that trust is not automatic for children. They not only “monitor the messenger,” starting when they are babies, but as they get older, they also often question the content.

In several experiments, teachers gave 3- to 5-year-olds information about an unfamiliar object from a hardware store. Both teachers — one known well by the students, the other not known well — made up names and information about the objects. All age groups equally showed a strong preference for the answers given by the familiar teacher.

“This type of early selectivity is all but universal among children growing up under normal rearing conditions,” Harris writes. This early “profiling” of people — reliable, not reliable — “means that caregivers offer much more than a secure base for autonomous exploration,” Harris writes. “What they say about the world may or may not be internalized and become part of the child’s conception of the way things are.”

What happens when the person providing the information is harder to gauge? Kathleen Corriveau, Ed.M.’03, Ed.D.’10, an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Education, worked with Harris on several studies, including one that looked at this question.

“We found that under these circumstances, 3- and 4-yearolds look to other people’s reactions for guidance,” she says. “They are more likely to accept an informant’s claim if it is endorsed by other people,” even when those other people leave. As children got older, researchers found that the track record of the person providing the information started to take on more importance. The more often they were accurate, the more they were trusted.

When using stories to figure out how children differentiate real from fiction, Harris found that by the age of 5 or 6, children believe the protagonist of a story is not real if the story includes magic or fantasy. Despite actor Daniel Radcliffe being human, most children understand that the character Harry Potter isn’t. If a story doesn’t contain magical or fantastical elements, however, children generally have no trouble believing a protagonist is real.

“This helps children sort out information about people they have never met,” Harris says.

How, then, to explain religious stories which often include things that don’t ever happen in real life, such as the parting of the sea? Harris assumed that children’s “magic detector” would go off, indicating that this kind of event couldn’t really happen. Instead, he found that children are often willing to accept the miracles or the extraordinary powers of God, perhaps because religious stories are often presented as real, especially in religious households.

“So, we end up with a paradox,” Harris writes. “On the one hand, young children have their feet on the ground — they spot the magic in a fairy story and classify it as fiction. Yet they spot the miraculous in religious claims and accept it as fact.”

In this sense, children do sometimes defer to others, even when it conflicts with the information they have gathered for themselves and even when it may not be in their best interest.

“In the third part of my book, and perhaps the most controversial, I argue that children’s willingness to listen to other people and trust them makes them susceptible to all kinds of things,” Harris says. “They are creatures of their culture. They’ll swallow, for better or for worse, the assumptions of the culture.”

With this in mind, Harris says he didn’t write his new book to revamp early education in the United States.

“I wrote it, I suppose, more because there are longer term issues at stake. My hope is that the impact will be on my colleagues interested in early childhood development. I hope that researchers will increasingly see young children as capable of learning as much via dialogue as from hands-on or discovery learning.”

Corriveau also sees practical implications for educators. For example, the findings on children being more trusting of information supplied by someone they know could improve hiring practices and policies in preschools and elementary schools.

“In particular, given the high rate of teacher turnover,” she says, the information shows that “children might be at a disadvantage when learning from a relative stranger.”

In addition, teachers can learn things they should and shouldn’t do in the classroom, she says.

“One is easy. When teachers say something incorrect, young children view them as inaccurate,” she says, “so even joking errors should be avoided.”

Harris says he hopes the book will be helpful for teachers and parents, too, “by calling attention to the critical importance of sustained dialogue in nurturing children’s curiosity and in encouraging them to ask questions.”

And he stresses that his research isn’t either/or. He’s not saying the Montessori way is wrong or that you shouldn’t encourage children to explore and learn for themselves. And just as children should be encouraged to question their own firsthand knowledge, they should also be encouraged to question the knowledge they gain from others.

Still, he says, it’s important to recognize that for our little anthropologists, “the testimony of other people is likely to be just as important as firsthand experience for setting such reflection in motion.”

Are you right as Rainn? You can be if you glam it up while reading Ed., as Rainn Wilson, star of The Office, did when he was at the school recording an EdCast. Send the photo of yourself or someone in your family to classnotes@gse.harvard.edu.

Photo by Jill Anderson

Felipe Barrera-Osorio says his upbringing in Colombia wasn’t typical. His father graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. in engineering, and his college-educated mother helped spark in her children a long-lasting love for learning. Through them, Barrera-Osorio also learned about public service and the importance of investing talent and energy for the greater good, as his father had done by returning to Colombia after Cambridge to help the country tackle various problems. In September, Barrera-Osorio spoke to Ed. about how his parents influenced his thinking, his recent move from the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and his love for a comic book character with a dog named Snowy.

You’re an economist. Why education?
I try to apply economic tools to analyze education problems. I believe education is one of the most powerful institutions to level the field for so many people.

Your research in places like Pakistan is, in some ways, your public service.
For the last four years, I have been doing research on the effects of a program in Punjab, Pakistan. The government is creating a partnership with the private sector to provide good, quality education to low-income individuals. The government provides financial resources for each kid enrolled in the private partner school, but schools have to show continuous student performance improvements, measured by a standardized test. There are also bonuses for teachers and schools.

What is your research looking at?
Three fundamental questions: First, can this program increase the enrollment rate, especially for low-income individuals? Second, are the schools in the program delivering higher performance, measured by individual test results, vis-à-vis similar schools that do not belong to the program? Third, when there are financial incentives attached to performance, do we see certain actions in the schools, such as teaching to the test or selecting only the best students? Our results, so far, have been quite impressive. These schools are receiving more students than similar schools, and there is evidence of real gains in student test performance.

What drives better test scores?
This is the new area of my research. Results show that schools at risk of losing benefits react in a fast and quite effective way, improving performance from one academic period to the next. In other words, “stick” incentives work. However, it is unclear what type of actions the schools are taking to improve. They haven’t changed the composition or type of teachers, increased inputs, or selected better students. It seems that, with the same resources, they are able to increase efficiency.

You have another project in Uganda?
Uganda is facing another type of problem. Thanks to the free education policy, classrooms in public schools are overcrowded and the quality of education is low. The government is exploring several policy options, including the creation of double shifts. The double shift is a polemic measure. On one hand, on average, systems with longer school hours have higher test scores on international tests like PISA. On the other hand, very large class sizes are correlated with low performance. I am working on a randomized experiment to assess what happens when schools go from one to two shifts.

You’ve had your own shift. How is life at Harvard different than the World Bank?
Managing my time. Last week was my first week here and I said to myself, “I need to be a lot more disciplined.” Here there is a lot of freedom. You decide how to use your time.

Your dad was a big influence, but your mom also shaped you. How?
Two months after my father died, when I was nine, my mother received her college degree in psychology at the age of 36. While working full time, she raised her three sons, alone, yet she was also very present in our lives. And she made the ordinary special. She’d cook our favorite meals. She made sure she ate with us every day. She didn’t do “extraordinary” deeds, but these everyday actions made very extraordinary statements. I am a father of two, in a household with two adults, and I barely can cope. My mother built a household that teemed with security. Nowadays, when I think about her, I think about being secure. About being loved.

Your Facebook profile picture is from Tintin. You’re a fan?
When my mother entered the university, I was in kindergarten. She would pick me up at daycare at noon. We came home, ate lunch, and then read. All sorts of books. Among my favorites was Tintin. We read it over and over. And my father used to read to us articles from the Britannica, probably way above my understanding. Now that I have my two sons, three and five, I read even more diverse books with them: Verne, Rowling, Tolkien, Feynman, you name it. And, of course, Tintin.

StreetSquash high school students take a break at the SL Green StreetSquash Community Center. (Photo by Ben Collier.)

Richard Polsky, M.A.T.’56, has long known that keeping the attention of kids isn’t always easy. He first saw it as a middle school teacher in Long Island, just after he graduated from the Ed School, then again as a staff member at the Children’s Television Workshop, where he used a machine called the Distracter to monitor whether preschoolers watching test versions of what would become Sesame Street were focused. These days, he sees it with the students he tutors twice a week at the Harlem-based nonprofit that his son, George, started a dozen years ago.

But this time, Polsky has something on his side: squash. Not the vegetable, but the high-speed racquet game played with a hollow rubber ball. His son’s nonprofit, StreetSquash, not only helps students with schoolwork, but it also teaches them a game that allows them to channel all of their teenage energy. And it’s intense. The students join the program in the sixth grade and commit for the entire academic year, for three days a week after school (academic tutoring and squash practice) and for a few hours every Saturday (more squash or community service and tutoring, if needed). Most of the 160 students stay with the program until they graduate seven years later.

StreetSquash also helps students get into college, starting with paid tutors and volunteers like Polsky, who help students with homework every week. Volunteers are also assigned a 12th-grader to closely mentor for the year.

“I tell him or her, ‘If I’m working with you, we’re going to be successful,’” says Polsky of his mentee. “You have to let them know what excellence is. At StreetSquash, every kid who wants to go to college goes.” So far, every student who has completed the program has graduated from high school and has gone on to college.

Starting in ninth grade, students also get help figuring out which colleges are the best fit, and then learn how to apply, meet deadlines, and write the all-important essay. They practice for the PSAT and SAT. By senior year, in addition to being assigned a mentor, students get targeted college help from the staff.

“We help them go on interviews, prepare for open houses, and fill out financial aid paperwork. Everything from start to finish,” says Sareen Pearl, Ed.M.’07, director of StreetSquash’s College Prep Program. And “finish” doesn’t mean help ends after the students graduate from the program.

“Staff from our Alumni Outreach Program make regular calls to students once they’re in college, visit them on campus, help them find jobs at school, and help them navigate the school’s resources,” says Pearl. “Early on, we found that so many students were underprepared and struggled once they got to college. We asked, ‘Why are we doing all of this — helping them get to college — if they’re not able to complete their education?’” To date, about 85 percent of StreetSquash alumni are still in college or have graduated.

And it’s this education that really matters, says George Polsky, who modeled StreetSquash on SquashBusters, a similar program started a few years earlier in Boston by another Harvard alum, Gregory Zaff, whom he met in 1997 when the two were involved with the U.S. squash team at the Maccabiah Games.

“Whether or not a student can hit a great forehand isn’t important. Whether or not a kid ends up being a great squash player doesn’t really matter,” he says. “What matters is getting a great education.”

Illustration by Daniel Vasconcellos

When I was younger, my dream was to be a professional baseball player, either for my hometown Red Sox, or the team that my parents had grown up loving, the New York Mets. Unfortunately, at the age of 14, I was cut from my high school baseball team and realized I might have to consider an alternate career plan. But what?

My mother was, and still is, an elementary school teacher. Every day, she would come home from work with stories about fun activities, curious questions, and adorable observations the kids had made. One of my favorites was a student mispronouncing our last name, referring to her as “Mrs. Bones.”

I began to consider becoming an elementary teacher so that I could one day come home with stories of my own. As I applied to colleges, I looked for those that had reputable teaching programs. I began at Hofstra University in the fall of 2001 as a dual major in mathematics and elementary education. After a semester of early morning classes where we discussed things such as imaginary numbers, I decided that math was not actually the route for me. I made a similar decision about elementary education after my first elementary ed class; we were asked to pretend that we were inside a cave where the lights flickered on for just a few moments, and then to use the crayons, markers, and colored pencils that were strewn about the tables to draw what we had seen in those few moments.

This was not what I was looking for.

I started thinking about the time I worked at a local summer camp and how much I enjoyed being with upper middle school students. They were at the perfect age where they understood what it meant to follow rules, but also had a bit of fun while doing so. I signed on to become a secondary education major. My senior year of college, I was placed into a seventh-grade classroom to do my student teaching. The kids were great, but I had a major problem: I found some of their “bad behaviors” to be funny! I easily pictured myself sitting at their desks 10 years earlier doing the exact same things. Now I was supposed to be the person saying, “Don’t shout out answers in the middle of class,” or “don’t try to make your friend laugh when he is reading something aloud,” or “no, you may not go to the bathroom — again.” I struggled with the need to discipline and was unsure that this was the path I wanted to go down.

I graduated as a 22-year-old with a degree and no idea where to go.

I decided to return to the metalworking factory not far from where I grew up, where I had been employed during summers in college. Resizing bolts, bending metal safety shields, and drilling holes into pieces of metal that would be put together to create hoists was how I spent my weekdays from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.

And then something happened. While working there, many of my coworkers told me that they had ended up in the factory because they had dropped out of school. This really began to open my eyes to the power of education. I decided to go back to school and see where I could make a difference. I entered the master’s program at the Ed School. During the spring semester, I participated in an internship in the Office of Student Affairs. Through this work I was able to discover my true passion: working with college and graduate students and assisting them in becoming wellrounded individuals with a wide range of experiences, both in and out of the classroom.

I may not be in a classroom myself, but working at the Ed School, I am interacting with a broad range of people to hopefully make their educational experience here positive, knowing that these people are graduating and going out to shape education on many different levels. Now that I am fully immersed in the world of education, I cannot picture myself being anywhere else.

— Kevin Boehm, Ed.M.’07, is the assistant director of the Ed School’s Office of Student Affairs. Going back to school had an added bonus for him: He met his wife, Laura Potenski, Ed.M.’07, when she was also getting her master’s. She is an eighth-grade special education teacher. And Mrs. Bones is happy her son is once again working with students.

For teacher Rhena Jasey, having a starring role in a nationally released documentary is one thing, but having actor Matt Damon say your name is completely another.

“It’s been really exciting,” says Jasey, one of the educators profiled in Nínive Calegari’s new documentary, American Teacher, which premiered in New York City on September 25. “Matt Damon said my name twice in the film. My aunt said maybe I could make that the greeting on my phone.”

But for Jasey, this film is about much more than excitement: It’s about validation.

“It’s rewarding that someone is recognizing all of the hard work it takes to be a teacher, and it was fun to go to my Harvard reunion and say, ‘I’m going to be in a movie. I’m not married and I don’t have any babies, but I’m going to be in a movie,’” she says. “It’s also great to see my doctor and lawyer friends excited, finally, about me being a teacher.”

Why did that excitement, mostly from Jasey’s Harvard College peers, take so long? It is one of the questions that former teacher Calegari, Ed.M.’95, tried to address as coproducer of the film.

“We really want to change American culture,” Calegari says. More specifically, she wants to change the perception, prestige, and pay scale of teachers, which is not an easy task in a post–Waiting for “Superman” world.

Narrated by Damon, directed by Academy Award–winning director Vanessa Roth, and produced by Calegari and author Dave Eggers, American Teacher delves significantly deeper into some of the questions raised, but not answered, in last year’s Superman. Among them? How the United States will address the retirement of more than half the nation’s teaching force in the next decade and attract new talent to a field that pays far below the private sector. (Jasey, for example, earned about $50,000 annually after six years teaching in the South Orange/Maplewood School District in New Jersey, which is in accord with the national average.)

Based on the book Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers by Calegari, Eggers, and Daniel Moulthrop, the film is one part of the Teacher Salary Project, which aims to shine a light on the undervaluation of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers. To illustrate this point, four educators, including Jasey, share their universal stories of success, challenge, and, in two instances, departures from jobs they love.

“When I was teaching, I thought no one was happier than me. I could not believe how rewarding it was, but I felt the outside community didn’t realize how sophisticated the job was,” says Calegari, who taught for nearly a decade before cofounding 826 Valencia, a nonprofit organization that supports both teachers and students in writing skills. “I felt the burn of America’s ambivalent feelings about it. Some people had a sense it was important work, while others didn’t. Meanwhile, I married someone who graduated from an M.B.A. program right at the start of the dotcom boom, and he and his peers were all being offered these six-figure salaries. I love innovation and I think technology is important, but the fact that I couldn’t even go to a friend’s wedding because I couldn’t afford it on my teacher’s salary … Something seemed very wrong to me.”

Calegari was not alone in her pursuit of this project, and found support among fellow Ed School graduates including board members Louise Grotenhuis, Ed.M.’95, and Ellen Gordon Reeves, Ed.M.’86; Mark Kushner, Ed.M.’95, who helped Calegari find one of the teachers profiled; and 2005 National Teacher of the Year Jason Kamras, Ed.M.’00, who holds the distinction of appearing in both American Teacher and Superman.

Kamras, who currently serves as the chief of human capital for the District of Columbia Public Schools, has a varied perspective echoed today by many inside and outside education: While great teachers may be underpaid, new evaluation criteria are critical to determine appropriate salary levels.

“Sometimes folks in education do ourselves damage when we say everyone should be getting more money regardless of what is happening in the classroom,” says Kamras. As for the perception problem? “The reality is the top third of college graduates do not go into teaching, it is usually the bottom third,” he says. “It is still not perceived as professional or as respected or as important as going into medicine or law or science … so it is not, on average, attracting the top. But the caveat is there are great people going into the profession every day and doing great things for kids. Rhena shows us that.

“Going forward, one of the ways to address this and to change the perception is to be honest about the profession and to be concrete,” says Kamras. “We have to be able to stand up and say, ‘Those who are not doing a great job have got to go.’ What attracts great people is other great people. The way we can create that cycle in schools is to make sure we have the best and not tolerate anything less. If we do that, I’ll be at the front of the line saying we have to pay people more. That is what we have tried to do here in D.C. Not only do we give out annual bonuses of up to $25,000, but we also move people up the salary scale — their base salaries — in some cases by more than $20,000. When you attach the dollars and it shows what you value, it does show prestige, and it goes hand-in-hand with saying, ‘We are not going to tolerate mediocrity.’”

As for Jasey, who left her public school job in New Jersey for a $125,000-per-year teaching post at a charter school in New York, she is hopeful that American Teacher will promote dialogue and impart “a new appreciation for how complicated and how difficult the job is, as well as the broad range of talent required to do it well.

“I’m lucky because I use so many of my strengths throughout the day and I want people to come away with that understanding that this is more than babysitting. Someone is showing the world what we do and the impact we have,” says Jasey, who holds two master’s degrees. “Teaching is a real profession that requires an intense amount of expertise.”

— Mary Tamer is a Boston-based freelance writer and a frequent contributor to Ed.

— Go to www.theteachersalaryproject.org to watch a clip of this film.

— A screening of American Teacher will be held in the Ed School’s Askwith Hall in Longfellow Hall, Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 4:00 p.m.