Sara Mead's Policy Notebook
Sara Mead was a senior associate with Bellwether Education Partners who wrote about education policy, with particular attention to early childhood education, school reform, and improving educational outcomes for low-income students. This blog is no longer being updated.
Education
Opinion
Daniel Jhin Yoo, Founder, Goalbook
Special education is a central component of the U.S. public education system: some 12 percent of U.S. public school students are identified with disabilities, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, designed to protect the rights and improve educational outcomes for students with disabilities, probably impacts day-to-day school operation more than any other federal policy. Yet students with disabilities are often overlooked or marginalized in contemporary education reform conversations.
Education
Opinion
Reid Saaris, Founder and Executive Director, Equal Opportunity Schools
Even as our public policies seek to ensure that all students graduate high school ready to succeed in college and careers, the practices and beliefs in our public school systems too often mean that many students--particularly but hardly exclusively low-income and minority students--never have access to the types of rigorous coursework that prepare them for success. Reid Saaris and the organization he founded, Equal Opportunity Schools, are working to change that. Equal Opportunity Schools works with high schools and districts to increase the number of these students enrolled in advanced courses, with the goal of closing racial and income enrollment gaps in AP and IB courses by 2020.
Education
Opinion
Teddy Rice, President and Co-Founder, Ellevation
One in ten U.S. public school students is an English language learner. In the past two decades, the population of ELL students has both grown rapidly and expanded beyond traditional "border" states to communities in all parts of the country. Yet our education system does a poor job of serving ELL students; there are large student achievement gaps between ELL students and their peers, and only 25-30 percent of ELL students graduate within four years of entering high school. Teddy Rice is working to change that. In 2011, Rice and Jordan Meranus of New Schools Venture Fund co-founded Ellevation, a mission-driven software company that focuses on tools to improve education for English language learner (ELL) students (disclosure: Some of my Bellwether colleagues have advised Ellevation).
Education
Opinion
Terence Patterson, Education Program Officer, Hyde Foundation
Memphis native Terence Patterson returned in his hometown in 2011 to join the Hyde Family Foundations, which focuses on improving education, strengthening neighborhoods, and building community assets in Memphis. As education program officer, Patterson leads the Foundations' work to improve education for students in Memphis, at a time when the city, and Tennessee as a whole, are seizing new opportunities brought about by Race to the Top, yet also struggling with complex challenges. Patterson, 34, brings to this work his diverse experiences in both education reform and the private sector. Prior to returning to Memphis, he served as Deputy Chief of Staff to the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools and Interim Officer for the Office of New Schools. He has also worked as a corporate financial analyst, entrepreneur and corporate transactional lawyer. He is a graduate of Harvard University, where he was a two-time Ivy League Football Player, and Northwestern University's dual MBA-JD program.
Early Childhood
Opinion
Sophia Pappas, Executive Director, Office of Early Childhood Education, New York City Department of Education
Regular readers of this blog are familiar with both the challenges and opportunities of early childhood education. Even as research demonstrates the incredible learning potential of young children and the impact of high-quality early learning programs to improve young children's learning outcomes, efforts to improve early learning outcomes continue to be constrained by limited--and in some cases, declining--funding, a fragmented early childhood system, a workforce with mixed skill levels, and even a lack of consensus in the field about the purposes of early childhood education. Sophia Pappas works at the heart of these challenges. As Executive Director of the Office of Early Childhood Education for the New York City Department of Education, Pappas oversees pre-k programs responsible for serving more than 58,000 4-year-olds in the City of New York, and also works to align pre-k offerings with the early elementary grades.
Education
Opinion
Ama Nyamekye, Executive Director, Educators for Excellence Los Angeles
Last year, this series profiled Educators for Excellence founders Evan Stone and Sydney Morris, who launched Educators for Excellence in New York City and state to engage teachers in education policy issues and provide a platform for teacher voices to be heard by policymakers and the media--with the ultimate goal of elevating the profession and ensuring that teacher expertise informs smart education policy choices.
College & Workforce Readiness
Opinion
Ben Miller, Policy Advisor, Office for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, U.S. Department of Education
Concerns about the equity, quality and outcomes of K-12 education have long been a feature of education policy debates, but analysts and policymakers have recently come to realize that our higher education system also suffers from poor outcomes (fewer than 60 percent of new students graduate college within 6 years), huge disparities in quality across institutions, and rapidly increasing college costs. As a result, our international lead in higher education attainment, which powered economic growth in the later half of the 20th century, has disappeared. And if the United States is to meet President Obama's goal of once again being first in the world in college completion, something's got to change.
Education
Opinion
Ben Marcovitz, Founder and Principal, Sci Academy, and CEO, Collegiate Academies
In the six years since Hurricane Katrina, efforts to rebuild New Orleans' public schools have made the city an incredibly fertile ground for new education organizations and talent. Ben Marcovitz is one of the visionary young education leaders to emerge from post-Katrina New Orleans. In 2007 he founded Sci Academy, an open enrollment, college preparatory high school that has led the district in high school performance since its founding. That success in turn prompted the creation of the Collegiate Academies network, to replicate the Sci Academy model and grow the number of high-performing high schools in New Orleans that prepare all students to succeed in college. This fall, Collegiate Academies will open two additional schools in the historic George Washington Carver campus in New Orleans.
Education
Opinion
Toni Maraviglia, Founder, MPrep
International comparisons are all the rage in education these days, but they tend to focus on how American kids stack up (or don't) against their peers in other developed countries. It can be easy to forget that millions of students in the developing world lack access to educational opportunities altogether--or face extreme challenges in accessing them. Toni Maraviglia is tackling this challenge. Her company, MPrep, uses a common technology--cell phones--to improve learning for Kenyan primary school students. But that's just a first step in a broader vision to use accessible technologies to improve learning for students in developing countries throughout the world.
Education
Opinion
Thaly Germain, Director, Lynch Leadership Academy
Thaly Germain is Director of the Lynch Leadership Academy, a partnership between Boston College and the Lynch Foundation to strengthen leadership among principals working in parochial, district, and charter schools in Boston and build their capacity to improve student achievement in the schools they serve. Born in Haiti, Germain, 33, immigrated to the United States in the mid-1980s, following a military coup in her native country, and was educated in schools in both Haiti and Brooklyn, New York. She previously taught in a public high school New York City and a charter school in Washington, D.C., of which she later became principal, and has held a variety of positions with New Leaders for New Schools. An alumnus of Bryn Mar College and New Leaders' Aspriging Principals program, she is currently in the process of moving from Washington, D.C. to Boston.
Education
Opinion
Cory Koedel, Assistant Professor, University of Missouri
Teacher effectiveness, and the use of student value-added data to measure it, are a hot topic in education these days. The University of Missouri's Cory Koedel is among the researchers helping to build our knowledge base in these areas and shape public policy as a result. Koedel has studied issues related to teacher quality, value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, school choice, and curricular effectiveness. He service on the VAM Technical Advisory Board for the Pittsburgh Public Schools, the Missouri Department of Education's Growth Model Technical Advisory Committee, and the National Report Technical Advisory Panel for the New Teacher Project, has also helped to inform public policy related to teacher effectiveness and evaluation. A California native, Koedel earned his bachelor's degree and Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, San Diego, before settling in Missouri, where he lives with his wife and daughters.
Education
Opinion
Nick Ehrmann, CEO and Founder, Blue Engine
"College and Career-Ready" is the catch word in education policy these days. But, even as increasing numbers of students are going to college, far too few are prepared to succeed there. Nick Ehrmann founded Blue Engine in an effort to solve this problem. Blue Engine recruits, trains, and supports recent college graduates to work with students and teachers in public high schools, reducing student: instructor ratios to customize learning and help students master advanced academic skills for high school and college success. Launched in 2010, Blue Engine has already gained national recognition from the Clinton Global Initative, Blue Ridge Foundation of New York, Echoing Green, and other major organizations supporting social entrepreneurship and education reform.
Education
Opinion
Genevieve DeBose, Teaching Ambassador Fellow, U.S. Department of Education
No topic in education has garnered more attention and controversy over the past few years than teacher effectiveness, and the U.S. Department of Education has played a critical role in that debate, first in Race to the Top, and more recently through the ESEA Flexibility Waiver process and proposed RESPECT initiative. The Department's Teaching Ambassador Fellowship program seeks to engage and give teachers a voice in that process by bringing a cohort of teachers to the Department for a year, where they work on policy issues and teacher outreach.
Education
Opinion
Matthew Chingos, Fellow, Brown Center on Education Policy, The Brookings Institution
At only 29, Matthew Chingos has already conducted research with some of the nation's leading education researchers and on some of the most pressing education policy questions, including issues related to teacher effectiveness, accountability, and higher education attainment. His first book, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities (co-authored with William Bowen and Michael McPherson) was published by Princeton University Press in 2009.