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Faculty
Our faculty consistently challenges the status quo and pioneers new approaches to teaching and learning. Yet their ideas are rooted in research, practice, and policy. With deep knowledge of the education field, HGSE professors influence current conversations in the media, giving educators and students a much-needed voice for positive change.
"I didn’t realize how even small changes to a system can produce outsized responses. It taught me an early lesson that any change you make will get pushback."
"I think if people want to come for you, they're going to come for you. I think the question is, why?"
"The money did contribute to the recovery, [but] could the money have had a bigger impact? Yes."
"Education can and should remain central, but we need to be very open to the form that education will take — from cradle to grave, with new kinds of roles, expertise, and options."
"With national politics dominating the discourse in education, it can be challenging for leaders to discern the true desires and concerns of their local communities. Politically savvy education leaders must regularly communicate what they are doing — and why — in plain language, while listening to and learning from more than the loudest voices."
"People in Boston, then as now, felt like they were entitled to have good, safe, nearby schools in their neighborhoods. For many parents, Black and white, the idea of busing their children to a far-away, possibly unsafe school was outrageous."
"High achievers aren’t born knowing that they want to become teachers or they’re not born knowing that teaching isn’t an appropriate career path for them. They learn it and they relearn it through a number of signals that are built into their interactions with family and friends."
"Effective education leaders must be proactive if they are to ensure a safe and supportive learning environment for every child while preserving their own integrity."
"People in general often behave in closed-minded ways, as is all too apparent in today’s world, and people high in cognitive ability turn out to be just as often closed-minded as those lower in cognitive ability, investing their ‘smarts’ in, for instance, more elaborate arguments on their favoured side of a matter."
"Summer is the most underused — and unequal — time of year educationally. I hope this study inspires more school districts to expand their summer learning options."
"On every campus there are people with both good ideas and an openness to change beyond the incremental. Too often, however, they run quickly into a wall of intransigence and retreat back into the safety of well-established practices."
"One of the biggest challenges facing education systems worldwide, especially those with lower levels of resources and capacity, is how to leverage technology and innovation to meet students where they are."
"If kids can read, then a lot of opportunities are available to them that wouldn't otherwise be."
"Every child is entitled to be challenged. That has got to be part of our definition of equity in education."
"I think one of the issues about being home for a full year, which is what a lot of kids were in some cases in some of these urban districts, is that they forgot how to 'student,' if you think about student as a verb. 'Studenting' means paying attention, being engaged with your peers, being engaged with your teacher."
"High school students, like all students, deserve places and spaces where their voices can be heard, and also supports and structures for having complex dialogue across perspectives."
"For parents, our well-being is often tied to how well our kids are doing. When you're anxious and depressed, it's harder to be emotionally available to your teen and patient and steady in the way the teens often really need."
"We have trained people to think that [family engagement] is an add-on, or we have not trained them at all. If we don’t train them, then of course they’re going to think this is something that’s not important."
"Going into higher education is very expensive, and what is particularly expensive is not finishing. These students take on loans but do not get the economic benefit of a four-year degree."
"Every child has the right to read well. Every child has the right to access their full potential. This society is driven by perfectionism and has been very narrow-minded when it comes to children who learn differently, including learning disabilities."
"For Jamaican society, it has the impact of pulling away scarce talent, thus perpetuating the challenge of raising education quality in Jamaica and similar countries and increasing the gaps in student learning between high- and low-income societies."
David Deming joins EconoFact Chats to highlight that even though standardized tests can be gamed by more privileged students through extensive test preparation, and retaking of tests, they remain less biased than other factors that can help students stand out in the admissions process.
"We could take this moment of confusion and loss of certainty seriously, at least in some small pockets, and start thinking about what a different kind of school would look like. Five years from now, we might have the beginnings of some very interesting exploration."
"Kim thinks that a knowledge-building curriculum doesn’t need to teach many topics. Random facts, he says, are not important. He argues for depth instead of breadth."
"Yes, SAT and ACT scores do strongly correlate with parental income levels. But when colleges take tests off the table, the remaining measures used to assess applicants are even more biased."
"Academic achievement is incredibly important, but I certainly think it’s just as important to prepare kids to be moral, to love, to have hope, and to have meaning and purpose in their lives. We’re tending to sideline those things."
"The U.S. is a society in which skills really do matter for economic success. What that means is that the impact of learning loss on individual students through their earnings is going to be larger in the U.S. than it might be in a society like Sweden."
"The skills required to use evidence well are in short supply, and districts and states vary tremendously in their capacity."
"We’ve got to be smart about these tools. It’s the glue that holds everything together. So you’ve got to do a little bit of that connection piece. The tools can’t create the relationship."
"When we focus only on moments of shock and crisis, we miss the long-term nature of what it means for kids to learn and become part of new schools."