Welcome!

While much of the rest of this Usable Knowledge site seeks to convey what we’re learning here at HGSE to a wider public, this blog will report on a workshop that is explicitly designed to explore what we don’t know. By bringing together faculty, students, and some current practitioners in the field, the workshop gives us a chance to learn from one another as we think about what we know about education reform and where we might profitably go next. This particular workshop is focused around the critical issues of standards and accountability, although this model would work for a broad range of topics in the future. This blog seeks to broaden that conversation to a wider group; we hope to learn from you as we report what we are learning from one another.

Faculty participants in the group include HGSE faculty colleagues Richard Elmore, Dan Koretz, Richard Murnane, Tom Payzant, Paul Reville, and Robert Schwartz. We are joined by 20-25 doctoral and masters students, many of whom have had considerable experience in the classroom or as administrators. We are also occasionally joined by current practitioners, such as Mary Russo, the highly successful principal of the Murphy School in Boston. To allow people to speak freely, I will not identify the speakers by name on the blog. The seminar is organized by Richard Elmore and myself, Jal Mehta (post-doctoral fellow and lecturer at HGSE). It will meet 5 times over the course of the semester, and I will post reports here, starting with the post immediately above this one.

Please comment below – we’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch with me at jal_mehta@gse.harvard.edu. Looking forward to the discussion!