Jordan Naidoo

Ed.D. CCE '04

Jordan Naidoo is the Basic Education specialist at Save the Children (US). He received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in June 2004. Jordan earned his BA and B Ed. from the University of Durban Westville (South Africa), and M. Ed. from the University of Natal (Durban, South Africa). Prior to attending HGSE, he was a member of the design team for the Turning Points Middle School Reform at the Center for Collaborative Education in Boston. Jordan has also held positions as a teacher, a researcher at the Education Policy Unit, University of Natal and as a policy analyst at the Center Education Policy Development, focusing on school integration and educational transformation in South Africa.

Recently he was a coordinator responsible for the theme of Decentralization and Education Management in the Association for Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) study, Improving the Quality of Education. He has contributed a chapter titled "Managing the Improvement of Education" for a forthcoming publication edited by Adriaan Vespoor, The Challenge of Learning: Improving the Quality of Basic Education in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2004 he was a visiting fellow at International Institute for Education Planning (UNESCO, Paris) working on issues related to decentralization and school evaluation.

Jordan's dissertation, "Educational Decentralization and School Governance in South Africa: From Policy to Practice," was motivated by his interest in the process of democratization and the role of grassroots structures, and by work in a project with Professor Susanne Grant Lewis on education decentralization in South Africa. In his dissertation study, he examined the mediation of educational governance policy at school level. Professors Susanne Grant Lewis, Richard Elmore, and Fernando Reimers served as his doctoral committee readers.

Jordan's work at Save the Children involves providing support to SC field offices in Indonesia, Philippines, Egypt, Malawi, and Uganda among others. Support includes working with country program staff and regional advisors in project implementation, research and documentation, proposal development and emergency response.