Project Leadership

The leaders of the Center have spent their careers bridging the boundaries between academia and the policy world. As such, they are particularly well suited to creating this new type of Partnership.

Thomas J. Kane

Thomas J. Kane, the Center’s faculty director, is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His work has influenced how we think about a range of education policies: test score volatility and the design of school accountability systems, teacher recruitment and retention, financial aid for college, race-conscious college admissions and the economic payoff to a community college. From 1995 to 1996, Kane served as the senior economist for labor, education, and welfare policy issues within President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. From 1991 through 2000, he was a faculty member at the Kennedy School of Government. Kane has also been a professor of public policy at UCLA and has held visiting fellowships at the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Jon Fullerton

Jon Fullerton is the Executive Director of the Center. Fullerton has extensive experience working with policymakers and executives in designing and implementing organizational change and improvements. Before coming to Harvard, Fullerton served as the Board of Education’s Director of Budget and Financial Policy for the Los Angeles Unified School District. In this capacity, he provided independent evaluations of district reforms and helped to ensure that the district’s budget was aligned with board priorities. From 2002 to 2005 he was Vice-President of Strategy, Evaluation, Research, and Policy at the Urban Education Partnership in Los Angeles, where he worked with policymakers to ensure that they focused on high impact educational strategies. Fullerton previously worked for five years at McKinsey & Company as a strategy consultant. He has a PhD in government and an AB in social studies, both from Harvard.

Janine Mathó

Janine Mathó serves as Director of Administration and Communications at CEPR. Her experience in the education sector spans from K-12 to higher education.  Janine’s interests lie in leveraging the resources of higher education to positively impact PK-12 education through strategic engagement with practitioners, innovative school-university partnerships, research initiatives, and leadership development.  Her professional experience includes over eight years experience in university administration having previously served in various leadership roles throughout Harvard University relating to development, communications, strategic planning and community outreach.  She has also served K-12 education initiatives as an Education Policy Researcher in Civil Rights at the American Federation of Teachers, and as a Teaching Fellow and Houseparent at Phillips Academy Andover.  Janine is a doctoral candidate in Education Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania where the focus of her dissertation research is an investigation of leadership development in mid-career K-12 education leaders.  She earned her M.A. in Education Administration from American University, and her B.A. in English from Franklin & Marshall College.