Explore our programs — offering exceptional academic preparation, opportunities for growth, and the tools to make an impact.
Find everything you need to apply for and finance your graduate education.
Stories, strategies, and actionable knowledge — putting HGSE's powerful ideas into practice.
With deep expertise that connects research, practice, and policy, HGSE faculty are leaders in the field.
Get to know our community — and all the ways to learn, collaborate, connect, develop your career, and build your network.
Faculty-led programs to deepen your impact and build your effectiveness as an educator and leader.
Access the premiere education subject library for Harvard University.
Access the Office of Student Affairs, the Office of the Registrar, Career Services, and other key resources.
Explore opportunities to grow, build connections, and create change.
Ph.D., Harvard University, (1991)
Visit my.Harvard
Thomas Kane is an economist and Walter H. Gale Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research, a university-wide research center that works with school districts and state agencies. Between 2009 and 2012, he directed the Measures of Effective Teaching project for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His work, profiled in Harvard Magazine, has spanned both K–12 and higher education, covering topics such as the design of school accountability systems, teacher recruitment and retention, financial aid for college, race-conscious college admissions, and the earnings impacts of community colleges. 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.
Because of the rich data they control, state and local education agencies are alluring partners for education researchers. Yet all researchersespecially young onesmust be mindful of the potential hazards: how to maintain objectivity, how to deliver bad news, how to negotiate a data use agreement and respect student privacy, how to convert an agency leaders concern into a tractable research question. By renewing the PIER fellowship, we hope to train the next generation of education scholars to navigate such hazards and produce rigorous research which informs practitioner decisions. We will focus on the content area of Improving Education Systems and in the methodological area of Efficacy. Our proposed program includes ten core elements: (i) the coordinated curriculum requirements, (ii) the public seminar with private directors cut seminar, (iii) the PIER proseminar course, (iv) the PIER faculty mentor, (v) the research apprenticeship, (vi) the policy internship, (vii) the PIER Summit, (viii) the PIER student seminar, (ix) independent research, and (x) job market supportare together designed to provide students with a mix of hard skills, soft skills, and relationships that are required for successful researcher-practitioner partnerships in education. Aside from our track record of training and placing many of the top young quantitative education researchers in the field today, our proposal has two primary strengths: (1) Through our Strategic Data Project, we have built a national network of agencies, having trained more than 350 data analysts in more than 125 state and local education agencies and non-profits. Moreover, with our recent IES-funded National Center for Rural Education Research Networks, that network now includes 50+ rural school districts in NY and OH. The size and breadth of the network allows us to accommodate a wide range of student interests as well as to foster direct relationships between fellows and agency leaders that are not dependent on a faculty members project. Fellows take those relationships with them as they start their careers. (2) In our first training grant in 2015, we included a policy internship, placing fellows in 10-week summer residencies in a partner agency. Thus, rather than starting from scratch, we are building on that experience and improving an existing policy internship: extending it to a yearlong engagement and adding a faculty coordinator of PIER partnerships (Carrie Conaway) to oversee student placements and partner engagement. Principal Investigator, Tom Kane, has extensive experience collaborating with school agencies, including leading the $60 million Measures of Effective Teaching project. Our twenty-six faculty affiliates are drawn from three schools at Harvard (HGSE, HKS, and GSAS) and two more are close collaborators, drawn from other Boston-area institutions. Number of PIER Fellows Trained: Approximately 30 doctoral students will receive two- or three-year PIER fellowships. (The exact number depends on cohort size across each of the three years and when students apply during their graduate career). Across all cohorts, the PIER fellowship will support 68 fellowship years.
As chronic absenteeism slows the pace of academic recovery after the pandemic, especially in poorer school districts, and achievement gaps widen, researchers urge states and districts to recommit to effective interventions, and for leaders outside schools and employers to help confront the problem
Although no state improved in both math and reading on the NAEP, the Education Recovery Scorecard highlights the work of over 100 districts performing above pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading
A new study finds federal relief funds, which will expire this fall, helped with academic recovery, especially in low-income schools, but urges states to help students who still remain behind
To complete the recovery, researchers advise states to target resources on academic interventions, such as tutoring and summer learning, and reducing absenteeism