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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.
"The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools."
"In short, Massachusetts schools may be number one for some students but not for all of them. Students’ skills are falling and growing more unequal."
"Our Massachusetts diploma used to be the admired national standard, but now college admissions officers and employers are baffled as to what a Massachusetts diploma actually means since the Commonwealth has reverted to a hodgepodge of variable local standards, coupled with some of the least rigorous course requirements of any state in the country."
"Oftentimes we think that politics is all about material goods, resource allocation and the like. I want to say it’s actually about something more fundamental. It’s about human dignity, and human dignity resides in the capacity of people to be the authors of their lives."
"It’s particularly important for schools to engage with families that might feel disoriented by their setting or that their cultural practices are unwelcome, according to Carola Suárez-Orozco."
"It’s important to keep in mind that there are two Massachusetts stories in this round of NAEP results. One is the 'best in the nation' story. The other is that we continue to have persistent learning loss due to the pandemic and that we have declined substantially from peak achievement levels early in the prior decade."
"When you have a supportive team, a supportive leader, the resources, and you also have the skill and the capacity and the knowledge of how to do it the right way, I’ve seen things really move tremendously, sometimes in a short period of time, if you’ve got the real backing of the leadership."
"If you have open choice in schools, it often leads to different kinds of segregation and clustering. Oftentimes, that will line up along racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic lines."
"The share of students receiving summer school and the share of students attending summer school was lower than needed. The recovery efforts were not intensive enough."
"Good teachers have strong knowledge of their students as individuals — how they think and think about themselves as learners — as well as of their students’ culture and community."
“What you’re seeing is a consequence of the success we’ve had in educating more people. Graduating college no longer gives you a leg up, as recent cohorts have seen the highest graduation rates ever.”
“The goal of good hiring is to establish a match between the person who’s coming in, either as a transfer from another school or as a new hire, and the expectations of people in that school."
“The challenges that community colleges face are just fierce.”
“Anytime, any place you bring up school closings, it’s a battle, and it’s a battle that often leaders pay a price for waging."
“Kids’ primary pathway to learning math is in school, and the only way to improve math instruction is through the constant improvement of what happens between teachers and students.”
"For nearly 100 years, community arts practitioners and organizations have been bastions of local culture and creativity and free expression, especially in communities of color that have contended with longer histories of discriminatory social policies and disinvestment."
"Anyone who studies organizational effectiveness would tell you that college and university boards are much too large, as would almost any college or university president when speaking off the record."
“People can respond to disillusionment by becoming bitter and withdrawing — and cynical. They can also respond to disillusionment by developing a more encompassing understanding of reality and thriving.”
"We must continue to ask how we might transform the next generation of the American workforce by anchoring hiring and promotion decisions on workers’ current skills and talents, regardless of where or how they acquired them."
“There’s been a decline in trust in large institutions generally, and I would interpret that change as a broader phenomenon rather than anything specific to education. But it does shift the lay of the land.”
"He does want to abolish the Department of Education, which was created in 1979, but it’s not clear what that means — just get rid of the bureaucracy or go further and cut the funding for education?"
"The toy should actually have a natural stopping point for the kids to end the conversation."
"I don't think that we should change education radically in the short run. But over the next few decades, education can and should change in major ways."
"The best way to tackle the current crisis is to make sure debates over social media’s mental health impacts don’t distract us from clear thinking and good problem-solving. Teens have insights that can light the path forward, but only if we’re willing to listen."
"It’s increasingly clear that most jobs require some degree of postsecondary training, and it’s been hard to develop viable alternative pathways to college for students who are not enrolling in four-year degree programs without financial support."
“There is a fear that people establish relationships with AI which might isolate them from human to human interactions.”
“What I’m seeing is everything from, ‘This is too hot, I can’t touch it,’ to, ‘These issues are too important for me to not take a stand.'”
"There isn’t a sense of freedom to explore a liberal arts education when people are concerned about the economy. For people who are first-gen and people from low-income backgrounds, I want them to come into any college … and feel confident in taking courses that broadly expose them to ideas."
"We need to move to a proactive, preventative model where we actually find the kids who most likely will struggle with learning to read before they struggle with learning to read, help them, then put them on the right developmental trajectory."
"The real issue, in other words, is not the existence of degree requirements, but the lack of alternative ways for workers to prove their qualifications. If political leaders really want to expand opportunities for non-college-educated Americans, that’s the problem they need to solve."