HGSE Remembers Arthur Powell

Harvard Graduate School of Education is mourning the loss of former administrator Arthur Powell. He passed away July 11, 2024, at the age of 87.

A historian and educator, Powell earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969. His studies focused on the history of American civilization with emphasis on the history of the professional development of the field of education. In 1966, while pursuing his degree, he published Educational Careers and the Missing Elite, which highlighted the array of careers that comprise the field and made a case for education as a viable career path for students from elite colleges and universities.

Powell was appointed to the administration at HGSE in 1968, working closely with his friend and mentor Dean Ted Sizer during a tumultuous time in the school’s history, and served in this role until 1976. In 1980, he published The Uncertain Profession: Harvard and the Search for Educational Authority, the first analytic history of a major school of education, providing insight into how the study of education had evolved in the years since it was first taught at Harvard in 1891.

"Arthur Powell leaves an impressive legacy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he taught [and] where he became a leading administrator throughout the deanship of Theodore Sizer and, briefly, Paul Ylvisaker," says Professor Patricia Albjerg Graham, a colleague of Powell's at HGSE and a former dean. "His history of the institution, The Uncertain Profession: Harvard and the Search for Educational Authority, ... provided the model for many subsequent institutional histories."

Powell authored many influential books which have had lasting impact on the field. While serving as director of the Commission on Educational Issues at the National Association of Independent Schools from 1978–1988, Powell was the lead author (with Eleanor Farrar, Ed.D.'75, and then-Professor David Cohen) of The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace, a critique of secondary schools in the United States and their tendency to offer too much choice within their courses and curricula, resulting in less-challenging and more accommodating models. The book helped shape the debate around public school reform in America through the 1980s and 1990s. He also published Lessons from Privilege, which aimed to demonstrate how public schools could learn from private schools to advance learning. 

As a student at Harvard, Powell met and married Barbara (Schieffelin) Powell, M.A.T.'65, Ed.D.'70, who survives him, along with their three children, Ben, Allie, and Julia; and his seven grandchildren, Finian, Cyrus, Rhea, Garrett, Auden, Aster, and Winslow.