Why do you have so many guns?

My heart broke the moment I was asked this question. It happened four years ago while I was on a fellowship in New Zealand, on a day where I’d driven to one of the more remote areas of an already very remote island in the South Pacific. The elementary school I was visiting, Te Kura o Hiruharama (Hiruharama School), serves Maori children living in poverty, and they weren’t used to visitors from faraway places such as America. So to kick things off, I asked them what they most wanted to know about my homeland.

The events of this past year have magnified differences in our culture, and produced conflict – but active efforts, including protest, can lead to reform. In many ways, this idea animates all of the activities we undertake at Deans for Impact. We believe in the power of helping existing and future educators practice better pedagogy with all students, so that over time, our work – and the work of so many others – will join together such that the stark racial segregation we witnessed during one school visit will seem an unconscionable aberration, rather than an accepted norm.

A new report, Scaling Solutions Toward Shifting Systems, captures a subtle but important “shift in the discourse” in the philanthropic community toward supporting more sustained, deeper-level transformations in society. Benjamin Riley argues this is a very good thing, as philanthropic organizations can play key roles in transforming complex systems when they remain committed to sustained change over time.

That’s why at Deans for Impact we describe our mission – to transform the U.S. educator-preparation system to be the best in the world – in generational terms. Our members are acting now to improve their programs, to change existing policies, and to demonstrate our collective impact. But it will take years for these changes to take root and to spread to the broader field.

In the wake of the violence committed by American white nationalists in Charlottesville over the past weekend, we reached out to offer our support to Dean Bob Pianta of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

Ben Riley and Kate Walsh debate educational innovation on the SXSWedu stage.

Most teaching is local: most teachers choose to teach near where they grew up. Given that, what are the implications for teacher preparation?

A review of Lucy Crehan’s new book Cleverlands, a tour of five of the world’s highest performing education systems.

In late 2016, a seven-part investigative series by the Houston Chronicle revealed that the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) monitoring system for the…

Gatherings at Deans for Impact play a pivotal role. Even in this hyper-digital world, it is through in-person interactions that we build trust and…