harvard phd of education

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Questions about these requirements? See the contact info at the bottom of the page. 

The PhD in education is awarded by the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Students will work with faculty in the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Candidates for the PhD in education will be affiliated with one of three concentrations: culture, institutions, and society (CIS); education policy and program evaluation (EPPE); or human development, learning, and teaching (HDLT).

All entering PhD students (“G1s”) are assigned an academic advisor based on interests and goals discussed in the admissions application. The advisor must be a  current  HGSE faculty member who is a member of the Faculty of the Whole. The relationship between the faculty advisor and student is integral for scholarly progress and professional development. Like any professional relationship, the advisor-student relationship takes time to develop and is unique in nature, matching the styles and needs of both individuals.

Academic Residence

Completion of a minimum of two years of full-time study in residence is required to receive the PhD from Harvard Griffin GSAS. The academic residence requirement can be reduced by as much as one term (four four-credit courses) if the candidate's department grants academic credit for prior work done at HGSE within three years of starting the PhD (see Credit for Completed Graduate Work ).

Satisfactory Progress

The PhD in Education Steering Committee monitors each student’s progress year by year. The PhD in education degree is governed by a series of benchmarks that define what is considered evidence that the student is making “satisfactory, adequate and timely progress.” During the period between admission and submission of the dissertation, the PhD Steering Committee conducts annual reviews to ensure each candidate is meeting relevant benchmarks and academic milestones.

Program of Study

The first two years.

PhD in education students must complete a minimum of 64 credits/16 courses toward the degree, along with other academic and research-related requirements including:

• PhD Proseminar in Education (Year 1 fall; 1 course)
• Concentration Core Seminar (Year 1 spring; 1 course)
• Foundational Quantitative Methods Courses (2 courses)
• Foundational Qualitative Methods Course (1 course)
• Additional Qualitative Methods Course (1 course)
• Concentration Electives (3 courses)
• General Electives (5 courses)
• Research apprenticeship (each year)
• Reading Time (written comprehensive exam preparation; Year 2 spring, 1 course)
• Written Comprehensive Examination (Year 2 spring)
• Research Colloquia (Years 1 and 2; 1 course per year)
• Any outstanding coursework
• Oral Comprehensive Examination
• Research apprenticeship
• Teaching Fellow appointment(s) (four “slots” required at HGSE, typically fulfilled in Years 3 and 4)
• Research Colloquium presentation (Year 3, 4, 5, or 6)

Years Four-Six

• Dissertation Proposal (to be completed by the end of Year 4)
• Dissertation Committee Meeting (Year 4 or 5)
• Dissertation and Dissertation Defense (Year 4, 5, or 6)

Master of Arts (AM)

Candidates for the PhD in education degree may apply eight courses/32 credits of their doctoral program toward an AM in passing from Harvard Griffin GSAS. PhD in education students may apply for a master’s only after they have completed at least 16 courses (64 credits) since enrolling in the PhD program.

Students who wish to receive the AM in passing must file with the Harvard Griffin GSAS Registrar’s Office. While the department does not admit candidates for a terminal AM degree, students who have met all the course requirements may petition to be awarded the AM in education. Students must have a B+ average to receive a master’s-in-passing.

To enhance students’ teaching skills and to promote consolidation of their own learning, all PhD in education students are required to complete four Teaching Fellowship (TF) “slots” at HGSE over the course of their time in the program. Most students will fulfill this requirement in Year 3 or Year 4, though students must fulfill the requirement before receiving Harvard Griffin GSAS dissertation completion funding .  

Please note that this requirement is applicable to all PhD in education students—regardless of amount/level of teaching experience—and MUST be met with HGSE courses. TF slots from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Harvard Griffin GSAS, and/or other Harvard schools do not count toward this requirement, though are certainly encouraged in terms of professional development.

TF “slots” at HGSE represent one and a half days per week (on average) of salaried academic work over the course of a term, or the equivalent amount of time when spread over a longer period (e.g., yearlong) or condensed into a shorter more intensive period (e.g., January Term). A TF “slot” can be fulfilled in the following ways:

• A single course “slot” for a traditional term-long class (equates to one “slot”)
• A single course “slot” spread across a year-long class (equates to one “slot”)
• A double “slot” for a course with a particularly heavy TF workload (equates to two “slots”)
• A January term “slot” (equates to one “slot”)

Other Requirements

Research colloquia.

The HGSE Research Colloquia Series brings together faculty and doctoral students in a community of learning to foster disciplinary, as well as interdisciplinary, dialogue. These meetings include presentations by Harvard faculty, faculty and researchers from outside of Harvard, and other Harvard doctoral students. They meet weekly, at the same day and time. Each colloquium addresses topics salient to its participants and includes presentations of work-in-progress in addition to completed work in topic areas in education, such as leadership in education, global contexts in education, early childhood education, education access and equity, civic learning and engagement, or teaching and instructional effectiveness. 

First- and second-year PhD in education students are required to register (and earn two credits per year) for the colloquium related to their academic concentration. Participation is strongly encouraged in later years as well. PhD in education students are required to present their work in the colloquium once during their program, typically between Year 3 and graduation.

Research Apprenticeship

All PhD in education students are expected to engage in research starting in their first year and continuing throughout their doctoral studies. The research apprenticeship provides students an opportunity to develop their research skills, and may take several forms, including:

• independent research work under the guidance of a faculty member, either as a paid research assistant (RA) or for independent study credit
• research work with a faculty member (and often other doctoral students) as part of a research project
• active participation in a research group or lab, often led by the primary academic advisor or by a small group of collaborating faculty.

Students are strongly encouraged, as part of their research apprenticeship work, to collaborate with faculty and other doctoral students in order to jointly author scholarly papers.

Grade Requirements

Students must maintain a cumulative grade average of B+ or better in each year of graduate work. At no time may a student register for a term if they have more than one Incomplete. Where the primary field requires either that all courses be passed at or above a certain grade or that the student’s average grade be higher than B+, the student will be required to meet that requirement for courses in the field.

No more than one Incomplete may be carried forward at any time by a PhD student in education. The work of the incomplete course must be made up before the end of the term following that in which the course was taken. In applying for an Incomplete, students must have signed permission from the instructor and, in some cases, the director of graduate studies, or the course in question may not count toward the program requirements. If students do not complete work by the deadline, the course will not count toward the program requirements, unless there are documented extenuating circumstances.

Comprehensive Examinations

All PhD in education students take the Written Comprehensive Exam at the end of Year 2. In Year 3, students take the Oral Comprehensive Exam with their faculty advisor and committee members. Once the student has passed the oral exam, they are approved to move forward to the dissertation proposal stage.

Dissertation Proposal

The Dissertation Proposal (DP) is a document generated prior to the dissertation to introduce and summarize a student’s research goals and proposed methods of investigation. It is a blueprint for the research to follow. The purpose of the dissertation proposal is to articulate for committee readers that there is a research question worth pursuing and that the study is well designed to address it. Every DP includes a literature review leading to an explicit research question and a detailed plan for investigating the question through original research. The DP should convince readers that the study is both likely to enrich the field in general and feasible in nature. As noted above, all PhD students are required to obtain DP approval by the end of their fourth year.

Dissertation Committee Meeting

The Dissertation Committee must hold at least one meeting (the Dissertation Committee Meeting, or DCM) to discuss and support the student’s progression toward completing the dissertation proposal as well as the dissertation. Each student should determine, in consultation with their advisor, when holding the DCM would be the most useful for advancing the dissertation work. For some students, the DCM will occur early in the dissertation process and involve discussion and/or approval of the DP. For other students, the DP can be approved by committee members without holding a committee meeting, allowing the DCM to be held after data collection has commenced (e.g., in order to talk about progress and potential challenges in the dissertation study). Regardless of timing, all DCMs should include the following elements:

• provide faculty readers the opportunity to question and offer suggestions about the dissertation proposal, data collection, analysis, and writing plans
• anticipate and/or discuss emergent issues in the early progress of the proposed work
• establish a framework and timetable for reading and submitting dissertation drafts to faculty readers.

At the DCM, members of the Dissertation Committee should come to an understanding about the future progress of the dissertation, resolve any emergent issues, and agree upon what will be included in the final dissertation in order for it to be considered complete.

Dissertation

The dissertation is the cornerstone of a PhD, presenting the student’s independent research and supporting their candidacy for earning the doctoral degree. For purposes of this program, a dissertation is a scholarly inquiry into some aspect of education based on original empirical research; it addresses a particular question and contributes significantly to knowledge and/or concepts in the field of education.

Dissertation Defense

The Dissertation Defense is, in many ways, a doctoral student’s crowning academic achievement––the presentation and defense of one’s own ideas and scholarship in a public forum. The Dissertation Defense promotes intellectual discourse and emphasizes the importance of disseminating educational research with the goal of having an impact on practice and/or policy. The Dissertation Defense is 75 to 90 minutes—beginning with a 20- to 30‐minute presentation by the student, followed by a 45‐minute question and answer session led by the dissertation committee. At the conclusion of these public aspects of the Dissertation Defense, the student’s Dissertation Committee will deliberate and vote in private before having the student return and learn the rating, along with suggestions for steps to finalize the dissertation. The dissertation committee must submit original signatures on the PhD in Education Dissertation cover sheet and the Dissertation and Defense rating sheet. In the event a committee member is participating remotely, please consult with the Doctoral Programs Office on how best to obtain all original signatures.

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Meg Anderson, Associate Director of Admissions Stanislav Rivkin, Associate Director of Admissions Harvard Graduate School of Education 13 Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02138

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Combatting Chronic Absenteeism with Family Engagement 

• Posted March 28, 2024
• By Jill Anderson
• Counseling and Mental Health
• Disruption and Crises
• Families and Community

Family engagement plays a pivotal role in combating chronic absenteeism, says Eyal Bergman , Ed.L.D.’21, senior vice president at Learning Heroes.

The number of students who are chronically absent — missing 10% or more of the school year — has skyrocketed since the pandemic. Bergman studied this issue and was surprised to discover how schools with robust family engagement had significantly lower rates of chronic absenteeism. “It shows that the strength of a school's family engagement is actually more predictive of a school's chronic absenteeism than their rates of poverty,” he says.

But fostering strong home-school partnerships has been a challenge for many school districts. “What we find is that schools often, despite really good intentions, have not really been designed to promote really strong partnerships with families,” he says. “This is why families are often treated as spectators to the work of schools. This is why their cultural wisdom and their expertise about their children aren't necessarily woven into the fabric of schooling. It's why we see that schools often apply assimilationist practices.”

Bergman emphasizes the need for trust-building between educators and families, personalized approaches to student learning, and systemic infrastructural support to enhance family engagement. In future work, Bergman will dig deeper into the data and try to gather more information about what certain school districts with strong family engagement did to keep chronic absenteeism down and a possible tool down the line to help schools with family engagement.

In this episode, he explains the soaring numbers of chronic absenteeism while underscoring the transformative potential of prioritizing family engagement in ensuring student well-being and academic success.

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Eyal Bergman believes strong family engagement may counteract schools' growing problem with chronic absenteeism. Nearly 16 million students missed more than 10% of the 2022 school year — that's double pre-pandemic levels.

Bergman leads research on the impact of family engagement in schools. When he set out to study family engagement during the pandemic, he was surprised to see just how much better schools with pre-existing strong family engagement fared on attendance. Many schools struggle to develop strong family engagement, despite its well-known benefits and even funding available to help. I wanted to hear more about the challenges associated with chronic absenteeism and the role of family engagement. First, I asked how the pandemic impacted chronic absenteeism.

EYAL BERGMAN: If you compare chronic absenteeism numbers from pre-pandemic, from 2019, '18-'19, to '21-'22, which is the first full year once kids were fully back in school, it doubled. And we have about 15 million children that were chronically absent in the '21-'22 school year. And they're all over the country. So you have a little over 5 million kids in cities, about 5 million kids in suburbs. You've got about 4 million kids that live in rural or small towns. It's really everywhere. But it's especially important to note that it's especially pronounced in high-poverty communities.

So when you look at high poverty communities pre-pandemic, about 25% of schools were in what's called extreme chronic absenteeism. That's where 30% or more of students are chronically absent.

JILL ANDERSON: Right.

EYAL BERGMAN: So you've got 25% of schools in high-poverty communities that were chronically absent pre-pandemic, and that number shot up to 69%.

JILL ANDERSON: Wow.

EYAL BERGMAN: So nearly 7 in 10 schools in high-poverty communities are beset by extreme levels of chronic absence. It is a tremendous problem. Now, some of those numbers have started to come down, but only slightly. So '21-'22, we're currently two years removed from some of that data. And some states have released their data from this past school year, from the '22-'23 school year, but most of the states that have released data have had their numbers come down less than five percentage points. Some states have actually gone up. So we're really in, still, a very elevated level of chronic absence across the country.

JILL ANDERSON: Do we know a lot about why this is happening post-pandemic, or is it still kind of we need to figure it out?

EYAL BERGMAN: Well, there's a lot of different factors explaining why kids come or don't come to school. I think there's been changing norms.

EYAL BERGMAN: It's important to remember that chronic absence takes into account excused and unexcused absences. So norms around-- it used to be that a kid had sniffles, and they would still come to school. A lot of families have decided just to not send their kids to school at that point.

But I think also, norms have changed in schools around kids wanting to stay home, families choosing to send their kids home. And I think the way it relates to our study, and the work that we look at, and the relationship between home and school, is that it shows that in communities that have strong relationships with families, they can have real talk about how important it is to come to school regularly, what interventions can be placed that are mutually supported at home and at school, such that kids feel more welcomed in school, such that kids feel like school is an everyday experience and families feel that way too. I think it's helpful to see attendance as like a vital sign of a school's health. And the more that students and teachers and parents and all the community members are wrapping themselves around kids to really stress the importance and help them feel welcomed and safe and supported in schools, the more likely kids are to show up to school every day.

JILL ANDERSON: You set out to study this issue. Tell me a little bit about what you discovered-- why some schools were faring better than others?

EYAL BERGMAN: Let me give you a little bit of an explanation about where the data comes from, to give some context, and a little bit about where the study came from. Because Dr. Karen Mapp is a mentor of mine and was my advisor when the pandemic hit. And we were talking a lot about, surely, the pandemic would be a very useful time to study the impact of family engagement.

Because the hypothesis for this study was born in those first few months. We were hearing all sorts of anecdotal evidence in the spring of 2020, when schools were shuttered, that the schools that had strong relationships with families were going to be a little bit better equipped to withstand the disruptions in schooling. So that was the hypothesis that was set out. And Dr. Mapp was able to join on a Learning Heroes webinar. And in that webinar, where we are talking about this, it piqued the interest of some funders that were on the webinar. And so we were able to start to get some initial funding to be able to set out and conduct this study.

And as a part of the initial landscape assessment of preparing to conduct that study, we interviewed about 20 family engagement scholars, experts in the field. And one of the things that we learned from that landscape assessment is that there is really one really predominant data source for a large quantitative sample. And that is the Five Essentials, which is administered statewide in Illinois. It was designed by the University of Chicago.

If folks are familiar with Tony Bryk and Barbara Schneider's landmark study, "Trust In Schools," this found that the presence of trust in schools was highly predictive of whether schools would improve over time. And so this data has been-- is a very high teacher response rate, so it's very reliable and valid. And it measures the five essentials of school improvement, like classroom culture, principal efficacy, teacher efficacy-- a number of key essentials. And one of those is family-community ties.

And so there are over 3,000 schools in Illinois that respond to this survey every year. That doesn't really exist in many other places. And so it's a really important and rich data set. And so it dates back. 

So that is the data that we used. And there is a lot of publicly-available data on achievement levels, and poverty rates, and a bunch of community and school characteristics that allow us to do statistical modeling. And so we're able to control for a lot of variables.

The way I like to think about statistics is that there's a lot of factors that contribute to chronic absenteeism. And what the stats allow us to do is start to tease apart, like, how big are the different pieces of the pie, right? For all intents and purposes, if you take two schools, and you say they had the same achievement levels, the same chronic absenteeism levels in 2018-2019, they have the same poverty rates, they're the same type of schools-- so you're not comparing high school to elementary school-- and so for all intents and purposes, these schools are essentially the same except for that one school scored in the 10th percentile of the Five Essentials family engagement metric, and the other school scored in the 90th percentile. So you're comparing two schools where one school performed very low, and one school performed very high. What this allows us to say is that the family engagement score accounts for a 39% difference in their chronic absenteeism rates. So that's tremendous. That 39% accounts for 6.2 percentage points on their chronic absenteeism score.

So those are real numbers. In a school of 500 kids, 6% of kids is 31 kids that are not chronically absent. In a school of 1,000 kids, that's 62 kids. That's multiple classrooms. That could be a whole grade level. So these are real numbers, and that's the most important finding from the study.

JILL ANDERSON: Were you surprised, though, to see this huge—

EYAL BERGMAN: Yes.

JILL ANDERSON: --number, this huge difference?

EYAL BERGMAN: We had to run the numbers multiple times to make sure that we were seeing the right thing. And we sent it out to external reviewers to make sure that we weren't missing something critical. We're like, this is pretty significant. There's also other findings where it shows that the strength of a school's family engagement is actually more predictive of a school's chronic absenteeism than their rates of poverty. JILL ANDERSON: Wow.

EYAL BERGMAN: We found that the strength of a school's family engagement was twice as predictive post-pandemic as it was pre-pandemic. So that 6.2 number is cut in half in pre-pandemic. In other words, we knew family engagement mattered before, but it really mattered in the pandemic. And considering that our levels are still pretty close, they're much closer to what they were in '21-'22 now than what they were pre-pandemic. So the importance of family engagement, to me, seems like it's here to stay if you're talking about addressing chronic absenteeism.

JILL ANDERSON: So it says that there was 6% less chronic absenteeism post-pandemic in schools with strong family engagement versus weak family engagement. I'm just going to ask you again if you can put that number into some kind of context, because I worry that people might hear that and think, 6% is really such a small number.

EYAL BERGMAN: Yeah.

JILL ANDERSON: It doesn't seem that dramatic, but it is.

EYAL BERGMAN: If you work in a school-- I imagine a lot of your listeners work in schools-- show me a school that doesn't want to lower its chronic absenteeism by 6 percentage points right now. And if you want to talk about real kids, like I said, in a school of 500 kids-- that's a normal-sized elementary school. That's an average-sized school in Illinois-- that's 31 children that are not chronically absent. In a school of 1,000, that's 62.

In terms of attendance, it's 800 fewer student absences in a year in a school of 500. And I'll put it in financial terms, too. In my state-- I live in California-- a lot of states like ours get their school funding based on something called average daily attendance. In other words, the days that students come to school is how schools actually get their funding.

So when I used to work in a school district here in California, our Attendance Office was located in Fiscal Services, just to give you a sense of where we situate the relative importance of attendance. So in a school of 500, that 6 percentage point equates to $45,000. A school of 1,000-- there's lots of schools with 1,000 kids-- that's $90,000 of your operating budget.

JILL ANDERSON: So it's not a case of just the value, of course, of getting kids into the school so that they can learn. It has significant funding repercussions.

EYAL BERGMAN: It has significant funding repercussions. And I also just think that anybody who's been a teacher understands that you can't do all the work that you want to do if your kids aren't in school. There's this saying that I don't necessarily love. It's like, they can't learn if they're not here.

I mean, I think kids learn wherever they are. Like, my kids learn at home. Our kids learn in the community. But the skills we want to impart on kids, the social development and the academic development we want to impart on kids, school offers an important sense of consistency for kids. And if they're not coming to school, then they can't get the benefits of everything we're trying to do in school.

JILL ANDERSON: Would you say that the majority of schools in the US have weak family engagement? EYAL BERGMAN: I'll put it this way. So Dr. Karen Mapp and I wrote a piece that was published in June of 2021. We really started thinking about it and writing it in the summer of 2020 amidst the renewed reckoning of racial injustice in America in the wake of George Floyd's murder and schools grappling with how to respond, how to think about themselves as service providers in communities-- particularly in communities of color-- but also the ravages of the pandemic upon low income and communities of color.

These dual pandemics just reveal a lot about the historical relationships between home and school in America. And what we find is that schools often, despite really good intentions, have not really been designed to promote really strong partnerships with families. This is why families are often treated as spectators to the work of schools. This is why their cultural wisdom and their expertise about their children aren't necessarily woven into the fabric of schooling. It's why we see that schools often apply assimilationist practices.

What do I mean by that? When you look at how most schools and systems allocate their funding for family engagement, it's usually things like parent liaisons. They hire parent liaisons who are from the community-- oftentimes in immigrant communities that speak the language and that are from that culture and that community-- and things like parent universities or training programs for parents. None of that is wrong. In many cases, that comes from requests from parents and from the communities themselves.

So the point there is that that's not wrong, but that it's incomplete. Because as a strategy, what it says is, in order to resolve this gulf between home and school, we need parents to come closer to the school.

EYAL BERGMAN: So we need to have staff explain things to parents so that they understand things and so that they are better equipped to support their kids. But there isn't very much in the way of strategy design or funding to help staff get to understand and know the communities better to build the staffing capacity for stronger and richer community engagement.

I mean, when I say that schools haven't really been designed for comprehensive engagement, I think you can look at most schools, like, teachers will tell you they don't really have the time to build relationships with families and to collaborate really richly with them. That is a product of design. What do we have time to do?

EYAL BERGMAN: It's A question of where our priorities are. When you look at most pre-service training programs in America, teachers do not receive training in their pre-service programs for building relationships with families and collaborating with them so that they can actually work in strong partnership, even though we know from research-- and it just makes intuitive sense, too-- if you're a parent, if you're a teacher, you know that if parents and teachers are actually talking to one another, if they're looking at data, if they're on the same page, then it feels like one of you is playing offense—

Like on a football team, the offensive players don't play defense, and the defensive players don't play offense. But they're both doing their part to help the team win. So you can imagine that the teachers doing their part in the classroom, the parents doing their part at home, if they're in strong partnership with each other, that actually really helps kids.

And this is what the research bears out. But the systems are not designed to promote that type of activity and behavior. That's why teachers don't have the time. That's why teachers aren't trained. That's why there's not much PD in the way of helping teachers improve in this work.

There are tools and tactics like apps that can be helpful, or text message opt-out, opt-in methods where parents get notified. There are important technical things that can be done, and that does help. That helps a little bit. But the fundamental questions of why parents and teachers don't have the time or the dispositions to be able to really build strong relationships, that's at the core of the nature of the challenge: What makes one school strong in family engagement versus another?

I can give examples from two pieces. One is the piece that Dr. Mapp and I wrote. It's called, "Embracing a New Normal, Toward a More Liberatory Approach to Family Engagement." We have a nice case study in there. And then, there's another piece that I wrote a few years ago called, "Unlocking the How, Designing Family Engagement Strategies that Lead to School Success." And that has about a dozen examples from across the country.

And in that piece, I sort of break down three basic pillars of what constitutes strong engagement. And all of this is rooted, of course, in the dual capacity-building framework for family school partnerships. That's Dr. Mapp's framework. And in that framework, which we borrow from the Three Pillars, the first pillar is the indisputable importance of trust-building.

EYAL BERGMAN: A lot of times, what I see is events, activities in schools where we invite parents to come in and do things, or we send out communications to parents. Those are the most common things. But if you're not building trust between teachers and parents, you're not going to see really strong engagement. 

And so schools that really excel, they do things even with the resources at their disposal. Like, make Back to School Night less about all the things that I want to do this year with your kids in my classroom, and more like, let me get to know you a little bit. There are schools where the teachers just walk around and they have parents introduce themselves to each other, to their parents. They open the floor. They just ask questions. 

You just build a relationship with another person. Schooling is fundamentally a human enterprise. So we get to know people for who they are and what they care about. You start by building relationships.

So some schools do home visits. To me, that's really powerful for teachers because it helps them conceptualize, like, what did I think about the kids and families that I've visited, and what did I actually observe in the home? And very often, it can start a conversation about some biases I thought-- I think I might have had about families.

Home visits are wonderful. Even if you don't do home visits, you can do like community visits. And one thing that I loved was just trust visits.

So the parents come to the school, but the point of the visit at the start of the year is just like, let's build a relationship. Let's get to know each other. At this one school that we featured in "Embracing a New Normal," they do welcoming meetings at the beginning of the year. 30 minutes, teachers meet with their students' parents for 30 minutes at the start of the year. That time is set aside by the schools.

In secondary schools, if I'm a math teacher in a high school, I can't meet with 150 parents at the start of the year. But oftentimes, there's advisories, or Zero Period. And so there are ways to chunk it out so that everybody does their part with just a few students. So that's one thing.

The second pillar is, this is all about student learning and well-being. I think a lot of times, what we see is that family engagement activities are more like feel-good. And that's not bad. In many cases, it can be really important for building a relationship.

But at the end of the day, we're all here for kids. And so family engagement is a means to an end. It's not an end in and of itself. The purpose should be, let's make sure we all have an accurate picture of how our children are performing in school.

So the organization that I work at, Learning Heroes, we do, practically every year, a national poll of parents and teachers and principals. The last data we have is from late in 2023, where we did a poll with Gallup. And again, we found that about 90% of parents in America think that their kids are at or above grade level in reading and in math.

Educators have one perspective. Families have a very different perspective.

EYAL BERGMAN: Families, for the most part, think that their kids are doing fine until they hear from the school that there was a problem.

JILL ANDERSON: Uh-huh.

EYAL BERGMAN: Well, also, more than 80% of parents in America report that their kids get A's and B's, or B's and higher, on their schools. So the primary method that families receive to let them know how their children are performing are report card grades. And report card grades have their benefit, but they're also deeply flawed. They're more of a reflection of effort and assignment completion than they are grade-level mastery-- or they can be-- and they're highly subjective.

So families have a distorted view of how their kids are doing in school. That has to change. And the best way to do that is to get on the same page, review data, make plans together, get together on a regular basis. 

So there are schools, plenty of schools, that have a fall conference where they review data, and they make a plan. And then, they meet again in the winter to review how that's going and adjust as necessary, and then get together in the spring to review progress and make a summer plan. So let's focus on student learning and well-being. The pillar is to anchor in student learning and well-being.

And then, the third pillar is to build an infrastructure, because you have to build a scaffold for this to actually function in schools and systems. Like, you can't just lop on a good idea on a system that isn't prepared to manage it or lead it. So there are some school districts, for instance, that have senior, cabinet-level leaders for family engagement.

In many places, the leader for family engagement at the district is nowhere near the senior-level leadership. And so that limits the ability of family engagement to be on the agenda and to be integrated into these systemic strategies of the district. So I'll give you two examples.

In Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland, Baltimore City Public Schools, you've got a senior-level family engagement lead. And so what they did coming out of the pandemic is that the Chief for Engagement and the Chief Academic Officer were able to work together on a Pandemic Recovery Plan that included student learning plans for every student that were co-designed by the teacher, by the student, and by the parent. And you know, any new policy in a large system is going to take some time. It's going to take its lumps. It's going to need to evolve and adjust. But now, they're getting to the point where it's becoming common practice that teachers are supposed to-- or at least expected to-- work closely with parents in order to build those student learning plans.

In Richmond, Virginia, you have a Chief Engagement Officer that was able to reframe attendance as an engagement challenge and redeploy resources. She has a whole dashboard where schools are able to input and track all of the efforts that they do to engage families directly on attendance. And she's able to see that, and she's able to help schools improve. And so now, they're like slowly-- like they've gotten much better attendance outcomes because they have a whole system-wide strategy to address it from the engagement perspective.

So you have senior-level leadership. You have PD time allocated. You have actual time in the teachers' calendars so that they can build a relationship. And you help them build the skills, and get over fears, and be able to feel comfortable and confident and collaborate with one another so that they can start to have more robust engagement strategies in the school that actually lead to improvements for kids.

JILL ANDERSON: We all know that changing the system takes time, but I'm wondering, are there any low-hanging fruits that exist for family engagement that a school district should definitely be doing-- should start as soon as possible if they're not currently doing them?

EYAL BERGMAN: Look, I think at the very least, we should be calling parents and telling them, ‘Hey, I'm going to be your child's teacher this year. I'm really excited to have them in school. I would love to hear a little bit about how last school year went for you, and what you're looking forward to this year.’ And let's have the mindset that we're going to treat parents as humans and then actively reach out to the other side. 

There's a lot of barriers for parents to come up to the school, and it's not just that they're working two or three jobs. It's that school feels like a foreign place to them. It's that they're speaking to an authority. They're speaking to folks that they haven't necessarily had good experiences within their own lives. They may be coming with their own traumas.

So at the very basic, what we should be doing is taking it upon ourselves to reach out to parents. That's the most effective low-hanging fruit, is to reach out, build relationship on the front end. Any teacher will tell you that when you build a relationship with a family on the front end, it more than pays dividends throughout the year.

And so principals, what they can do is they can turn over a whole staff meeting and say, OK, instead of 60 minutes of us talking or me talking at you, I want you to call five parents and tell them how excited you are. And then, bring in PD, and build from there. There's plenty of apps that are helpful, also, for communication, but let's not assume that those apps that are for communication are going to necessarily build trust. We need to do one-on-one trust-building.

JILL ANDERSON: Eyal Bergman is the Senior Vice President at Learning Heroes. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening. 

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Bridget Terry Long, A.M. ’97, Ph.D. ’00, announced on Thursday that she will step down as dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education at the end of the 2023-24 academic year.

Long’s leadership service to the Ed School spans 10 years — four as academic dean and six as dean. A renowned scholar of the economics of higher education, she will remain on the School’s faculty following a sabbatical next year.

In Long’s message to the Ed School community, she said, “It is with a deep sense of gratitude and admiration for this remarkable community that I write today to share the news that I have decided to step down as Dean at the end of this academic year. This decision was not an easy one, but I believe this is the right time for me to embark on my next chapter — and the school is well-positioned to embark on its own next chapter, too.”

In his message to the School community, Interim President Alan Garber praised Long for her steadfast leadership.

“Since her appointment in 2018, and throughout her earlier tenure as academic dean, Bridget has served HGSE with distinction, guided always by an unwavering commitment to the School’s mission of preparing leaders and innovators who expand opportunities and improve outcomes for learners everywhere,” Garber said. “I am deeply grateful for her leadership.”

Garber added that he will share information about the search for a new dean in the coming weeks.

“Her insights into the factors that influence educational opportunity and student success in higher education have helped us advance a central aspect of Harvard’s mission.” Alan Garber, interim president

Long led the Ed School through the pandemic, as schools, teachers, and administrators sought new methods of teaching and learning. Under her leadership, the Ed School redesigned its master’s degree program, including through the creation of the Foundations curriculum, and opened doors to new students by creating an online master’s degree program that has served as a model for the University. She also launched the Social Impact and Lifelong Learning unit, which integrates alumni relations, career services, and professional education into a single hub to provide professional development.

Recognizing the importance of external engagement, Long oversaw the launch of Education Now , a webinar series and newsletter in which experts discuss challenges in the field, and refined the Askwith Education Forum . She created the Dean’s Education Fellows , an initiative that matched Ed School grads with school districts around the country to provide support during the COVID crisis. She also launched the Principals’ Network , a space for leaders to cultivate relationships and share resources and knowledge with leading faculty.

“Beyond her service to the School, Bridget has been an invaluable partner to her fellow deans and to me,” Garber said. “Her insights into the factors that influence educational opportunity and student success in higher education have helped us advance a central aspect of Harvard’s mission.”

Long joined the Ed School faculty in 2000 and has devoted much of her research and scholarship to improving educational opportunities. Her research has examined the effectiveness of financial aid policies and support programs on educational attainment. She has been the recipient of various research awards, including from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation. She is also a recipient of the Robert P. Huff Golden Quill Award from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

Long is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the National Academy of Education, and a fellow of the International Academy of Education. She was also appointed to the National Board for Education Sciences, having served as vice chair and chair.

In her note to the community, Long expressed enthusiasm for the next chapter of her career.

“I look forward with excitement to how the school will continue to grow and advance its mission over the next 10 years as it confronts the many new questions, and new challenges, that are at the forefront of our field and our society. I’ll be vigorously addressing those challenges myself, as I return to active scholarship, using my expertise, research, and voice to address some of the larger debates about higher education that are now unfolding.”

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The HGSE faculty is a dedicated group of researchers, practice leaders, and policymakers who collaborate and innovate to transform the field of education and expand opportunities for every learner. HGSE students work alongside passionate faculty members to make extraordinary contributions to fields and disciplines ranging from early childhood development to leadership and change management to technology and media.  

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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.

"[Rest] allows us to take stock of what’s going on inside and shatters the myth that the only real social justice work happens outside of us. Rest forces us to reconcile the close relationship between our inner journey and how we show up in the world on the outside."

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Join fellow Harvard College alumni for a conversation with Harvard College Dean  Rakesh Khurana PhD '98 , Dean of Undergraduate Education  Amanda Claybaugh PhD '01 , and Dean of Students Thomas Dunne .

Join fellow Harvard College alumni for a conversation with Harvard College Dean  Rakesh Khurana PhD '98 , Dean of Undergraduate Education  Amanda Claybaugh PhD '01 , and Dean of Students Thomas Dunne . This wide-ranging conversation will explore campus life today, including intellectual vitality, academic freedom, and civil discourse.

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Application deadline: january 5, 2024.

Leadership in Education Fellowships are given to top Ed.M. degree candidates with strong leadership potential and demonstrated financial need as determined by the HGSE Financial Aid Office. Leadership in Education Fellowship recipients are given a fellowship close to one half of tuition during the one year program. Preference is given to alumni of Teach for America, the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps/VISTA, TeachFirst or other comparable full-time volunteer service programs.

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30 Best universities for Mechanical Engineering in Moscow, Russia

Updated: February 29, 2024

• Art & Design
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Environmental Science
• Liberal Arts & Social Sciences
• Mathematics

Below is a list of best universities in Moscow ranked based on their research performance in Mechanical Engineering. A graph of 269K citations received by 45.8K academic papers made by 30 universities in Moscow was used to calculate publications' ratings, which then were adjusted for release dates and added to final scores.

We don't distinguish between undergraduate and graduate programs nor do we adjust for current majors offered. You can find information about granted degrees on a university page but always double-check with the university website.

1. Moscow State University

For Mechanical Engineering

2. Bauman Moscow State Technical University

3. National Research University Higher School of Economics

4. Moscow Aviation Institute

5. N.R.U. Moscow Power Engineering Institute

6. National Research Nuclear University MEPI

7. National University of Science and Technology "MISIS"

8. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology

9. Moscow State Technological University "Stankin"

10. RUDN University

11. Moscow Polytech

12. Moscow State University of Railway Engineering

13. Finance Academy under the Government of the Russian Federation

14. Moscow Medical Academy

15. Russian State University of Oil and Gas

16. mendeleev university of chemical technology of russia.

17. Russian National Research Medical University

18. Plekhanov Russian University of Economics

19. National Research University of Electronic Technology

20. Moscow State Pedagogical University

21. Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration

22. State University of Management

23. Moscow State Institute of International Relations

24. Russian State Geological Prospecting University

25. russian state agricultural university.

26. New Economic School

27. Moscow State Technical University of Civil Aviation

28. Russian State University for the Humanities

29. Russian State Social University

30. Moscow State Linguistic University

Universities for Mechanical Engineering near Moscow

Engineering subfields in moscow.

Best Global Universities for Mechanical Engineering in Russia

These are the top universities in Russia for mechanical engineering, based on their reputation and research in the field. Read the methodology »

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Here are the best global universities for mechanical engineering in Russia

Tomsk polytechnic university.

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• # 74 in Best Universities for Mechanical Engineering
• # 879 in Best Global Universities  (tie)

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