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Our client is a premier non-profit in the education space. Its mission is to enlist the nation's most promising future leaders in the movement to eliminate educational inequality. Embarking on a stage of significant growth, the organization is looking for a team of highly talented individuals to help shape both the future of the organization and the education landscape.

The teacher preparation, support and development (TPSD) team seeks to ensure that corps members are developed into teachers whose students make significant academic gains. TPSD team members create our client’s research-based, needs-driven professional development curriculum, training and resources for corps members during their two-year commitment, and training and resources for staff members on our regional program teams who directly coach and support our corps members.

The vice president, studies will play a critical leadership role in ensuring that our client achieves its ambitious national student achievement goals. Over the last several years, various teams within TPSD have been ramping up their internal research agendas as the client, as a whole, becomes increasingly important voice in the broader educational reform m ovement. The VP, studies will be responsible for bringing multiple threads together by partnering with public affairs team leadership and leaders of other teams to create, maintain, and evolve an organization-wide research agenda and by building and leading a team to execute these studies in partnership with key external research partners/advisors.

This research agenda includes the critical questions which underlie TPSD’s impact:

• What distinguishes highly successful teachers in a difficult context (i.e., what broad principles characterize teachers with strong student achievement results, what teacher actions are most critical in support of these principles, and how proficient do teachers need to be at these actions to move students forward significantly)?
• What underlying knowledge, skills, and mindsets are most important in driving the most crucial teacher actions, and are most important in building these actions at each stage of a teacher’s development?
• What programmatic elements (e.g., sessions, interventions, resources, tools, etc.) are most effective in creating these learning experiences and helping teachers achieve significant improvement in these actions, knowledge, skills and mindsets at each stage of their development?

As two examples, our client is currently co-developing a major study proposal with Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, to understand how corps members develop from “good” teachers to “great” teachers, as well as a large-scale study of its Teaching as Leadership rubric, which will explore the degree to which the elements of this rubric correlate with student achievement and other well-known teaching rubrics. Some combination of these two studies is likely to be 80-100% of the focus of the VP, studies role this year. The vice president, studies will report to the VP, strategy and research.

Responsibilities will include, but are not limited to:

• Partnering with Public Affairs leadership and leaders of other areas of our client’s program to create, maintain, and evolve an organization-wide research agenda
• Developing research proposals to drive internal/external syndication and funding requests
• Managing and developing an evolving team of dedicated resources and resources from other areas to execute this research agenda
• Cultivating, hiring and retaining high-performing team members
• Working with leaders of other national teams to ensure that the insights generated by our research are effectively and efficiently translated into actions in support of our mission
• Partnering with Public Affairs leadership to work with academics and other external research partners/advisors on both the overall research agenda and individual projects
• Representing the research agenda and insights in various external forums (conferences, funders, etc.)

Education and Experience

• Bachelor's Degree required; graduate degree preferred
• 7 – 10 years of work experience
• Proven record of success in a role managing managers to achieve ambitious goals
• Experience in creating and leading research programs

Knowledge, Skills, Abilities

• Ability to effectively manage and cultivate the leadership of others
• Exemplary critical thinking skills
• Exemplary writing skills
• Ability to set compelling vision and strategy for immediate and long-term impact
• Ability to analyze and synthesize data from a range of sources to make high impact, strategic decisions
• Ability to interact effectively with external academics and other key research partners/advisors on critical aspects of study design and our broader research agenda
• Exceptional collaboration skills
• Demonstrated sound judgment
• Confidence, poise, and the ability to communicate with diverse constituents
• Deep commitment to our client’s mission

• Competitive compensation commensurate with experience

• Result-oriented and flexible culture; opportunity to telecommute as the job permits.