Susan Moore Johnson

Susan Moore Johnson grew up in a family of teachers and knew early on that she belonged in classrooms and schools. A former high school teacher and administrator, she is now the Jerome T. Murphy Research Professor in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she served as academic dean from 1993 to 1999. She is a member of the National Academy of Education.

Johnson is a national expert on teachers’ work and the policies that shape it. She directs the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers at Harvard, where she and her colleagues have studied alternative preparation, hiring, induction, performance-based pay, teacher leadership, and local union leadership (www.projectngt.gse.harvard.edu).

Johnson’s new book, Where Teachers Thrive: Organizing Schools for Success (2019), explores how schools that succeed in low-income communities support and enhance their teachers’ work. Her three earlier books about teachers and their work provide the foundation for this current study: Teacher Unions in Schools (1984); Teachers at Work (1990); and Finders and Keepers (2006).

Johnson also is an authority on leadership in school districts. Her classic 1996 study of new superintendents captures the challenges and successes of leading change from the top. Between 2007 and 2014 Johnson served as co-chair of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a collaboration between the Harvard Business School and Harvard Graduate School of Education that is dedicated to improving the leadership and management of large school systems. In Achieving Coherence in District Improvement (2015), Johnson and her PELP colleagues explore how the central office and schools work together in five large urban school districts.