From ideas to action

For three decades, Steven has sought to spark change in urban public education—offering fresh ideas in his writing and research, shaping legislative change, and opening new schools that prove what’s possible. 

Steven is a senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research.

Most recently, Steven launched the National Summer School Initiative (NSSI) to create a new model for accelerating learning and building teacher capacity—fast. Since its inception in 2020, NSSI has partnered with schools and districts to educate more than 150,000 students, including at hundreds of sites in New York City.

Steven founded and built Ascend Learning, a growing network of tuition-free, liberal arts charter schools that today educates 6,000 students in Central Brooklyn. Ascend demonstrated the power of a warm and joyful school culture focused not on ensuring compliance but on fostering student agency. The Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University identified Ascend a “gap-busting” network for its success in closing achievement gaps of race and income.

His first book, Reinventing the Schools: A Radical Plan for Boston, drove the development and passage of the Massachusetts charter school law. Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools, won the Virginia and Warren Stone prize for an outstanding book on education and society. His new book on the future of school reform, The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools, will be published in fall 2024.