PROVIDENCE – Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform’s interim director will now lead the institute on a permanent basis.
The university announced that John Papay, who has served as Annenberg’s interim leader since January, will now be the institute’s new permanent director moving forward. Brown said Papay – who joined Brown’s faculty in 2012 – now formally succeeds Susanna Loeb, who served as Annenberg’s director from 2018 through 2022. Loeb is now a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.
“I’m excited to be taking on this tremendous responsibility, following in the footsteps of transformative leaders who have helped shape the institute over the years,” Papay said in a statement. “I’m eager to continue to grow Annenberg into a leading national education research institute and the hub for applied education research here at Brown as we work to connect more directly to the university.”
Papay, Brown said, will continue to position the institute to serve as a hub of education scholarship by confronting major issues within teaching and learning in schools. Among the matters Annenberg looks to review are opportunity gaps and learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The university also said Papay has helped build a partnership between the institute, the R.I. Department of Education and the Providence Public School District to help improve student engagement and teacher learning, among other things, by combining educators’ expertise with data-driven research methods. One Annenberg report released back in March offered a mixed analysis of teacher retention within the state-controlled PPSD. The report said that while the district’s retention rate is higher than many districts across the U.S., the city is still seeing more teachers leave the district than coming in.
Another Annenberg report released last month noted that public school districts across Rhode Island have spent about one-third of federal COVID-19 relief funds to help local schools recover from the pandemic. The report states that if the state does not pick up the pace, its public schools could potentially lose out on approximately $200 million in federal assistance.
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter at @James_Bessette.
