ABOUT KIRSTEN

"We do this work because we think it can change the world."

-Elementary school principal working with Old Sow Consulting, New Jersey, June 2009

 

My work is about how to make American schools

more equitable, less hierarchical,

more welcoming to everyone, and more like places

where real thinking happens.

Kirsten Olson is Chief Listening Officer at Old Sow Consulting, which works with schools, school districts, and emerging organizations on educational equity, learner disengagement, and educational transformation.  She president of board of the Institute for Democratic Education in America, a national grassroots organization designed to support the transformation of American schools, and is the author of Wounded By School: Recapturing The Joy In Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture (Teachers College Press 2009); Schools As Colonizers (Verlag 2008), and many articles about education.  She received a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an undergraduate degree from Vassar College.

She lives in Massachusetts, where her four children attended public school. She believes in the power of many different kinds of education to achieve a more socially just, equitable and humane world.

 

Longer Bio...

Kirsten Olson is passionately interested in transforming American education. Beginning with her own experiences of grouping practices in school based on race, social class, and perceived ability--and the disregard for pleasure and adventure in learning in school, Kirsten's writing and consulting focuses on describing how the American educational system works; developing understandings of the policies and interests that mediate against reform; and marshaling like-minded collaborators into coherent transformational strategies.

After graduating from Vassar College, Kirsten was an editor at Random House and Holt, Rinehart and Winston. She helped found a cooperative school that her own children attended, and then began graduate work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received a doctorate in social policy and the social history of education at Harvard, where she worked with Sara Lawrence Lightfoot and Pedro Noguera. After university teaching and consulting in urban schools in Boston and New York City, Kirsten founded Old Sow Consulting.  Now Chief Listening Officer at Old Sow Consulting, Kirsten's work specializes in transforming educational settings for greater student engagement and higher performance, and organizing teachers, and other adults in the support of reforms that make learning more equitable, more challenging, and more related to the real world. Old Sow Consulting clients include large public school systems, charter schools, private schools, and alternative schools.

The author of Wounded By School: Recapturing The Joy In Learning and Standing Up To Old School Culture, one of the top selling books at Teachers College Press in 2009, and Schools as Colonizers (Verlag 2008), she is an active blogger and  and writes for Education Week, Teacher Magazine and Educational Leadership.

Kirsten is the president of the board of IDEA, the Institute for Democratic Education in America, a national not-for-profit organization aimed at fostering conversations about transforming and revolutionizing education, and is on the Advisory Board of the Institute for Humane Education.

Kirsten is interested in working across traditional educational boundaries to bring powerful systemic transformation, and on focusing reform to look at education from a student's point of view.