In the Spirit of David K. Cohen: A Reflection on the State and Future of Public Education

Author’s Note: David K. Cohen was one of the sharpest, kindest, and most quietly radical minds in the field of education. He spent his career studying the real work of teaching—and the many ways policy fails to support it. I had the privilege of learning from him as a student, teaching fellow, and doctoral advisee at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His influence runs deep in my thinking and in my work. This reflection is both a tribute to his legacy and a wrestling with the questions I wish I could still ask him.

I remember the first time I heard Professor David K. Cohen describe policy not as a lever from above, but as a web—messy, interdependent, and deeply human. As his student and teaching fellow, I learned not just how to study education systems, but how to see them: with clarity, compassion, and unrelenting honesty.

Today, as an education leader and the founder of Sabbaticalize, I find myself returning to David’s ideas with new urgency.

Under the Trump administration, public education has been pulled further into a vortex of privatization, deregulation, and political spectacle. Teachers are vilified or ignored. Schools have become battlegrounds for culture wars rather than sanctuaries for learning. Civil rights protections have been rolled back. And yet—the lived realities of classrooms have remained remarkably consistent with what David taught us decades ago: that reforms often fail because they do not touch the work of teaching. That policies built without regard for instructional practice, without investment in teacher learning, are unlikely to move the needle—no matter how loudly they are announced. The administration’s recent move to freeze or eliminate federal professional development funding is especially damaging, cutting off one of the few policy levers David believed could truly support instructional improvement and build the capacity needed for meaningful change.

As an education leader and public school parent, I have seen firsthand what David described so often: a system burdened by contradiction. We ask teachers to be frontline workers, mental health counselors, curriculum experts, and digital learning wizards—often all at once. But we have not designed policies or systems that have honored or supported that work. 

Lately, I’ve been sitting with a deeper question: Did we miss a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform public education in the aftermath of the pandemic? The disruption exposed so much—deep inequities, brittle systems, overreliance on standardization. For a moment, it felt like the entire country saw what many of us working in schools had known all along. We had a window. And yet, instead of building back better, many systems rushed to rebuild the same.

I often find myself wishing I could call David. Just to ask, “What would you have done?” I imagine he’d pause and then offer a characteristically wry observation—something disarming and brilliant. But I also imagine he would urge us to focus on the infrastructure of improvement: curriculum, teaching, leadership, learning communities, and the organizational conditions that allow them to thrive. He would also remind us about the importance of incorporating student voice into our improvement efforts.

As the founder of Sabbaticalize—a space for leaders to reflect, reimagine, and restore their capacity to lead—I now carry David’s legacy in a new way. His insistence on coherence and capacity has become a guiding principle in my work. I coach leaders to slow down not for the sake of rest alone (though rest is radical), but so they can reconnect policy to purpose, strategy to practice, and leadership to humanity.

David taught us that meaningful improvement in education cannot be done to schools. It must be done with and through the people in them. That’s the work I’m committed to now—helping those people lead from the inside out, with vision and with heart.

He used to say, with his signature mix of rigor and dry humor, “Reform is easy. Improvement is hard.”

And he was right. But thanks to him, many of us are better equipped to do the hard work.

Not with blind optimism, but with informed hope.

The kind of hope that builds things that last.