JULIE KOWAL is a senior consultant with Public Impact. She consults and leads teams to offer research-based guidance on several challenging policy and management issues in education, including school turnarounds; educator effectiveness, evaluation, retention and compensation; and charter schools and charter school authorizing. Ms. Kowal is leading Public Impact’s efforts to recruit sites from across the country to redesign school models and teachers’ roles to extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students. She also led Public Impact’s involvement in several states’ applications for the federal Race to the Top competition. An alumna of AmeriCorps NCCC and Public Allies DC, Ms. Kowal earned her law degree with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In the area of school restructuring, Ms. Kowal’s recent work includes advising the state of Tennessee on the creation of its Achievement School District; assisting the Colorado Department of Education in the development of a system to address chronically failing schools, evaluate external education service providers, and increase teacher and leader effectiveness; examining the school turnaround initiative in Chicago Public Schools; and conducting an evaluation of the School Turnaround Specialist Program at the University of Virginia.  Her recent publications on school restructuring include guidance for districts on supporting successful turnarounds, research about leading indicators of school turnarounds, and strategies for importing talented candidates to successfully lead major change. Ms. Kowal is a featured expert on school turnarounds for the U.S. Department of Education’s Doing What Works website, and has led several workshops and seminars with school, district, state, and federal leaders on fostering successful turnarounds.

Ms. Kowal’s recent research on the critical role of teacher and leader policy includes cross-sector research to inform teacher and leader evaulations; profiles of schools that have redesigned teachers' jobs to let those at the top extend their reach; cross-sector solutions for retaining high-performers; and studies of innovative teacher compensation systems. She has also facilitated partnerships between states and national providers of quality teachers and leaders, guided the development of a statewide agenda for improving teacher quality in Indiana, and served as an expert panelist for a national initiative to retain generation Y teachers.

Contact Julie Kowal