Jal Mehta

Jal Mehta is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research explores the role of different forms of knowledge in tackling major social and political problems, particularly problems of human improvement. He has also written extensively on what it would take to improve American education, with a particular focus on the professionalization of teaching.

Jal is the author of The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of The Futures of School Reform (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2012). He is currently working on two projects: In Search of Deeper Learning, a contemporary study of schools, systems, and nations that are seeking to produce ambitious instruction; and The Chastened Dream, a history of the effort to link social science with social policy to achieve social progress. He is co-editor of the Learning Deeply blog at Education Week, and in 2014 was the top-ranked junior faculty scholar in the Rick Hess Education Week rankings. He is also the winner of the Morningstar Teaching Award at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He was recently awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship and will be on sabbatical for the 2016-17 academic year.

EDUCATION

• HARVARD UNIVERSITY 2006
  Ph.D. Sociology and Social Policy Cambridge, MA
• HARVARD UNIVERSITY 2002
  M.A. Sociology Cambridge, MA
• HARVARD UNIVERSITY 1999
  B.A. Social Studies, Magna Cum Laude Cambridge, MA

Books:

• 2013 The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling. New York: Oxford University Press.
• 2012 The Future(s) of School Reforms, eds Jal Mehta, Robert Schwartz and Frederick Hess. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.
• 2004 Katherine Newman, Cybelle Fox, David Harding, Jal Mehta and Wendy Roth. Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. New York: Basic Books.