In addition to facilitating the professional learning networks, the Aspen Education Program commissions papers, convenes key stakeholders for ad-hoc policy workshops, and informs the public conversation regarding education reform with public events.

Since its launch in the mid-1970s, the Aspen Education Program has organized a week-long summer policy workshop as its primary activity. These workshops continue as a hallmark of the program, bringing together approximately 20-25 leaders from government, academia, and K-12 education to have a sustained, focused conversation on a significant problem in practice and policy. Several workshops in the early 1990s nurtured the nascent framework for standards-based reform; in the late 1990s there was a series of workshops on high school reform, and more recent workshops have focused on human capital/educator quality.

For the last several years, as the focus in the networks and workshops has been on system-level human capital issues, the program has produced important new work in this area. Several papers were developed for the Aspen Education Program’s annual summer policy workshop and shared with the urban superintendents and their teams; these papers were published in Teaching Talent: A Visionary Framework for Human Capital in Education by Harvard Education Press in February 2010. Complementary case studies and reports have been commissioned and published, including a profile of Urban Teacher Residency programs, and an analysis of human capital policies in Singapore schools and the implications for U.S. systems.

Visit Policy Work to learn more about individual summer workshops.