Coburn Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
School of Education and Social Policy professor Cynthia Coburn was one of nine Northwestern University faculty members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies.
The newest members have distinguished themselves in academia, the arts, industry, policy, research, and science. They include everyone from Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella and activist/journalist Gloria Steinem to cancer geneticist Kenneth Offit and chef, restaurateur, and humanitarian José Andrés.
Coburn, a professor of human development and social policy and professor of learning sciences, is a world-renowned expert on partnerships between academic researchers and those working in the field—including teachers, principals, and district leaders.
Her work, which helped spark a renaissance in the field, has found that these long-term collaborations, called “research-practice partnerships,” can catalyze profound, lasting educational reform.
“Ultimately, our goal is to understand what helps and hinders how we use research in policymaking, and importantly, to create tools and resources so practitioners can use this evidence in their classrooms and schools,” she said.
A member of the National Academy of Education, Coburn serves on the Spencer Foundation Task Force on Preparation for Transformative Research and the selection committee for the William T. Grant Scholars Program. She has also been part of the Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education (DREME) Network and a National Academies Committee on science communication research and practice.
Coburn is particularly interested in how new practices, rules, and roles promoted by policies weave through the system and make their way into classrooms. She also studies how teachers and others respond to these policies in ways that transform, disrupt, or even reproduce the status quo that the policies were designed to change.
She stresses that helping teachers and school leaders meaningfully interact with their colleagues can ease the process. In several studies, she has shown that teachers who had the chance to discuss policy ideas with colleagues of differing backgrounds “were more likely to rethink their existing approaches to instruction rather than implement ideas by layering them on top or rejecting them,” she said.
Similarly, she has shown that when district leaders are given the time and space to get familiar with policy ideas, they develop more innovative approaches to implementing them in their districts, rather than using approaches from the past.
“For nearly two decades, Cynthia Coburn has been renowned as a leading scholar on the use of research evidence in decisions of education practice by teachers, school leaders, and school district officials," said sociologist Adam Gamoran, one of her nominators and president of the William T. Grant Foundation. "The question of how to bring evidence to bear on practice has long troubled the field of education research, and Coburn has led the development of a body of knowledge to meet this enduring challenge.”
Ultimately, Coburn has helped the field see that policies don’t change social structures—people do. The process is fundamentally social and interactive. “A policy may change a rule,” she says. “It may promote a new practice or procedure. It may create a new position or alter an existing one. But these changes are simply words on a page until they are acted on by people at different levels of the system.”
A proud public school graduate
Coburn grew up in Philadelphia, where she attended public elementary and high schools before heading to Oberlin College to study philosophy.
After graduating in 1989, she worked for the National Coalition of Advocates for Students, a national non-profit policy organization that worked to improve public schools for poor students and students of color.
While the group did national policy work in D.C., Coburn worked on a project that helped school districts better serve their immigrant students.
“I went to graduate school to better understand the relationship between the debates that my organization participated in the policy world and what actually happened in districts, schools, and classrooms,” said Coburn, who later earned a master’s in sociology and a doctorate in education from Stanford University.
In 2020, she received an honorary doctorate from Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), which she dedicated to her grandmother, Frances Coburn, a teacher, early founder of the Grand Rapids NAACP, and a board member of the Urban League.
While pursuing a master’s degree, Frances Coburn collected data that the Board of Education used to help desegregate the public schools in Grand Rapids in the 1950s.
“She deeply believed in the power of public schooling to address social wrongs,” said Coburn, who shares her grandmother’s passion for teaching and social justice.
Coburn has won numerous awards for her scholarship, including the American Educational Research Association Early Career Award, and she was elected as a fellow of the American Educational Research Association. She has received Northwestern University’s Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship and the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence in recognition of her impact on students.
She is a member of several advisory boards, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Network for School Improvement Portfolio and the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative.
The School of Education and Social Policy now has eight members in the Academy.
- Cynthia Coburn, Professor of Human Development and Social Policy and Professor of Learning Sciences
- Megan Bang, James E. Johnson Professor of Learning Sciences
- Uri Wilensky, Professor of Learning Sciences
- Larry Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics
- Kirabo Jackson, Abraham Harris Professor of Education and Social Policy
- Carol Lee, Professor Emeritus of Learning Sciences and Education
- Doug Medin, Professor Emeritus of Education and Psychology
- James Spillane, The Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change and Social Policy
Induction ceremonies will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2025. See the full list of Northwestern winners.