Leadership for Learning Program Faculty
Meredith Honig
Director, Leadership for Learning
Educational Leadership & Policy Studies
College of Education
University of Washington
Ph.D., Stanford, 2001
Dr. Honig’s research and teaching focus on policy, leadership, and organizational change in urban educational systems. She is particularly interested in how public policy making bureaucracies such as school district central offices innovate and collaborate to improve opportunities for all youth to learn. She examines these challenges using a variety of cases including school-community partnerships and new small autonomous schools initiatives. Her current research projects focus on:
- The participation of school district central office administrators in the implementation of new small autonomous schools initiatives in two urban districts;
- The role of community-based youth agencies and intermediary organizations in supporting youths’ opportunities to learn; and,
- How urban school district central offices are fundamentally transforming themselves to support districtwide teaching and learning improvement.
Evidence-based decision-making has been a major focus of these projects—particularly how policymakers incorporate local or practitioner knowledge into their decision-making. Dr. Honig's work starts from the premise that multiple institutions beyond schools matter for youth development and learning and that public policymaking appropriate to this orientation demands that public policymakers adopt non-traditional roles. She focuses on how theories of organizational learning, systems complexity, and managerial innovation help illuminate how public policymakers manage (and why they sometimes do not manage) these non-traditional, public-sector demands.
Prior to joining the University of Washington faculty, Meredith was an assistant professor and co-director of the Center for Educational Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has worked at the California Department of Education and in other state and local youth-serving agencies.
Contact Information:
Meredith Honig
College of Education, EDLPS
Box 353600, 315D Miller
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-3600
Office: (206) 616-0679
mihonig@u.washington.edu