Steven Farr

Educator/Teacher, Musician, Parent, Scientist, Student, Writer/Editor

As chief knowledge officer, Steven Farr leads Teach For America’s efforts to discern what distinguishes teachers whose students in low-income communities achieve dramatic academic growth. Those findings inform the organization’s teacher selection, training, and support. Farr also works to build the organization’s knowledge by learning from and sharing with other organizations working towards educational equity. Farr is the author of the organization’s 2010 book Teaching As Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap. Farr’s work has featured in the Atlantic, in Educational Leadership, on NPR’s All Things Considered, and on ABC World News Tonight as part of the Person of the Week segment. Since 2001, Farr has overseen various elements of Teach For America’s teacher training and support efforts, as well as studies of the best practices of highly effective teachers. He managed the research and development of a number of Teach For America’s training texts, including Instructional Planning and Delivery, Classroom Management and Culture, Learning Theory, and Diversity, Community, and Achievement. He has contributed to the development of the Teaching As Leadership framework and rubric, as well as some of Teach For America’s online resources built around those ideas, including the public resource: www.teachingasleadership.org. Farr’s work in education began in 1993 when he joined Teach For America as a corps member in the Rio Grande Valley after graduating from the University of Texas’s Plan II Honors program. (Steven worked for UT’s Dean of Students as an orientation advisor during college.) For two years, he taught high school English and English as a Second Language in Donna, Texas at Donna High School where he was nominated for Teacher of the Year by his colleagues. He then attended Yale Law School, where he focused on issues related to education. He coauthored “The Edgewood Drama: An Epic Quest for Education Equity” for the Yale Law and Policy Review, an overview of the policies and politics affecting school finance in Texas in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision that education is not a fundamental right. While attending Yale, Farr taught English as a Second Language at Quinnipiac College and represented children in special education matters through the school’s legal clinic. After law school, Farr served as a law clerk for the Honorable William Wayne Justice in Austin, Texas. Farr then taught and litigated civil rights and disabilities issues at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation until 2001, when he joined the staff of Teach For America as vice president of training and support.

Ending educational inequity

Education CAN trump poverty. We can and must redefine education in low-income communities as embracing the hard (but nonetheless doable) work of changing the predicted life-trajectory of children facing all the burdens of poverty. A new wave of classroom and school leaders are showing us what is necessary and thereby offering a map of the contextual and systemic changes necessary to replicate and sustain their success.

Piano and music