Jeff Schulz

Background: Jeff Schulz is a partner with Bellwether Education Partners in the Strategic Advising practice area. Since joining Bellwether in January 2013, Jeff has helped school districts, charter management organizations, and service providers address a wide range of strategic issues, from developing five-year strategic plans to more targeted initiatives around personalized learning and teacher development. Before joining Bellwether, Jeff was a manager in Deloitte’s Strategy practice, with a focus on helping Fortune 500 clients identify opportunities to generate growth and improve profitability, especially through the application of advanced analytic techniques. He is also a proud Teach For America alum, former advocacy lead for a group of high-performing, nationally acclaimed Texas charter schools, and education analyst for the central Texas-based E3 Alliance. Jeff holds a master’s in public administration from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from the University of Michigan.

Experience at Bellwether: strategic planning, market assessment, growth and expansion strategy, teacher evaluation and development systems, project management and implementation support

Client segments served: school districts, charter systems and schools, product and service providers, foundations

Sample clients: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, San Francisco Unified School District, Harmony Public Schools, Youth Truth

Why I do this work: Our current education approach has failed too many students, especially low-income students, for far too long. Yet, we know success is possible based on the experience of a diverse array of innovative districts, CMOS, and product and service providers. I am inspired by the work of these “whatever it takes” organizations and am committed to helping them deepen and grow their impact.

Recent Media

December 4, 2019

Publication

Wide-Open Spaces: Schooling in Rural America Today

Kelly Robson

Phillip Burgoyne-Allen

Juliet Squire

Jeff Schulz

Fourteen percent of the nation’s population lives in rural communities, and one in five K-12 students attends a rural school — a substantial proportion of America’s school population. Despite increased attention from the national education policy community in recent years, too many rural communities and schools continue to struggle to provide their students with quality educational opportunities. Common approaches to education reform that may work in urban communities often fail to take into account the unique assets and challenges facing rural schools.

"Wide-Open Spaces: Schooling in Rural America Today” provides education policymakers with a factbase on America’s rural schools and communities: the economic and academic challenges they face, their unique assets, and opportunities for improvement. This resource highlights some of the challenges facing schools and students, including limited economic opportunity, poor access to healthcare, and social challenges like drug addiction. It also provides an overview of available data on student outcomes, including National Assessment of Educational Progress data and graduation rates. These data reveal that while rural students appear to be doing better on average than students in some other geographies, there are real gaps among subgroups and barriers to postsecondary opportunities that hinder many rural students from achieving their full academic potential.

Even so, rural communities’ assets provide opportunities to create and sustain meaningful change. Compared with other geographies, rural communities tend to place high value on civic and community engagement and support tight-knit networks among residents. Community members tend to have a deep sense of and commitment to place that dates back generations. And at a state and national level, rural communities represent a powerful political voice.

"Wide-Open Spaces: Schooling in Rural America Today"
aims to equip advocates, decision-makers, and other stakeholders with a shared understanding of rural education to generate a more accurate and nuanced policy response.