Linda Nathan

Linda Nathan is the founding headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy (BAA), the city’s first and only public high school for the visual and performing arts. BAA sends over 95 percent of its graduates, all Boston residents, to college. Under her leadership, the school has won state, national, and international recognition and awards. BAA is a CES Mentor School. Nathan was instrumental in starting Boston’s first performing-arts middle school, and was a driving force behind the creation of Fenway High School, recognized nationally for its innovative educational strategies and school-to-work programs. She is also a co-founder and board member of the Center for Collaborative Education in Boston, a nonprofit education reform organization and CES Affiliate Center dedicated to creating more equitable and democratic schools. She has served on the National Academy of Science’s Commission for the Science of Learning. She has received numerous local, national, and international awards and honors. Nathan’s articles have appeared in Phi Delta Kappan, Educational Leadership, Horace, and other publications. Fluent in Spanish, she has worked on issues of school reform in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. In 2006, she presented to the first UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education in Lisbon, Portugal. Nathan is a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Nathan’s book about teaching and leadership in urban schools, The Hardest Questions Aren't On the Test, will be published by Beacon Press in October 2009. Nathan earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley; a master’s degree in education administration at Antioch University; a master’s of performing arts at Emerson College, and a doctorate in education at Harvard University. She is married to Steve Cohen, a professor at Tufts University, and they have three children, ages 22, 19, and 15.