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Nick Simmons (MBA/MPP 2019) was no stranger to the principal’s office as a student. “I was definitely an active, energetic young person who wasn’t always paying the closest attention,” says Simmons, currently senior advisor for school reopening and recovery under US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. “If you told my teachers that I would go on to be a teacher myself and work on education policy, they would have found that really incongruous.”
Simmons credits some of those same teachers and coaches (he found an outlet in wrestling and football) with providing the unconditional support that helped him focus. After high school, Simmons majored in political science at Yale, then went to work on Wall Street. “I wasn’t as thoughtful about the kind of career I wanted when I graduated as I should have been,” he says of his first job. “It was a clarifying experience that helped me understand I needed to be working on solving problems I have a passion for; otherwise, I was going to be useless.”
That passion was finding ways to provide young people with the same kind of support he’d received, something he’d done as a volunteer mentor and tutor during his time at Yale. Simmons left investment banking to become a seventh-grade math teacher at Harlem West Middle School, teaching for three years before taking positions in school leadership at Success Academy Midtown West and Harlem Central Middle School.
The experience piqued Simmons’ desire to learn more management, leadership, and operations, drawing him to HBS. After receiving his MBA, Simmons took a job in Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont’s office as policy advisor and director of strategic initiatives, with a focus on education equity, workforce development, and economic development. When the pandemic began, Governor Lamont asked Simmons to work alongside Connecticut Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona, putting in 80 to 100 hours a week to safely reopen Connecticut schools and ensure all students had a laptop and internet access. “It was an experience of, okay, we’re no longer in a traditional scenario of developing legislative bills and trying to pass a budget; we are now in an emergency-management situation,” he recalls. Difficult as that time was, it set Simmons up as the perfect candidate for his next role. In April 2021, after Cardona was appointed by President Biden as Secretary of Education, he asked Simmons to join his team to take on another challenge: ensuring that every US public school opens its door to full-time, in-person instruction this fall.
What was it like working in Governor Lamont’s office during the early days of the pandemic?
In those first few weeks of March 2020, it became clear we had entered an extraordinary public health challenge that would affect all aspects of our society. Information about how the virus worked was key. There were so many competing beliefs. One fundamental part of the equation was trying to understand what was working and not working with remote learning. How many of our students were participating? If not, what were the reasons? Was it because they didn’t have the equipment, or internet access? Was it because parents weren’t in the house? It was all about gathering data, both on the ground and from the experts, creating a framework, and then letting your convictions guide an urgent effort to do right by everyone. We used federal money and funds from the Dalio Foundation (Ray Dalio, MBA 1973) to buy 121,000 laptops and became the first state to close the digital divide for all K–12 students.
You left your position in the governor’s office on a Friday in April 2020 and started working at the Department of Education as senior advisor for school reopening and recovery the following Monday. That’s a big, fast jump.
In Connecticut, there are about 200 school districts. Nationwide, there are 15,000 districts, 161,000 schools, and 53 million students. It’s huge.
At the federal level, our value add is providing resources like the American Rescue Plan, as well as the guidance and partnership for spending those dollars. We accumulate and share best practices. We try to partner with districts to help them reopen and address the academic and social and emotional needs of students. And we have guidance from the CDC, of course. The ultimate framework we’re working to create will empower districts to make the right decisions for what’s going on in their community, given transmission rates and how many of their students and staff are vaccinated. The situation on the ground in a Mississippi town versus a school in Chicago is going to be totally different, and Secretary Cardona is spending a lot of time traveling to get a sense of those differences. Ultimately, the Secretary’s goal is for 100 percent of schools to be opened safely this fall, offering 100 percent of families five days a week of in-person instruction. In the end, it all comes down to trying to be good leaders and good partners.
“All the best tips and training for how to best run a classroom, or a school, are wrapped up in basic management and leadership skills.”
You applied to the MBA program while you were assistant principal of a middle school. Why did that seem like a good path?
All the best tips and training for how to best run a classroom, or a school, are wrapped up in basic management and leadership skills. If you think about the nuts and bolts of a middle school, you have 400 kids, each with their unique needs and schedule. You’re trying to maximize learning time, and the optimal throughput, if you will, is what would be best for each student. That in itself is a complicated operational challenge. On top of that, you have hiring demands and the need to create a culture in which teachers feel enabled to develop professionally. You also need to build a strong community culture for students. Then there’s the budget-management aspect.
This really is a dream job, from so many perspectives, because you get to work in the executive branch of government and apply the MBA toolkit to issues that have a ton of impact, and you get to see and feel that impact. It’s not this dreaded bureaucracy. In Connecticut, the person who ran our COVID-19 operations, Josh Geballe, had previously been an 11-year executive at IBM who also started a successful tech company. He really drove the entire vaccine response, and it was that MBA mindset that enabled Connecticut to do so well.
What keeps you going in this work?
Our young people need so many community leaders, family members, teachers, and mentors to be successful. That’s what I had, and I owe so much of who I am today to having those supports in my life. Now we’re in a climate that is uncertain, anxiety-inducing, and harmful to young people. Hard stop. What keeps me going is remembering my former students who I taught as seventh graders and imagining them at home, scared, and robbed of many of the experiences that are part of being a normal young person. It’s a way to help them and their families through a difficult time.
Looking past this fall, what are some of the Department of Education’s priorities once school is back in session?
Secretary Cardona always says if the outcome of all our effort is to go back to where we were, that will be a failure. There were so many inequities and problems present before the pandemic. Right now, we have an incredible opportunity to build a better system with the $120 billion in funds from the American Rescue Plan. States across the country have unprecedented resources to change the way we think about all aspects of school. Could we create a world-class workforce development system for 16- to 18-year-olds? Could we create a computer science program in every school? Hire more social workers to provide the support our students need? That’s the kind of moment we’re living in, and we’ll be in that moment for years. That’s what I’m looking forward to working on: laying the tracks for a much stronger, more equitable education system.
Photo courtesy Nick Simmons
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