Matthew Harrington is the Director of Operations at the New American Academy Charter School in Brooklyn, NY.
What is your proudest accomplishment in your current role?
I have two. My department has not had staff turnover in 5 years (5 employees) and we have been able to spend our public dollars wisely to not only pay teachers/staff like professionals but also to generate a 1.3 mil surplus in the first 4 years of operations.
What was the focus of your Capstone project?
The Effects of Teacher Salary on Retention.
What was the most important thing you learned in the EDSP program?
The two things that I learned at EDSP that I found myself referring to most often are around the value of statistics/data in grounding arguments and also how often statistics are misused or misunderstood to make arguments/decisions. My job in helping start this school involved a ton of decisions (both critical and trivial) and it was helpful being able to either toss out arguments that were grounded on faulty use of data and also make better decisions using available data. I find myself saying "correlation does not equal" causation at least once a week at work.