EdChoice at 30: Paul Peterson’s Coaching Tree

EdChoice is celebrating its 30^th anniversary this year. As part of that celebration, we’re looking back on the individuals, research, and books that shaped the school choice movement.

I’ve previously written about Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools and the seminal role that it played in shaping the debate around school choice.

In this installment, I want to pay tribute to an individual: Harvard’s Paul Peterson. It is hard to capture how central he has been to the development of researchers studying school choice in America.

When looking at the influence of NFL coaches, analysts like to use a “coaching tree” to visually demonstrate who worked under who. The most famous coaching tree belongs to 49ers coach Bill Walsh, who had Hall of Fame coaches on his staff who then went on to have Hall of Fame coaches on their staffs and are in the process of mentoring another generation of coaches today.

Paul Peterson of the Harvard Kennedy School is the Bill Walsh of school choice research.

So, I thought, let’s make a coaching tree for Paul.

This proved substantially harder than I thought it would be. Paul has been a professor since the late 1960s and has taught and mentored thousands of students at multiple institutions and in multiple ways. Undergrads, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, junior faculty, Paul has had a role in mentoring all of them.

Below, I did my best to recreate his coaching tree, knowing that it would be impossible to identify all of his students, and all of their students, and all of their students. Even this limited diagram is impressive. It is incredible to see his reach in our community.

(Note: This is an attempt to identify school choice researchers. Both Paul and his proteges have taught and mentored many other students who have gone on to do wonderful things in lots of fields. I am not trying to track all of them here.)

If you are part of this tree or know someone who was and I missed you, please reach out and let me know, I’d be happy to add you!

But even in this incomplete form, what does Paul’s influence look like in practice?

When I perused the program for the recent International School Choice and Reform Conference panel, two thirds of the panels had someone on them from Paul’s coaching tree. And this does not count the numerous panels with multiple Peterson tree members on them.

And, this does not count people like John Chubb and Terry Moe, who were brought to Brookings to write Politics, Markets, and America’s school by Paul.

Nor does it take into account other, impressive non-choice researchers. There are so many notable people, from former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who studied under Esther Fuchs at Columbia, who studied under Paul at the University of Chicago, to Whitney Downs Hermandorfer, who was named to the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit by President Trump — Hermandorfer  worked for Rick Hess at AEI, who studied under Paul at Harvard. I imagine I could come up with 50 more of these connections. Marty West is the academic dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Rick Ginsberg is the dean of the University of Kansas school of education. Both studied under Paul. Think of all of the people who pass through their institutions.

What I take from Paul’s career is that even the most productive researcher can only accomplish so much. They can publish a few papers a year for, God willing, a multi-decade career. Some of them might turn out to be very influential. Most won’t be.

But, if that same person chooses to mentor others, to take the time to identify and nurture talent, their impact can grow exponentially.

Paul did seminal work on federalism, local government, and school choice. He has been a prolific author. He even founded an influential magazine! But the total tonnage of what his students and their students have done is so large as to take any individual’s contribution and dwarf it.

I am here because I was a student of Pat Wolf and Jay Greene and was mentored by Rick Hess. We all stand on Paul’s shoulders. I’m very grateful that he saw something in my teachers and mentors who saw something in me worth cultivating. I hope to continue in that spirit with my own colleagues.

As all of these students and students of students and students of students of students fan out, Paul’s influence will only grow. What a tribute to a towering figure in our field.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Antonio Wendland of PEPG, who sent me a ton of information and Anna Egalite of NC State who reviewed an initial graphic and added to and corrected it. Any mistakes are my own.