What is “the Good”?
When I was a first-year teacher, I made a pledge to my students and posted it on our classroom wall: “I will help each of you build a future that is full of choice and opportunity.” Years later, that is still how I fundamentally think about my work and who I serve. Education for the Good imagines a world where communities are fair and people are free.
Theory of Change
The Social Justice Standards provide a framework for transformation. With a focus on identity, diversity, justice, and action, Education for the Good prioritizes systemic change in the critical areas of curriculum and school culture. In curriculum, we develop students’ critical consciousness through a marriage of rigor and relevance. In school culture, we build beloved school communities that welcome, respect, care for, and support all students in their full identities.
Justice at the Heart
Meaningful change happens when people are focused on a meaningful purpose. The shared purpose driving Education for the Good partnerships is equity—creating the conditions for each student and all groups of students to develop their full human potential. This is why a focus on justice and action is central to all of our services and support.
Education is a practice of freedom, an act of love, and a commitment to the collective liberation of all people.
bell hooks
Emily is a career educator specializing in anti-bias education in K-12 schools.
She began her 25 years in the field serving as a classroom teacher in public, charter, and alternative school settings in Newark, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. Since leaving the classroom, she has supported educators as a teacher trainer, curriculum designer, content developer, and writer.
Since 2015, when she founded Education for the Good, Emily has worked with more than 40 schools and districts all over the country and dozens of institutions including the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., nonprofits such as the Children’s Defense Fund and FoodCorps, and curriculum publishers like Great Minds and Core Knowledge.
From 2011-2015, Emily was a Teaching and Learning Specialist with Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance), where she designed instructional tools such as Civil Rights Done Right and developed resources like Teaching 'The New Jim Crow' and Critical Practices for Anti-bias Education. Underpinning all of this work are the Learning for Justice Social Justice Standards, a first-ever set of age-appropriate anti-bias benchmarks, for which Emily was the principal author.
Today, Emily focuses on equipping teachers with foundational knowledge in anti-bias education and using the Social Justice Standards to align and improve curriculum and school culture. She continues to write about and train cohorts of educators in facilitating critical conversations, disrupting everyday bias, and centering diverse representation in the curriculum.
Emily loves spicy food, hip-hop, art, travel, and spending time with family and friends. She lives in Buffalo, New York, with her dog Puba.
Emily Chiariello, Founder and Lead Consultant
Dr. Jawanza Kalonji Rand, Facilitator
Jawanza is an educator and scholar focused on improving educational experiences and outcomes for all constituents of school communities.
His work focuses on cultivating and advancing racial literacy, social justice, and antiracist ethics in policy, pedagogy, and school culture and climate. As an education specialist, he combines over a decade of scholarly research and seven years of workshop facilitation and counseling with the frontline knowledge he gained when working as an educator in public, private, and charter schools for a decade in New York, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Atlanta. While completing his PhD in Social Analysis and Policy Studies in Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh, Jawanza developed Socially Responsible Education as a framework to support educators, school leaders, and policymakers in their efforts to enhance the lives of students, and improve schooling processes by making them more relevant, accountable, responsive, ethical, critical, active, sustainable, and eco-aware/environmentally engaged.
Dr. Rand brings a unique blend of experience, knowledge, and skill to his work with Education for the Good, where he facilitates professional learning that engages and encourages educators, students, and parents toward transformative ideation and promising practices.