Katharine Stevens, Ph.D., is the research fellow in early-childhood education at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she focuses on the research, policy, and politics of early-childhood education, the role of early learning in expanding opportunity for low-income Americans, and the implementation challenges of rapidly growing early-childhood education initiatives, especially issues of teacher quality. Stevens has 20 years of both on-the-ground and research experience in urban education reform. Before joining AEI, she founded and led Teachers for Tomorrow, one of the first urban teacher-residency programs in the United States, which recruited and trained teachers for New York City’s lowest-performing schools. She began her career in public education as a preschool teacher in New Haven, Connecticut, and St. Louis, Missouri. Her analyses and commentary have been published in Education Week, the Huffington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, U.S. News & World Report, and The Wall Street Journal. She has a Ph.D. in education policy from Columbia University, a M.Ed. from Teachers College, an MBA from Columbia Business School, and a B.A. in US history from the University of Chicago.