Core Staff

Aarav Sundaresh

Assistant Director for Engagement and Partnerships
Brown Tutoring Corps
Evidence in Action - RI
he/him
Aarav Sundaresh
Biography

Aarav Sundaresh supports Annenberg’s engagement and partnerships with Rhode Island K-12 schools. Specifically, he connects students, teachers and school communities to resources including Brown Tutoring Corps (BTC), College Day at Brown, and the scholarship, research and knowledge that Annenberg leads. Working in collaboration with the Swearer Center for Public Service, Aarav’s work nurtures sustainable partnerships grounded in mutual respect. Prior to joining the Annenberg team, Aarav worked in the Providence Public School Department as the Director of Equity and Belonging and as an art teacher for over 13 years. He earned his BA in Visual Arts from Brown University and his Master of Arts in Teaching from Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a Presidential Scholar. With a firm commitment to educational equity and justice, Aarav brings dedication to serve the local community and creativity in effective partnership- and engagement-building.

Through our pillars: applied research training, engaged scholarship, sustained partnerships, and efforts to generate actionable knowledge, we seek to improve the creation, synthesis, and application of educational research. 


Applied Research Training

Through programs, fellowships, and learning opportunities, Annenberg provides a hub at Brown University for conducting and engaging with education research for impact.


Engaged Scholarship

Annenberg is connecting with leading scholars in the field and supporting a growing body of cutting-edge research that builds new knowledge of promising practices and of the conditions that enable students to thrive.


Sustainable Partnerships

Annenberg’s partnerships connect researchers and practitioners, deepening relationships across the educational system and transforming policy and practice through ongoing collaboration.


Actionable Knowledge

Annenberg’s knowledge initiatives catalyze conversations across the research landscape, synthesizing what we know and mobilizing practitioners, policymakers, and researchers toward collaborative impact.
 

Our Work in Action

Learn more about the type of working happening at Annenberg.

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Welcome to the Annenberg Institute

It is an honor to be leading the Annenberg Institute. Over the past several decades, the Institute has helped improve and make more equitable educational experiences for students across the country. I am humbled to be filling the enormous shoes of Annenberg’s three previous directors, Ted Sizer, Warren Simmons, and Susanna Loeb, all of whom have shaped the Institute and its legacy. I continue to reflect on the Institute’s early mission, what has changed, and what shapes the work that lies ahead.

The Institute was launched in 1993, with a large grant from the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Foundation to “provoke and nurture the redesign of American schools,” with a mission to “document, analyze and publicize the nature and progress of that redesigning.” Our founding documents highlighted the research-practice divide, centering our work “along the often controversial and troubled ‘fault line’ between those two worlds.” They also anticipated the importance of cross-disciplinary inquiry and the capacity of research to improve education across the country, noting that the Institute  would provide “a neutral gathering place for all those concerned about schooling, a site for debate and investigation.”

Over thirty years later, the Institute continues to fulfill this mission. Some things have changed and modernized – the “emerging sophisticated telecommunications systems” described in 1993 are quite different today. While the early work focused specifically on differences along socio-economic lines, our current efforts engage centrally with equity and inequality more broadly, highlighting the important intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, language, immigrant status, geography, and other dimensions of students’ identities.

But, over three decades, much has remained the same. Our work continues to prioritize investigation and research, center equity, focus on impact and improvement, and engage with practice and communities. Through it all, we strive to shape the national conversation about effective and equitable educational practices.

We are especially keen to move the conversation beyond the typical either/or trade-offs and “fault lines” that are often present in education research. We want to center both/and solutions. How can we conduct partnership research that meets the needs of practitioners and creates new lines of inquiry that push understanding in our field? How can we maintain intellectual rigor in our research and answer questions of most importance to policy and practice? How can we attend to the lived experiences of the policymakers and practitioners with whom we work and focus our attention most directly on improving, and making more equitable, the educational experiences of the youth they serve?

As we continue to evolve and develop as an Institute, we continue to lean into these tensions. I am excited about the work that we are doing and about how we continue to build our partnerships and collaborations with organizations and scholars at Brown and across the country to push forward, together, to equalize and improve educational opportunities for all students. 

John Papay
Director

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Our History

The Annenberg Institute was founded in 1993 with the goal of improving educational opportunities for students. Over the years, the work of the Annenberg Institute has reflected a deep commitment to reducing educational inequality and promoting educational excellence.  

2025

  • The Annenberg Institute serves as the independent research partner for the Rhode Island Foundation’s Blue Ribbon Commission, conducting the research analysis that informed the Commission’s findings and recommendations about the school funding formula for the State of Rhode Island.
  • The Annenberg Institute continues growing, as the SustainableEd and Research for Postsecondary Policy and Practice Initiatives launch.

2024

  • The Annenberg EdExchange launches, designed as a "town square" for education research and improvement, aimed at bridging the gap between research, policy, and practice by bringing together EdWorkingPapers, EdResearch for Action, and EdInstruments resources in one centralized hub.

2023

  • Susanna Loeb transitions to the Stanford University Accelerator for Learning, SCALE Initiative. Education scholar John Papay is named Director of  Brown’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform after serving as interim director. He continues to position the Annenberg Institute to serve as a hub of education scholarship that confronts some of the most pressing issues in teaching and learning, including opportunity gaps and learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. By creating a broader set of opportunities for engagement and learning for students, postdoctoral fellows, researchers, scholars and practitioners across campus and beyond, Papay plans to expand the institute's robust set of collaborative research projects, generating insights that can be directly applied to teaching practices and education policy. Under Papay’s leadership, the Annenberg Institute launches a doctoral student affiliate program at Brown.

2022

  • The Annenberg Institute continues to expand its scholarly reach with a focus on how race, ethnicity, and social class intersect with school leadership, practices, and policies to shape educational opportunities and outcomes. 

2021

  • The Annenberg Institute launches the National Student Support Accelerator to synthesize the large body of research on tutoring to better understand what drives effective tutoring.

2020

  • Responding to the COVID-19 impact on education, the Annenberg Institute launches EdResearch for Recovery project to provide actionable insights rooted in high-quality research and synthesized into short, easy-to-digest evidence briefs – to help education leaders make informed, student-centered decisions as they consider which strategies will work best in their schools and their communities.

2019

  • The Annenberg Institute develops and launches EdWorkingPapers.com in May. This national working paper series provides open access to high-quality papers across disciplines on a wide variety of education topics. EdWorkingPapers focuses particularly on pre-publication research with strong implications for education policy. Loeb spearheads the creation of the Annenberg Undergraduate Fellows for Education and Social Policy Program. Designed to prepare current Brown undergraduates to engage in rigorous empirical research in education and social policy, the program is comprised of an 8-week paid summer internship, followed by research and workshop opportunities throughout the remainder of the student’s undergraduate experience. The program welcomes its first cohort in the summer of 2019. The Postdoctoral Research Associates program also launches, a two-year appointment which provides early career researchers an opportunity to participate in collaborative research with Annenberg faculty on issues related to PK-16 education policy.
  • The Annenberg Institute moves to 164 Angell Street, a multidisciplinary hub for five university entities.  

2018

  • Susanna Loeb, previously the Barnett Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and founding director of the Center for Education Policy at Stanford, assumes leadership of the Institute in July. Reflecting the University's strategic plan Building on Distinction, Loeb emphasizes closer integration with the University’s research and teaching mission, and aims to create a hub of scholarship and policy work that engages faculty, students, and practitioner experts. This work addresses the causes, consequences, and mitigation of educational inequality with the goal of creating scalable solutions.

2017

  • In order to increase coordination between the Annenberg Institute and Brown University more broadly, several former Institute programs move to continue their work in new organizational homes. In September, the New York-based Community Organizing and Engagement team moves to the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools at New York University’s Steinhardt School. And in November, the New England-based Community Organizing & Engagement team and the District & Systems Transformation team moves to Roger Williams University’s School of Continuing Studies.

2015

  • In December, Warren Simmons steps down as executive director of the Annenberg Institute. He continues to serve as senior fellow and team-teaches a course in urban systems and structure in Brown University’s Urban Education Policy master’s program. Former Institute Deputy Director Michael Grady is named interim executive director.

2012-2017

  • The Annenberg Institute hosts the Providence Children & Youth Cabinet.

2012

  • The Annenberg Institute’s Board of Overseers establishes the Ruth J. Simmons Urban Education Policy Scholarship. This permanent annual award goes to the UEP graduate student who most epitomizes the former Brown University president’s commitment to educational equity and social justice. Simmons, who served as chair of the Institute’s Board of Overseers beginning with her appointment as Brown’s president in 2001, was instrumental in urging the Institute and the University’s Education Department to collaborate on a graduate program in the study of urban public education.

2011-2014

  • In partnership with the Rhode Island Foundation, the Annenberg Institute sponsors a series of eight forums focused on "Building a 21st Century Education System."

2008-2009

  • The Annenberg Institute supports the Governor's Urban Education Task Force, a key factor in Rhode Island's successful Race to the Top application.

2007

  • The Annenberg Institute opens an expanded New York office in the Woolworth Building in lower Manhattan.

2006

  • The Institute's programs and staff expand by incorporating the Community Involvement Program, which was formerly affiliated with the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University.

2005

  • In collaboration with Brown’s Education Department and other University entities, the Institute establishes a Master’s Program in Urban Education Policy (UEP), with the first cohort of students entering the program in the summer of 2006. The tightly focused 12-month academic curriculum, integrated with a 9-month internship, is designed to impart a set of core skills and competencies necessary for successful careers in urban education policy

2003

  • The inaugural issue of the Annenberg Institute’s quarterly journal, Voices in Urban Education (VUE), is published in the spring of 2003, and ceases publication after 48 issues in the spring of 2018.

2001

  • The Institute moves its Providence operations to new headquarters on Benefit Street, just off the Brown campus.

2000

  • The Annenberg Institute opens a small office in New York City in conjunction with the launch of its Task Force on the Future of Urban Districts.

1998

  • In October 1998, Warren Simmons leaves his position as director of the Philadelphia Education Fund to become executive director of the Institute. Under Simmons’ leadership, the Institute adopts a mission statement concentrating on the critical need to improve schools in the nation’s urban communities.

1996

  • After Sizer's retirement in 1996, Vartan Gregorian — then president of Brown University — serves as acting director of the Annenberg Institute, and Ramón Cortines, a member of the Board of Overseers, serves as interim director.

1993-1996

  • The Annenberg Institute’s founder and first director is education reform leader Theodore R. Sizer. Sizer was previously the founder and chairman of the innovative Coalition of Essential Schools, which envisioned a type of whole-school reform, with differentiated learning and a commitment to educating informed citizens. Under Sizer, the Institute builds upon the work of the Coalition and expands its goals, endeavoring to support sustained, focused efforts to enhance the quality of learning of children and youth across the country.

1993

  • The Annenberg Institute is established through an anonymous gift to Brown University of $5 million. A subsequent $50 million gift — part of Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg's $500 million Challenge to the Nation to improve public education in America — enables the fledgling organization to expand the scope of its work. In appreciation for this generous gift, the Institute is renamed in the philanthropist’s honor.

    Note: While the Annenberg Institute received an initial gift and other grants from the Annenberg Foundation (Ambassador Annenberg’s charitable trust), the Annenberg Institute is a separate entity from the Foundation and from other organizations that were beneficiaries of the Foundation and bear the Annenberg name. The Annenberg Institute does not make grants and cannot consider proposals for funding from outside organizations.

     

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