Andrew Volkert (center) with colleague Rydell Harrison (left) and Tom Nobili (right)
Andrew Volkert grew up high on a hill in San Bruno—the foggiest corner of the San Francisco Bay. He spent his childhood watching thick gray fog gather and release, sometimes hiding the entire landscape and sometimes parting just enough to reveal the Golden Gate Bridge and the city below.
“What I loved about the fog,” he says, “was that it showed you exactly where you were. When visibility is limited, your vantage point becomes everything.” He remembers running up the hill to see where the fog ended—to get above it and understand how the pieces fit together. “It became a running theme in my life: climbing to see the whole system, not settling for a single point of view.”
That instinct now sits at the center of his work at Partners, where Andrew serves as a program coordinator. He describes his role as a kind of shuttle run between ground level and high altitude—between the day-to-day experiences of educators and the strategic decisions that shape their work. “Many policies are written from a high altitude without enough knowledge of what’s happening on the ground,” he explains. “Improvement work means moving between both places and helping people see the connections.”
At Partners, Andrew helps teams clarify purpose, make sense of complexity, and design systems where equitable learning can take root. He draws on improvement science, liberatory design, and mixed-methods evaluation to help schools and districts build more adaptive, human-centered practices.
Before joining Partners, Andrew led Continuous Improvement strategy at the Rennie Center in Boston, supporting the Teach Plus Chicago Network for School Improvement, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantee. He has also worked with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the American Institutes for Research, and school networks across Massachusetts and Connecticut. Across settings, his focus has remained steady: driving systems change that leads to more equitable outcomes for students.
His entry into improvement science came from realizing that traditional research didn’t fully answer the questions he cared about. He says he’d been trying to identify “what works,” but came to understand that the real question is “what works for who, under what circumstances?” That shift grounded his approach in context, collaboration, and learning through action. “Improvement isn’t just technical,” he says. “It’s emotional and cultural. Systems change when the people within them build shared clarity.”
In his coaching and facilitation, Andrew helps teams examine where their systems unintentionally create barriers, use data for learning rather than judgment, and build small, focused changes that accumulate over time. That early lesson about visibility resurfaces here—not as something to eliminate, but as something to navigate. “Low visibility is part of real systems work,” he says. “Improvement gives you practices that help you see patterns even when things seem unclear.”
This past year brought Andrew a moment of clarity of his own as he and his colleagues, Tom Nobili and Isobel Stevenson, completed a four-year book project, Maximizing Opportunity to Learn: A Guide for Equitable and Ambitious Instruction, slated for release in 2026. “It feels like something that’s been swirling in my head has finally settled,” he says.
Now on the East Coast with his wife and daughters, Andrew still carries the image of the Bay emerging from the clouds. “Those moments when the whole landscape comes into view—that’s what I want for the teams I work with,” he reflects. “A clearer sense of the system, and a clearer sense of what’s possible.”
Contact Andrew at avolkert@partnersforel.org
