Dr. James Harvey is the Executive Director of the National Superintendents Roundtable

James Harvey has worked with school superintendents since 1992 and served as executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable since 2007. The Roundtable, an invitational membership organization, is dedicated to leadership in support of just and humane schools. It holds in-depth seminars on cutting-edge topics annually and Harvey has led Roundtable study missions to England, France, Finland, Cuba, and China to understand schooling abroad. The Roundtable also examined the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) at a 2012 meeting at OECD in Paris.

A native of Ireland, Harvey attended elementary and secondary schools in Ireland and London and completed his high school education at a public school in Pennsylvania. He is the author or co-author of dozens of articles and five books on education and education policy, including A Legacy of Learning (2000, with David Kearns former CEO of Xerox) and The Superintendent’s Fieldbook (2004 and 2013). He was the principal staff writer and editor of A Nation at Risk (1983) and What Work Requires of Schools (U.S. Department of Labor’s SCANS Commission, 1991). Earlier, he served in the Carter administration as an education lobbyist and on the staff of the Committee on Education and Labor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

His doctoral dissertation at Seattle University examined both the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and American school performance in an international context. This research was published by the Roundtable and the Horace Mann League in 2015 and 2018 as The Iceberg Effect and How High the Bar? He serves on the boards of the Horace Mann League and the Network for Public Education as well as on the Steering Committee of the Urban Superintendents Academy sponsored by AASA and Howard University. Married to Anne Paxton, he is the father of three children: Janet, Jamey, and Patrick.