Karen Hawley Miles

Karen Hawley Miles is executive director and founder of Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit organization in Boston, MA that specializes in strategic planning, organization, and resource allocation in urban public school districts. Her work aims to help states, districts, and schools rethink resource use in a way that creates great schools and redirects resources to promote excellent teaching, individual attention for children, and productive instructional time.

Miles has worked intensively with urban districts including Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Boston, Baltimore, Providence, Rochester, and Cincinnati to deeply analyze and improve their funding systems, school-level resource use, and human capital systems. She has worked to create many tools for practitioners including the web-based DREAM tool that helps district leaders model specific resource tradeoffs, and a national comparative database of urban district spending to help leaders benchmark their practice and prioritize areas for reallocation.

Miles has taught education leaders at Harvard University, in school districts, and with the Aspen Institute, New Leaders for New Schools, and the Broad Institute for School Boards. Her research and lessons from the field have been published widely, and include most recently her book The Strategic School: Making the Most of People, Time, and Money and a chapter in Operation Public Education's upcoming book A Grand Bargain for Education: New Rewards and Supports for New Accountability. Prior to her work at ERS, she worked at Bain & Company as a strategy and management consultant for hospitals and corporations.

She has a B.A. in economics from Yale University and a doctorate in education from Harvard University, specializing in school organization, change, and finance.