Stanford's Graduate School of Education, whose research programs on student mental health and multilingual learners touch Palo Alto schools directly, will get a new leader Nov. 1: Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a civil rights and education law scholar coming from Harvard.

Brown-Nagin has served as dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute since 2018. Stanford provost Jenny Martinez announced the appointment Aug. 4. Brown-Nagin succeeds Daniel L. Schwartz, who led the GSE for 11 years before announcing in February that he would step down.

Harvard Magazine marked her departure with an Instagram post recapping her tenure at Radcliffe and her move to Stanford.

Her research focuses on how law structures access to education and the distribution of educational opportunity. She is a constitutional law and American legal history scholar, the author of two award-winning books on civil rights, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"She's had a career-long focus on civil rights history and equal protection, so she will be a fierce advocate of equitable access to quality education," said Daniel McFarland, a Stanford education professor who co-chaired the dean search committee.

The hire matters locally because the GSE's partnerships reach into Bay Area classrooms. Its Challenge Success program works with K-12 communities on student mental health and school climate. The Stanford-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative, formed in 2017, focuses on supporting multilingual learners across nine districts. PAUSD is not among the Sequoia collaborative's formal partners, but the GSE's broader research on equity, AI in education and student wellness intersects with pressures the district faces heading into the 2026-27 school year.

Those pressures are significant. PAUSD's Measure B, an $800-per-parcel tax, failed in June with only 61% support, well short of the two-thirds threshold. The existing parcel tax expires in 2027, and without a replacement the district faces a $17 million annual shortfall. The expiring tax funds roughly 79 full-time positions, including teachers and specialists. Enrollment has dropped from 11,745 students in 2019-20 to about 10,318, and the district's new superintendent, Dr. Jason E. Glass, takes over as it navigates those challenges.

Brown-Nagin arrives with a personal connection to the equity questions that animate those debates. A first-generation college student and the daughter of a public school teacher, she attended integrated schools in the 1970s as a direct beneficiary of Thurgood Marshall's desegregation litigation. Her senior thesis at Furman University examined public school desegregation in South Carolina. She holds a law degree from Yale and a doctorate in history from Duke.

At Harvard, she chaired the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery and in 2024 co-chaired a working group on open inquiry and constructive dialogue. She led a five-year strategic vision for the Radcliffe Institute and launched an emerging leaders program pairing high school sophomores with Harvard undergraduate mentors.

Brown-Nagin said she plans to hold affiliations with Stanford Law School and the History Department alongside the GSE. In April, Stanford announced $1 million in seed grants through its AI Meets Education initiative for research on artificial intelligence in teaching, a priority area Brown-Nagin has cited.

Schwartz will return to teaching full time and continue leading the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, a university-wide initiative based at the GSE.