Jed F. Lippard, now head of school at Prospect Hill, was among those three. “There are a lot of personal relationships that people [at Prospect Hill] have developed with HGSE. Many of us are on the Ed School listserv and attend the Askwith Forums,” Lippard says.

Cambridge Public School Superintendent Jeffrey M. Young, who received a doctoral degree in administration, planning, and social policy from the Ed School in 1988, praises the presence of Harvard alumni teaching in the district.

“We always feel that Harvard graduates who come to work here bring to us a good mix of the two core values: academic excellence and social justice,” Young says.

While currently no faculty members at Benjamin Banneker hold Harvard degrees, Deputy Director Sherley Bretous-Carre says that the school takes advantage of Harvard by drawing upon faculty research and knowledge.

Benjamin Banneker, a kindergarten through sixth grade charter school focused on science and technology, has looked to Harvard to help improve its curriculum and teaching methods.

“We continue to be ahead of the curve. We’re always looking to studies and programs that we can participate in. We love to do longitudinal studies on where students have gone, what path they’ve taken,” Bretous-Carre says, adding that Banneker hopes to use Harvard resources for development and marketing as the school looks at updating its technology labs.

LEARNING TO TEACH

Every weekday last semester, Seth A. Pearce ’12 woke up at 6:40 a.m. and took the 7 a.m. shuttle into Kendall Square to student teach in the classroom of William D. Connell, an Ed School graduate who now teaches humanities at CCSC.

When not writing his thesis on liberal political philosophy and education, Pearce worked as a full-time student teacher. Now, in his final semester at Harvard, Pearce has continued to work for CCSC as a substitute teacher and will join the CCSC staff full-time after graduation to teach eighth grade humanities.

“My impression was that it is a really effective school. I’ve been in a lot of different educational environments, and I wanted to be in a place like [CCSC],” Pearce says.

Pearce is enrolled in the Undergraduate Teacher Education Program at Harvard, through which he has studied at the Ed School and assisted teachers at Quincy Upper School in Boston and CCSC. Participants in the program take the Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure so that they graduate as certified public school teachers.

Orin Gutlerner—the former director of UTEP who left Harvard in 2008 to help found Match Teacher Residency, a program that trains teachers and places many of them in charter schools—said that Harvard’s student teachers have increasingly been placed at Cambridge-based charter schools rather than traditional public schools run by the city since he took over the program in 2003.

This year, Pearce and one other UTEP student have taught at Cambridge charter schools, and one UTEP student taught at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the city’s flagship public high school.

Gutlerner found charter schools to be beneficial for student teachers. “CCSC believed in [a college preparatory education] for low-income students, and that’s why Harvard students have gotten into teaching in the first place. They want students to see the kind of opportunity that they have had,” he says.

When Seton arrived at Harvard, he was hesitant about charter schools. He completed his student teaching hours at public high schools in Boston and Quincy.