Jeff Howard

Educational consultant Jeff Howard was born on May 29, 1948 in Chicago, Illinois to Florence Howard and George Howard. He graduated from Chicago’s Martha M. Ruggles Elementary School in 1961 and Tilden Technical High School in 1965. Howard received both his B.A. degree in government in 1969 and his Ph.D. degree in social psychology in 1980 from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While attending Harvard University, Howard served as the head of the Harvard Black Student Association in 1967.

After earning his B.A. degree, Howard founded the Efficacy Group in 1974, an organization focused on educational reform, where he worked until 1983. In 1977, he established a corporate consulting firm, J. Howard & Associates, and served as its CEO for 28 years until his retirement in 2005. In 1983, he founded the Efficacy Institute—a national not-for-profit organization dedicated to education reform and committed to helping children meet high academic standards. Howard has served as president of the Efficacy Institute for over forty years.

Throughout his career, Howard published numerous scholarly articles, including “Rumors of Inferiority” with Ray Hammond in The New Republic in 1985, “The Third Movement: Developing Black Children for the 21st Century” in the National Urban League’s publication The State of Black America in 1993, “You Can’t Get There from Here: The Need for a New Logic in Education Reform” in Daedalus Magazine in 1995, and “Still at Risk: The Causes and Costs of Failure to Educate Poor and Minority Children for the Twenty-First Century” with The Harvard Education Publishing Group in 2003. He also co-authored “A Manifesto for Educational Recovery”, with Kim Marshall, Douglas Reeves, Jon Saphier, and Sue Szachowicz, in 2021.

Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick appointed Howard to serve on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in 2008, where he remained until 2012. Howard served as a board member of the Black Philanthropy Foundation from 2012 to 2019 and The Basics, Inc., a nonprofit childhood development organization, since 2013.

Howard received the W.E.B. DuBois Medal from Harvard University in 2000.

Howard resides in Reading, Massachusetts with his wife, Cheryl Howard.

Jeff Howard was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on June 14, 2024.