Kiran Bir Sethi did not set out to reform education. She was a graphic designer — a trained visual communicator from India's National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad who ran her own successful design firm for over a decade. Then her children started school, and what she saw dismayed her: rigid, unfriendly institutions that seemed designed to diminish the very curiosity children brought through the door.

So she did what designers do. She prototyped an alternative.

The Riverside School, which she founded in Ahmedabad in 2001, began as one school. It became a laboratory. And the method developed inside it — Design for Change — became the largest children's movement of its kind in the world, active in more than 60 countries. Sethi's journey from designer to teacher to principal to global education reformer is one of the most instructive leadership stories in modern schooling.

Who she is

Sethi trained at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, in visual communication, and spent the first phase of her career designing restaurants and writing for newspapers. The pivot came when, as a parent, she confronted the atmosphere of conventional schooling and recognized what she calls her true calling: designing experiences for children rather than for clients.

Riverside was conceived explicitly as a prototype — a place to test whether design processes could build a culture of empowerment. Its animating idea is the "I CAN" mindset: the belief, cultivated deliberately in every child, that they possess agency to improve their world. That mindset is nourished, in Riverside's language, by five values — Empathy, Ethics, Excellence, Elevation, and Evolution — pursued with the intention of forming what Sethi calls "HumanE, by design."

In 2007 she founded aProCh, an initiative to make cities more child-friendly, for which she was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2008. In 2009 she launched Design for Change, distilling Riverside's method into a simple four-step framework — Feel, Imagine, Do, Share (FIDS) — that any child, in any school, could use to identify a problem in their community and act on it. In 2016, the Riverside Learning Centre began codifying the school's practices into six pillars — curriculum, parent partnership, personal and professional development, community, administration, and leadership — and training other schools to become "I CAN schools." In 2023, she published "Every Child CAN" with HarperCollins, chronicling the journey.

What she is known for

Sethi is known, above all, for proving that student agency scales. Design for Change is today described as the world's largest movement of change by and for children: present in more than 60 countries, it has engaged over 2.2 million children and 65,000 teachers in designing solutions to real community problems — from sanitation to safety to inclusion — using the Feel-Imagine-Do-Share framework.

The movement's credibility is reflected in its recognitions: Design for Change was named among HundrED's 100 most innovative education programs in the world for four consecutive years, won the Commonwealth Education Good Practice Award, and was declared the LEGO Foundation's Reimagine Learning Challenge Champion. In 2017, Sethi signed a landmark agreement at the Vatican to introduce Design for Change into more than 460,000 Catholic schools worldwide — arguably the largest single scaling of a pedagogical method in history.

Her personal honors trace the same arc: the INDEX Design to Improve Life Award (2011), the Rockefeller Foundation Youth Innovation Award (2012), a top-10 nomination for the Global Teacher Prize (2015), the Asia Game Changer Award (2015), and a Yidan Fellowship (2019). She now serves as a judge for the Yidan Prize and as a Visiting Global Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The ideas she stands for

Sethi's philosophy is design thinking applied to childhood itself. First, she holds that empathy must precede curriculum: children learn best when learning begins with feeling — with noticing the needs of others — rather than with memorization.

Second, she insists that children are not future citizens but current ones. The Design for Change framework exists to prove that even young children can identify problems, imagine solutions, act, and share results — and that schools should be organized to make that cycle routine.

Third, she believes school culture is a designed artifact. Riverside's six pillars — and its explicit attention to parent partnership, teacher development, and community — reflect the designer's conviction that nothing in a school is accidental: every process either builds or erodes the "I CAN" mindset.

Fourth, she has argued that cities, not just schools, must be designed for children — the aProCh initiative's premise being that a child's learning environment extends far beyond the school gate.

Why leaders should pay attention

For education leaders, Sethi offers three lessons that cut against conventional reform. The first is methodological: she treated a school as a prototype, iterated on it for two decades, codified what worked, and then scaled the method rather than the institution. Most school networks do the reverse.

The second is about the purpose of schooling. In an era of anxiety about test scores and AI disruption, Sethi's two-decade demonstration is that agency — the practiced belief that "I can" — may be the most durable outcome a school can produce. Her 2.2 million children are not a pilot program; they are an existence proof.

The third is about who gets to lead change. Sethi was not a career educator, a minister, or a researcher. She was a designer and a concerned parent who refused to accept the schools on offer. Her story is a standing challenge to every education leader: the next transformative idea in your system may come from outside the profession entirely — if your system is open enough to let it in.

Dr. Tariq Al Gurg spent twelve years in banking — senior management roles in consumer and corporate banking at what is now Emirates NBD, a seat on the UAE's National Anti-Money Laundering Committee. It was a prestigious, lucrative career. Then, in 2009, he made a leap that redefined not only his own life but the place of the Gulf in global education philanthropy: he became Chief Executive Officer of Dubai Cares.

What he inherited was a young organization with a bold mandate. What he built is one of the most influential education philanthropies on the planet.

Who he is

Dubai Cares was founded in 2007 by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, as an organization dedicated to providing children in developing countries with access to quality education. When Al Gurg took the helm in 2009 — appointed by Chairperson Reem Al Hashimy — it was, in the words of contemporary coverage, a young philanthropic establishment finding its footing. He joined its Board of Directors in 2018.

Al Gurg's formation was unusual for the philanthropy world: a banker trained in the Mohammed Bin Rashid Programme for Leadership Development, bringing private-sector discipline to a development mission. As those who have worked with him note, he has run Dubai Cares less like a charity and more like an institution with a strategy — one grounded, in the organization's own description, in continuous monitoring and evaluation and rigorous research.

What he is known for

Under Al Gurg's leadership, Dubai Cares grew into a global force. The organization has launched education programs reaching more than 20 million beneficiaries across 59 developing countries, working through integrated, sustainable, and scalable program design — spanning early childhood development, primary and secondary education, technical and vocational training, and, distinctively, education in emergencies and protracted crises.

But Al Gurg's influence extends well beyond Dubai Cares' own programs. He has become a fixture of the global education governance architecture: a founding member of UNICEF's Generation Unlimited and its Global Leadership Council, a founding member of the high-level steering group of Education Cannot Wait (the global fund for education in emergencies), a High-Level Champion of the World Economic Forum's Reskilling Revolution, a member of UNESCO's Futures of Education advisory board, and Regional Champion for the Global Partnership for Education.

He is also the architect of landmark convenings that put education at the center of global agendas — including the RewirEd Summit, held at Expo 2020 Dubai and again at COP28, which for the first time embedded education programming inside a UN climate conference. In 2017, then-UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova recognized him for transforming Dubai Cares from a young philanthropic organization into a global leader in the international education arena. He received the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean Award in 2016 and an honorary doctorate from Mangalayatan University in India in 2019.

The ideas he stands for

Al Gurg's public positions cohere around several convictions. First, education in emergencies is not a secondary concern but a frontline one: he has been among the most persistent champions of schooling for children in fragile and conflict-affected states, arguing that protracted crises demand education systems, not just emergency relief.

Second, philanthropy must be evidence-based. His signature contribution to Dubai Cares has been building it as what the organization calls a "best-case practitioner" — investing in research, measurement, and evaluation so that programs can be proven, refined, and scaled.

Third, the education agenda must be holistic. Dubai Cares' programming deliberately reaches beyond classrooms into health, nutrition, and gender equality — a recognition that children cannot learn when they are hungry, sick, or excluded.

Fourth, youth must be agents, not just beneficiaries. His leadership roles in Generation Unlimited and the WEF's Reskilling Revolution reflect a consistent emphasis on youth empowerment and closing the global skills gap. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he drew a lesson leaders should remember: the crisis forced 1.6 billion children out of school and put 24 million at risk of never returning — and the divide between systems that could pivot to remote learning and those that could not was, above all, a divide of connectivity and resources.

Why leaders should pay attention

For education leaders, Al Gurg matters as a case study in institution-building at global scale. He took a national philanthropic initiative and made it a node in the world's education governance — proof that strategic clarity, measurement discipline, and relentless partnership-building can compound over fifteen years into genuine influence.

He also embodies a shift in where education leadership comes from. The great education philanthropies of the twentieth century were largely Western; Dubai Cares represents a new geography of generosity — Gulf-funded, globally governed, and focused on the developing world. For leaders in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, that shift is not academic. It is the funding landscape they now operate in.

And his core warning deserves attention everywhere: the children hardest to reach — in conflict zones, in protracted crises — are precisely those for whom education matters most. A system that works only in stable times is not a system at all.

If American education research has a central figure of the last half-century, it is Linda Darling-Hammond. Teacher, scholar, institution-builder, presidential adviser: across nearly five decades, she has pursued a single thesis with unusual persistence — that the quality of teaching is the decisive factor in student learning, and that everything else in education policy should be organized around strengthening it.

Today she occupies a rare combination of posts: Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University, founding president of the Learning Policy Institute, and president of the California State Board of Education — a position to which Governor Gavin Newsom appointed her in 2019. Few people alive have moved as fluidly between the seminar room, the think tank, and the machinery of government.

Who she is

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1951, Darling-Hammond earned her B.A. magna cum laude from Yale University in 1973 and her doctorate in urban education, with highest distinction, from Temple University in 1978. But her formation began in classrooms, not libraries: she started as a teacher's aide and English teacher, and later co-founded both a preschool and a public high school — grounding that would shape her insistence that policy must answer to practice.

Her research career ran through the RAND Corporation, where she directed the education program, and Teachers College at Columbia University, before she joined Stanford in 1998. At Stanford she founded the Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and helped redesign the university's teacher education program. In 2015 she founded the Learning Policy Institute, created to supply policymakers with rigorous, nonpartisan research on what actually improves schooling. She has authored more than 600 publications and over two dozen books, received 14 honorary degrees, and ranks among the most cited education researchers in the world.

Her influence has repeatedly crossed into government. She directed Barack Obama's education policy transition team in 2008 and Joe Biden's in 2020. From 1994 to 2001, she led the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, whose 1996 report "What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future" was judged one of the most influential education documents of its decade and drove concrete policy changes across the United States.

What she is known for

Darling-Hammond is best known for making teacher quality the center of the education debate — and for backing the claim with evidence. Her research has shown, again and again, that well-prepared, well-supported teachers matter more for student achievement than any other school-controlled factor, and that the United States' uneven approach to teacher preparation is a root cause of its achievement gaps.

She is equally known for her work on equitable school funding and school redesign. Her book "The Flat World and Education," which won the 2011 Grawemeyer Award in Education, argued that America's decentralized, inequitable funding model was leaving it behind nations that invest deliberately and evenly. In 2022 she received the Yidan Prize for Education Research — among the largest international honors in the field — for work that has shaped policy on the most equitable and effective ways to teach and learn.

As president of the California State Board of Education, she has had the rare chance to implement her own prescriptions at scale: steering the country's largest state education system toward whole-child approaches, community schools, and deeper investment in the educator workforce.

The ideas she stands for

Her public positions are remarkably consistent across decades. First, teaching must be treated as a true profession — with rigorous preparation, residency-style clinical training, decent pay, and career ladders — not as a stopgap job. Countries that do this, she notes, get the results to match.

Second, accountability should be built on professional capacity, not punishment. She has long criticized test-and-sanction regimes that narrow curricula and drive talented people from the profession, arguing instead for performance assessments and systems that develop educators rather than merely sorting them.

Third, equity requires deliberate design. From funding formulas to school integration to access to experienced teachers, Darling-Hammond's work insists that equal opportunity does not happen by accident — it must be engineered into policy.

Fourth, schools should educate the whole child. She has championed community schools, social-emotional learning, and restorative practices as core infrastructure, not optional extras — a position that moved from the margins to the mainstream during her tenure in California.

Why leaders should pay attention

For education leaders, Darling-Hammond offers something rarer than inspiration: a usable theory of action. Her message to a head of school or a minister is concrete — audit your teacher pipeline, invest in preparation and mentoring, fund equitably, measure what matters, and build systems that keep good educators in the profession.

She also models a career that more education leaders should emulate: one foot in evidence, one foot in practice, and a willingness to enter the arena of policy rather than merely comment on it. In an era when education debates are increasingly polarized and evidence-free, her five-decade demonstration that rigorous research can move systems remains the field's most important case study — and its most demanding challenge.