Dr. Alina Lewis

Dr. Alina Lewis is a Research Partner at BetterEd Solutions and an education researcher, former New York City public school teacher and administrator, teacher educator, and community education leader whose work examines how schools change, how students experience those changes, and how evidence can be used to improve policy and practice. Her expertise sits at the intersection of research, curriculum and instruction, school improvement, student voice, civic engagement, organizational learning, and the social and political contexts that shape educational outcomes.

At BetterEd, Lewis serves a distinctive role: helping the organization study transformation as rigorously as it delivers it. As BetterEd works with schools to improve leadership, instruction, culture, organizational systems, and student outcomes, Lewis helps build the research architecture necessary to understand what changed, why it changed, how stakeholders experienced the change, and whether the improvement is likely to endure. Her work strengthens BetterEd’s ability to move beyond individual success stories toward a cumulative body of evidence about school improvement and transformation.

Lewis earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction through the University at Albany’s Department of Educational Theory and Practice. Her doctoral research, “History Is within and around Us: High School Students Actively Engage the Past in New York City,” used qualitative inquiry to examine the ways adolescents encounter, interpret, and engage history beyond traditional classroom settings. The work reflects a broader intellectual commitment that runs throughout her career: students are not passive recipients of schooling. Their experiences, interpretations, identities, relationships, and voices are essential evidence for understanding whether educational systems are working as intended.

Her research training is grounded in substantial professional experience inside public education. Before completing her doctorate, Lewis worked as a New York City public school teacher and administrator. That practitioner background allows her to approach research differently from someone observing schools only from outside. She understands the time pressures, policy demands, implementation challenges, competing priorities, and human dynamics that shape what educators can actually do. As a result, her research is designed not merely to produce findings, but to help leaders make better decisions.

Lewis’s recent scholarship demonstrates that orientation. In 2026, the Bank Street College of Education Occasional Paper Series published her case study, “This Curriculum Has No Real Reading: A Case Study of Student Activism in Response to a Centralized Curriculum Mandate.” The study examined how students and families responded to a top-down literacy mandate in New York City and what their advocacy revealed about curriculum quality, student agency, bureaucracy, and community voice. Rather than treating implementation as a purely technical exercise, Lewis examined how educational change is experienced by the people most directly affected by it.

That perspective is highly relevant to school improvement work. Schools frequently introduce new curricula, management systems, interventions, schedules, accountability structures, and professional learning initiatives with strong intentions. But implementation succeeds or fails through the interactions among policy, leadership, adult behavior, organizational culture, student experience, and family trust. Lewis helps BetterEd examine those interactions so that a transformation plan can be evaluated not only by whether an initiative was launched, but by whether it was understood, adopted, experienced as intended, and associated with meaningful changes in outcomes.

Lewis has also conducted research on civic education, political engagement, and how students learn to engage across differences. Her scholarship includes collaborative work examining whether structured interscholastic discussions can foster open-minded political engagement, reduce affective polarization, and strengthen civic participation among young people. This work reinforces her interest in the development of schools as places where students learn not only academic content, but how to reason, communicate, participate, and exercise agency within democratic communities.

Her experience in teacher preparation further extends her ability to connect evidence to adult learning. At the University at Albany, Lewis taught foundations coursework for future educators, helping prospective teachers understand the sociopolitical context of schooling and the historical role of race and inequity in American education. She also contributed to research on civics curriculum, helped develop and pilot a teacher-evaluation capstone, and collaborated on efforts to strengthen teacher preparation. These experiences give her a strong lens on how research can inform the development of educators rather than remaining confined to academic publication.

At BetterEd Solutions, Lewis’s research agenda is particularly focused on school improvement, transformation, and growth. She helps design qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method approaches that allow BetterEd and its school partners to study change over time. That can include baseline and follow-up research, stakeholder interviews, focus groups, surveys, implementation studies, case studies, culture and trust measurement, student and family experience research, leadership-practice studies, and the synthesis of academic and organizational performance data.

Lewis is especially interested in the questions that sit underneath headline outcomes. If a school’s test scores rise, what changed in classrooms and leadership practice? If attendance improves, what changed in student belonging, family trust, or operating systems? If culture improves, which adult behaviors shifted? If a turnaround accelerates rapidly, which changes were essential and which were incidental? If a school improves for one group of students but not another, what explains the difference? If leaders believe an initiative is working but students and teachers experience it differently, what does that gap reveal?

These are the questions that allow BetterEd to distinguish correlation from a credible theory of change and isolated success from repeatable practice.

Lewis’s role is also central to BetterEd’s long-term aspiration to transform 100 schools over ten years while developing a body of knowledge about how school transformation actually occurs. Rather than allowing each engagement to disappear into a separate project file, Lewis helps build structures for cross-school learning. Over time, the objective is to identify patterns across settings: which leadership routines repeatedly matter, which culture indicators predict implementation, what forms of adult development are associated with stronger outcomes, how trust changes during transformation, which interventions produce durable gains, and where context meaningfully alters the pathway to improvement.

Her research orientation is particularly valuable because BetterEd’s model emphasizes evidence, not ideology. Lewis helps ensure that the organization remains willing to test its own assumptions. When evidence supports an approach, BetterEd should understand why. When an intervention does not work, the organization should learn from it rather than explain it away. When findings are mixed, leaders should know what additional evidence is needed. That discipline strengthens both the integrity of BetterEd’s work and the quality of the decisions made by its school partners.

Lewis also brings a strong commitment to community voice. She is a New York City public school parent, a local education advocate, and an elected member of the District 20 Community Education Council in South Brooklyn. Her work therefore spans research, practice, and public participation. She understands that families and students possess forms of knowledge that are often absent from administrative dashboards and that sustainable school improvement requires leaders to understand not only performance indicators, but how communities experience the institution.

At BetterEd, this makes Lewis particularly well suited to research on organizational culture, belonging, trust, family experience, student voice, and stakeholder confidence. She can help schools build instruments and inquiry processes that surface what people actually believe and experience, identify gaps between leadership assumptions and stakeholder reality, and translate those findings into improvement priorities.

Lewis’s scholarship and practice ultimately serve the same purpose: helping education organizations become more reflective, evidence-driven, and responsive. She brings methodological rigor without losing sight of the people behind the data. She understands that a statistically significant result and a compelling qualitative narrative answer different questions, and that strong improvement research often requires both.

At BetterEd Solutions, Lewis contributes to the organization’s vision of transforming schools in our nation’s most underserved communities into happier, healthier, higher-performing places where every child can thrive. Her responsibility is to help BetterEd know, with increasing precision, whether transformation is occurring, what is producing it, how it is experienced, and what the broader education field can learn from it.