Casey Kean, Ed.M.

Casey Kean is a Partner at BetterEd Solutions and an experienced school leader, instructional strategist, and data-driven improvement expert with more than a decade of experience helping schools translate academic data into stronger teaching, better leadership decisions, and measurable student outcomes. Across his career, Kean has served as a classroom teacher, assistant principal, academic director, principal, network academic operations leader, and international education consultant. His work is defined by a disciplined belief that data should do more than describe what happened. Used well, it should tell leaders what is happening now, why it is happening, where performance is likely to go next, and what adults must do differently to change the trajectory.

Kean brings particular strength in building the systems that make data useful inside schools. He has designed and managed progress-monitoring structures, assessment systems, instructional dashboards, leader and teacher data routines, goal-setting processes, and accountability systems that help organizations move from raw information to clear action. His approach connects multiple forms of evidence, including state assessments, interim assessments, standards mastery, classroom observations, teacher performance, student work, intervention data, special education performance, and implementation measures, so that leaders can see the whole organization rather than reacting to isolated numbers.

His data orientation is grounded in direct experience producing and improving academic results. At Success Academy Charter Schools in New York City, Kean served first as an elementary and middle school teacher and later as an Assistant Principal. As a teacher, his students produced exceptionally strong state assessment outcomes, including 93 percent proficiency on the New York State English Language Arts examination, 95 percent proficiency in mathematics, and a 99 percent passing rate on the Algebra I Regents examination. As an Assistant Principal, he coached teams across elementary and middle grades and helped establish schoolwide systems for tracking teacher and leader performance against student outcomes. Teams under his instructional leadership produced results that included a 99 percent passing rate on the eighth-grade Algebra I Regents, with 75 percent of students achieving the highest performance level, and a 97 percent passing rate on the seventh-grade New York State mathematics examination, with 80 percent of students performing at Level 4.

At Success Academy, Kean’s work extended beyond analyzing results after an assessment cycle. He built systems for using evidence before, during, and after instruction. He developed schoolwide teacher and leader progress-tracking structures designed to create a culture of mastery, led professional development in literacy, mathematics, and data analysis, and managed the logistics and integrity of internal and state assessments across hundreds of students. His experience taught him that the value of assessment is not the score itself, but the quality of the decisions the score produces.

Kean later brought that expertise to Nova Pioneer Schools in Nairobi, Kenya, where he served as Director of Academic Operations. In that role, he supported elementary, middle, and high school principals with school management, dean development, teacher management, academic operations, digital learning platforms, and data analysis. He developed and managed a networkwide instructional leadership development program for current and emerging deans that incorporated teacher coaching, goal setting, accountability, people management, and data analysis. He also created a six-week intensive training program for more than 200 educators and helped develop the leaders responsible for turning schoolwide information into stronger execution across classrooms.

His international work reinforced a principle that continues to shape his BetterEd practice: data systems must be rigorous enough to produce clarity but flexible enough to work within the actual context of a school. Whether working in New York, Kenya, or Nigeria, Kean has learned to distinguish between collecting more information and collecting the right information. He helps leaders identify the measures that matter, establish routines for examining those measures, and create clear thresholds for when performance requires celebration, intervention, or a change in strategy.

At Explore Charter School in Brooklyn, Kean progressed from Academic Director to Principal and became a central instructional leader during a period of sustained academic improvement. His professional record documents an average 22 percentage-point increase in New York State ELA and mathematics proficiency from 2019 to 2023. In 2023-24, Explore’s fourth graders achieved 83.1 percent proficiency in mathematics and 78 percent proficiency in ELA. More broadly, the school’s accountability systems increasingly emphasized visible and accessible performance data, including recurring standards-based data snapshots designed to help leaders and teachers monitor mastery, identify gaps, and respond quickly.

Kean’s work at Explore demonstrates the relationship between data infrastructure and school improvement. He has supervised teachers and leaders, managed a multimillion-dollar school budget, strengthened instructional systems, designed professional learning, and helped create conditions in which data is part of the daily management of the school rather than a compliance exercise. His leadership reflects a consistent effort to connect academic outcomes, teacher development, intervention, culture, and resource allocation so that organizational decisions remain tied to evidence.

The strength of that approach is visible in Explore’s more recent outcomes as well. In 2024-25, Explore Charter School’s elementary students outperformed New York City averages in both mathematics and reading, while students with disabilities and English learners also exceeded citywide comparison rates in both subjects. For Kean, subgroup performance is especially important because schoolwide averages can conceal significant differences in student experience. Strong data analysis must identify not only whether a school is improving, but which students are benefiting, which students are not, and what leaders must change to close those gaps.

Kean also brings experience in school founding and organizational design. As an educational start-up consultant supporting the development of Abraham Lincoln American Academy in Lagos, Nigeria, he worked on business planning, curriculum development, staffing, instructional methods, school operations, facilities, training, marketing, and family outreach. That experience broadened his understanding of how academic data systems must be designed from the beginning of an organization rather than layered onto a school after problems emerge. Strong schools establish the measures, reporting structures, assessment architecture, and management routines they will need before scale makes weak systems harder to correct.

At BetterEd Solutions, Kean is positioned as a lead expert in data, evidence, and continuous improvement. He supports schools and education organizations in building performance dashboards, assessment systems, data-meeting protocols, progress-monitoring tools, intervention trackers, leader scorecards, academic forecasting systems, and 30, 60, and 90-day performance measures. He helps leadership teams determine which indicators should be reviewed daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, and how those indicators should drive decisions about instruction, coaching, intervention, staffing, priorities, and organizational strategy.

His work is particularly valuable for leaders who have extensive data but lack a coherent system for using it. Many schools possess assessment platforms, spreadsheets, dashboards, surveys, attendance reports, observation data, and state accountability results while still struggling to answer basic management questions: What is improving? What is getting worse? Which students are off track? Which classrooms need support? Which leader actions are producing results? Where is implementation breaking down? What should change this week? Kean helps schools move from data abundance to decision clarity.

Kean’s coaching also emphasizes data literacy for adults. He works with principals, assistant principals, instructional leaders, coaches, and teachers to strengthen their ability to interpret evidence accurately, distinguish signal from noise, identify root causes, set measurable goals, and monitor whether interventions are working. He believes that strong data cultures are not created by dashboards alone. They are created when adults become increasingly skilled at asking the right questions, confronting evidence without defensiveness, and translating findings into specific changes in practice.

This work aligns directly with BetterEd’s broader approach to school transformation. BetterEd treats Data, Evidence and Continuous Improvement as one of the essential dimensions of organizational excellence, and Kean brings deep practical experience in making that dimension operational. His contribution helps ensure that BetterEd clients can define a baseline, establish measurable 30, 60, and 90-day targets, monitor progress with precision, detect weak implementation early, and determine whether improvement strategies are actually changing outcomes for students.

Kean also brings a global and research-oriented perspective to this work. He earned a Master of Education in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a bachelor’s degree in International Business and Development from the University of North Texas. His professional experience has spanned the United States and multiple international contexts, and he has contributed to published research, further reinforcing an analytical approach grounded in evidence, inquiry, and disciplined learning.

Across his career, Kean has repeatedly occupied roles where leaders needed more than numbers. They needed someone who could tell them what the numbers meant. His value lies in that translation: converting performance information into an understandable story about what is working, what is not, why, and what must happen next. He combines the analytical discipline of a data strategist with the practical judgment of a principal who understands that every number represents a student, a classroom, a teacher, and a set of decisions made by adults.

At BetterEd Solutions, Kean 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. His work helps make that vision measurable. By building stronger data systems, strengthening leaders’ ability to interpret evidence, and creating disciplined cycles of analysis and action, Kean helps schools move from intuition to insight, from insight to execution, and from execution to measurable improvement.