Ashley Berner

Ashley Berner is co-founder and Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and Associate Professor of Education. She is widely recognized as the nation’s expert on educational pluralism, or the “choice and accountability” that most countries in the world take for granted. Palgrave MacMillan released Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School (2017), and Harvard Education Press released her new book, Educational Pluralism and American Democracy: How to Handle Indoctrination, Promote Exposure, and Rebuild America’s Schools, in April 2024. Her goal in this work is to change the tenor of American education policy, from a zero-sum game to a collaborative space in which equal access to academic excellence is possible. Dr. Berner has also published dozens of articles, book chapters, op-eds, and a widely watched TedX talk on citizenship formation, academic outcomes, pluralism, and the political theories of education in different national contexts. She serves as an executive board member of OIDEL, a non-profit with consultative privileges at UNESCO and the Council of Europe and, in that capacity, has lectured on educational pluralism at The Hague, the European People’s Party, and the University of Geneva, and participated in three working sessions hosted by UNESCO.Dr. Berner led the design of the Institute’s School Culture 360™ and ELA and Social Studies Knowledge Maps™ and has helped raise, since the Institute’s founding, more than $20 million in funded projects. Dr. Berner represents the Institute’s work across the country and consults regularly with international, federal, and state-level agencies, non-governmental organizations, and school systems. She held a five-year fellowship at the Center for the Study of Law & Religion at Emory University School of Law and a one-year fellowship at the Mercatus Pluralism and Civil Exchange Program. She served a four-year term as a Board Member at Large for the Council of American Private Education and acted as senior advisor to the Educating for American Democracy project, the Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Debate Program, and CivXNow!’s Research and Best Practices Affinity Group. She currently serves on iCivics’ Independent Review Council. Dr. Berner holds degrees from Davidson College (Honors A.B.) and from Oxford University (M.Litt. and D.Phil. in Modern History).