Jeannette Garcia Coppersmith

Jeannette is a doctoral student and former public middle and high school mathematics teacher and leader interested in understanding the mechanisms that contribute to racial-ethnic disparities in secondary mathematics education. Pulling from critical perspectives and implicit social cognition theory, and using methods from the field of measurement as well as qualitative approaches, she aims to better understand how teacher racial-ethnic biases relate to instructional decision-making and student opportunities to learn in reform-oriented math classrooms.

Born and raised in the Highland Park and Eagle Rock neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California, she is a proud public school alumna of the Los Angeles Unified School District and earned her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley where she studied Environmental Sciences. She began her teaching career with a teacher residency program in the Oakland Unified School District and continued to teach in Providence, Rhode Island where she led her school's mathematics department. After teaching secondary mathematics at Title I schools for several years, Jeannette began her graduate studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as an Urban Scholar in the Instructional Leadership strand of the Learning and Teaching Program.

She is now a doctoral student studying education as a Graduate Prize Fellow at Harvard University. Her concentration is Human Development, Learning, and Teaching. She also serves as the Content Chair on the Editorial Board of the Harvard Educational Review. In her free time, Jeannette enjoys cooking and baking, going on runs, painting, playing fetch with her dogs, and spending time with her family.