Tammie Causey-Konaté, PhD, is a Senior Technical Assistance Consultant at American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the Equity in Education Senior Advisor at the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders. Causey-Konaté has over 25 years of experience as a professional educator, with her years in K–12 and higher education divided equally. She has international and regional experience in diversity and equity, cultural and linguistic competence, cross-education system partnerships, and the postsecondary development of school leaders for urban and rural education contexts. In the area of educational leadership, she has served as an assistant dean, associate professor (tenured), and doctoral program coordinator. Co-editor of the book, Called to Sankofa: Leading in Through, and Beyond Disaster: A Narrative Account of African Americans Leading Education in Post-Katrina New Orleans (2018), and author of the Fall 2020 REL Southwest Blog post, Taking Off Our Blindfolds, While We Wear Our Masks, she also has extensive experience in trauma-informed practices.
Much of Causey-Konaté’s current work focuses on educational equity, including equity leadership, whole child equity, equitable access, diversification of the educator workforce, culturally responsive hiring practices, and social emotional learning. She advances equity through her work on a number of projects, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Covid-19 and Equity in Education Longitudinal Deep Dive Study and the Evaluation of the Networks for School Improvement and leads work to diversify the educator workforce through the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Midwest and Region 9 Comprehensive Center. In addition, Causey-Konaté was instrumental in helping to develop AIR’s Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Standards for Projects, Research, and Operations (CLAS PRO) and co-leads cultural and linguistic competence capacity building at AIR and engages in comprehensive action planning, resource development, and organization-wide training to support the integration of cultural and linguistic competence into all policies, practices, and projects. Dr. Causey-Konaté holds a PhD in educational administration and MEd in curriculum and instruction, from the University of New Orleans.
As co-principal investigator, Causey-Konaté co-leads Implementation study C which seeks to document what equity centered leadership practice looks like in schools.