Susan M. Kardos is Senior Director, Strategy & Education Planning at The AVI CHAI Foundation. After facilitating a process of developing AVI CHAI’s ten-year spend-down strategy for Jewish day schools, she now oversees the implementation of the strategy.
Formerly, she was the Director of the Initiative for Day School Excellence at Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP), a $45M Jewish day school project focusing on school excellence, access, and affordability. A graduate of Brown University, Kardos received her Doctorate and Master’s degrees from Harvard University and was a post-Doctoral research fellow at Brandeis’s Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education. She is a founding member and research associate at Harvard’s Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, a comprehensive, multi-year research project addressing critical questions about the nation’s public school teaching force.
A former elementary and middle school teacher, and certified as a middle and high school principal, Kardos studies, publishes, and lectures on school organization, improvement and leadership; new teacher induction and support; education policy; and Jewish education. She has won awards for her teaching, leadership, citizenship, and scholarship and has just completed a film documentary called Keep and Remember, about the reclamation and recreation of Jewish memory in post-Soviet Ukraine.
In addition to her volunteer roles as a member of the board of her local Jewish day school and of the national Schechter Day School Network, she enjoys reading short, rhyming books with her husband and two young children.