Education policy · program design · compliance
Programs that work in practice and hold up on paper.
ED Consultants is an independent, pro bono practice serving under-funded schools, school systems, colleges and correctional programs. We help them build education programs that meet the law they operate under and the people they serve. Policy drafted to the statute. Curriculum built to the standard. Structures that survive the audit and the Monday morning.
Services
Six lines of work, one standard: the program must be defensible to the regulator and useful to the student.
Correctional education and Pell-funded prison programs
Prison Education Program design and approval, Title IV compliance, oversight-entity readiness, reentry pathways and credential stacking for colleges and departments of corrections.
School discipline, safety and student-intervention law
Implementation audits of state discipline statutes, behavioral-intervention and reentry procedures, teacher-protection provisions, and the training that makes them operate as written.
Board of education policy writing
Policy manuals drafted and reconciled to current statute and state board rule, with revision histories, implementation procedures and the forms employees actually need.
Program development and school structure
New programs, alternative settings, scheduling and staffing models, and the governance structure that keeps them running after the launch team moves on.
Curriculum development
Standards-aligned curriculum for adult, secondary and postsecondary settings, including literacy, testing and credential-bearing programs for nontraditional learners.
Research, evaluation and grants
Program evaluation, quantitative analysis for grant applications and reporting, and scholarly or public writing on education, institutions and liberty.
Approach
Every engagement runs the same four steps, because the law and the classroom both reward the same discipline.
Read the governing law
Statute, rule and policy, in that order. Most program failures are a gap between the three.
Map what actually happens
Interviews, records and observation. The procedure on paper and the procedure in the building are rarely the same document.
Build to both
Policy, curriculum or structure written so a regulator can trace it and a teacher can use it before class.
Evaluate and revise
Measures set at the start, reviewed on a schedule, and a plan that changes when the data says it should.
About
Two decades inside the institutions this work is written for.
Mark A. Morgan has spent nearly twenty years in federal correctional education as a classroom teacher, testing and literacy coordinator, supervisor of education, and national program specialist for Pell-funded postsecondary programs. He has led an education department of eighteen staff, served as an acting associate warden, and now works on program oversight, regulatory compliance and policy at the national level.
Before corrections he administered federally funded workforce and tutoring programs across four West Virginia counties and produced the analysis behind a successful seven-figure federal education grant. He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Theory and Practice from West Virginia University, where he has taught graduate courses in educational methodology and philosophy, and his scholarship examines how institutions sustain or diminish the educational opportunity they are built to provide.
He consults in his personal capacity and without fee. Nothing on this site represents the views of any employer.
Writing
Scholarship and public writing on education, institutions and liberty.
Education and Liberty
A philosophical treatise on liberty as a felt horizon in education, developed from doctoral work at West Virginia University and available through WVU Libraries.
Conference papers
Work for the American Educational Research Association on fragmentation as inheritance and reading as disclosure, drawn from research on learning-difference recognition in rural West Virginia.
Policy analysis
Implementation reviews of state education statutes, written for the officials responsible for carrying them out and the educators who must live under them.
Contact
Start with the problem. The work is pro bono, and under-funded schools and systems come first.
Describe the program, the policy or the question, and the deadline if there is one. ED Consultants is an independent, unpaid public-interest practice that specializes in assisting under-funded schools and school systems; engagements are accepted on need and time available.