Brendan Quinn

Brendan is an education policy researcher and advocate, he is motivated by a deep belief in educational equity that was shaped by his variety of experiences as both a student and teacher. Brendan has been at E4E since 2019, first as an organizer with E4E-New York, where he traversed the schools of the five boroughs, connecting with thousands of teachers about how to improve their jobs and their students’ experiences. He now serves in a national policy role, crafting teacher surveys, researching policies and campaign opportunities, and writing reports to bolster the advocacy efforts of E4E’s local chapters.

Brendan studied history and Spanish at the State University of New York at New Paltz and got his start in education as an English teacher at a Catholic school in Barcelona, Spain. He was impressed by the closeness and affection of the school’s community, by the multilingual instruction (Catalan, Spanish, and English), and by the staffing/scheduling structure that was quite distinct from American classrooms. After a year abroad, he spent two years teaching third grade at a charter school in the South Bronx.

Brendan was attracted to E4E because he was dissatisfied with the efforts in New York City educational movements to address student achievement gaps without identifying or seeking to change the root causes of the inequities he experienced in the public school system.