About Exponent

Exponent Education supports the boldest leaders in public education with the data expertise they need to drive improvement and expand opportunity for low-income students and students of color.  We are a team of consulting data engineers, analysts, and coaches working with education intermediaries and schools to build capacity for data use and generate insights at scale.

About Steve

Steve Cartwright has spent the past 15 years working with schools and systems to make better, more evidence-informed decisions with data.  Since 2018, Steve has led Exponent Education and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the fastest-improving and innovative systems in the country.

Before founding Exponent, Steve served as Vice President for Strategy and Integration at Teach For America where he supported the national organization’s strategic alignment and performance management activities and served as Chief of Staff to the Chief Strategy and Program Officer.  Before that, Steve was Chief Implementation Officer at Tembo, where he led a team of data scientists responsible for maximizing the company’s impact on the way education agencies use data and analytics to measure and drive improvements in student achievement and school quality.  There, Steve led educational research, evaluation and other data-analytic projects focusing on the longitudinal analysis of student performance data for large urban school districts, state departments of education, charter management organizations, authorizers, foundations and non-profit organizations.  Prior to joining Tembo, Steve managed the analytics portfolios of StudentsFirst and DC Public Schools, where he was a Fellow with the Strategic Data Project at the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research.  As a faculty instructor with the Strategic Data Project, Steve has trained hundreds of analysts and researchers in data visualization, program evaluation and information design.

Steve began his data career in the Urban Institute's Education Policy Center after graduating from Notre Dame with a degree in economics and Africana studies. He has been a proud resident of Washington, DC since 2007, was Board Chair of The Next Step Public Charter School, and currently serves on the board of Fonkoze USA, a sister organization to Haiti’s largest microfinance institution.