Paul W. Bennett, Ed. D. (OISE/Toronto) is Founding Director of the Schoolhouse Institute and Adjunct Professor of Education at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
After a professional career spanning three decades in Canadian K-12 education, Paul is now an author, policy analyst and agent provocateur. In the world of education reform, he is best known in Nova Scotia as a Co-Founder of the Nova Scotia Small Schools Initiative (May 2012). He authored the 2012 NSSSI brief, Schools at the Centre: A Revitalization Strategy for Rural Communities, calling for a moratorium on school closures and introduced the concept of Community Hub Schools here in Nova Scotia.
Dr. Bennett has written or co-authored eight books. His three most recent books are The Grammar School: Striving for Excellence in a Public School World (2009), and Vanishing Schools, Threatened Communities; The Contested Schoolhouse in Maritime Canada, 1850 -2010 (2011), and The Last Stand: Schools, Communities and the Future of Rural Nova Scotia (2013). He produces regular columns on education issues for The Chronicle Herald and serves as a policy research analyst with two think tanks, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) and the Northern Policy Institute, based in Thunder Bay, Ontario.