Davidson Teacher Selected for Harvard's Opportunity Fellows Teacher Fellowship
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Professor Raj Chetty, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and the Director of Opportunity Insights, Andrew Housiaux, Strategic Advisor for Educational Partnerships at Opportunity Insights, and Opportunity Insights Advisory Board and Teaching Fellows Teacher Cohort
Dr. Lucretia Carter Berry Selected for Harvard Opportunity Fellows Teacher Fellowship
Dr. Lucretia Carter Berry, a teacher at Community School of Davidson (CSD) and founder of Brownicity, a nonprofit focused on intercultural fluency, has been selected for the 2026-2027 Opportunity Fellows Teacher Fellowship through Opportunity Insights (OI) at Harvard University.
The fellowship is a year-long research partnership between OI and a small group of teachers chosen from across the country. Berry's cohort attended an in-person workshop at Harvard from July 20-23, and she will now bring OI's economic mobility research into her classroom and work with OI staff throughout the school year to measure the impact on her students. The fellowship runs through June 2027.
Berry teaches EmpowerED: Self, Systems & Solutions, a high school elective at CSD that examines the systems that shape opportunity through a four-phase structure: Foundations, Investigation, Action, and Presentation. Through the fellowship, she plans to build new units that pair OI's Opportunity Atlas data with the national and local policies and practices that have shaped opportunity over time, giving students a way to connect that history to present-day patterns in their own zip codes.
At the workshop, Berry presented "Which Side of the Tracks," a lesson she developed to show how large-scale datasets like the Opportunity Atlas can be integrated directly into classroom instruction. In it, students compare town-wide economic mobility data for Davidson against outcomes in West Davidson, then trace that gap to specific streets and buildings documented in the 2009 National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Davidson Historic District.
"I spent four days with brilliant, creative educators from across the country, and I was reminded that this work deserves to be seen and celebrated," said Berry. "This fellowship lets me bring real economic mobility data into EmpowerED, so my students aren't just studying opportunity gaps through history and story. They're learning to read data, question it, and use it to propose real solutions to the systems they're learning to name. Data literacy is becoming as essential as reading literacy, and my students deserve that skill built into a class that already asks them to think critically about the world."
Beyond her classroom at CSD, Berry is the founder of Brownicity, a nonprofit that designs education to build capacity for intercultural fluency, working with schools, businesses, and community groups. Materials developed through the fellowship are expected to reach that wider network of educators as well as CSD students.
About Community School of Davidson
Located in Davidson, North Carolina, Community School of Davidson serves grades K-12 with a mission to use the principles of The Basic School to provide an optimal, inclusive learning environment where every student succeeds based on individual aptitudes and interests.
