Make it plain.

Educator, Advocate, Leader.

Nathan Dudley, Ed.D. Bio

Nate Dudley is a native of inner-city St. Louis and a graduate of Yale University where he played football and majored in history with a focus on Latin America. Currently he worked with 27 high schools in the South Bronx, leading principals and teacher teams to turn around many of the lowest performing schools in New York. Prior to this, Nate led an academic and operational support team for 30 middle and high schools throughout NYC. Throughout his career as a New York City public school administrator, principal, teacher, and as a television producer and community organizer, Nate has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to drive innovative solutions for improving equity and opportunity for all communities. His trilingual background, extensive international travels and work with a wide variety of communities give Nate a unique perspective, and it is through this intersectional lens that Nate views all of his career. 

After college, Nate focused on community development. He taught and coached at a community center in Ceilấndia, Brazil, taught bi-lingual high school history in Chicago, then worked on Central American issue-related organizing campaigns. After studying at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, Nate received his M.A. in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He produced news and sports reports for TV-Globo of Brazil, then became vice-president for Pan American Sports Marketing, where he utilized his project management and language skills to organize international basketball tournaments throughout the Americas, including producing the original USA Dream Team games in 1992. Nate began teaching high school in NYC in 1996, then completed his administrative training in 2003. Nate’s doctoral work was done at Seton Hall University where  his dissertation focused on small high school graduation rates. 

Nate’s mission has always been to connect his students’ learning with the real world. In 2003 Nate became the Founding Principal of the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a new small maritime public high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The school’s mission is to engage students by using New York City’s greatest resource, its harbor, as a classroom for students to develop college readiness, career and technical skills (CTE), and environmental stewardship. To fulfill these goals, Nate also helped create the Billion Oyster Project, a 501c3, and he coordinated the school’s work with more than 60 environmental, educational, and community partners. In 2010 Nate moved the Harbor School from Bushwick to its current home on Governors Island, off the tip of Manhattan. The Harbor School’s CTE programs support the Billion Oyster Project to restore the water quality of New York Harbor by putting a billion oysters in the NY Harbor by 2035. Harbor School and BOP have become a national model for student-run restoration projects. Nate is also working with a planning team to create Harbor Schools in port cities around the United States.