Cassandra J. McGraw, Ed.M.

Cassandra McGraw is the President and CEO of Powerhouse Collective, an education strategy organization that partners with schools, districts, families, state agencies, and organizations to strengthen learning outcomes across the P–12 continuum through family and community engagement. With 17 years of experience as a classroom teacher, school leader, coach, and senior leader across community-based, philanthropic, and nonprofit organizations, she designs and leads education strategies that drive measurable outcomes for children, families, and communities.

Cassandra has led local, state, and national educational improvement initiatives across urban, rural, remote, and Indigenous communities through evidence-based family literacy, family and community engagement, and family leadership strategies. Through her work with the Flamboyan Foundation, she co-developed the Family Engagement Assessment Tool that currently serves as a free and publicly accessible contribution for schools and districts. Her recent capacity-building work has expanded access to high-quality play-based early learning in Kentucky, Nebraska, Colorado, California, Alabama, and Texas through cross-sector partnerships with state agencies, philanthropic organizations, libraries, and early learning providers. In K-12 settings, she also led the expansion of intergenerational learning and family-school partnerships tied to digital literacy through partnerships with school districts, state education agencies, industry, libraries, and community-based organizations. These efforts have contributed to increased attendance, strengthened family support for learning at home, expanded digital literacy for families, students, and educators, and deeper school-family partnerships linked to academic outcomes.

Driven by the belief that every family and community is a powerhouse of brilliance, leadership, and possibility, Cassandra advances family and community engagement through Powerhouse Collective as core infrastructure for transformative learning outcomes. Her work positions family engagement as the strategy that more deeply connects foundational and applied literacies to college, career, and life readiness. She helps schools and districts design engagement systems with families to produce sustainable and measurable outcomes for children and youth.

Cassandra is a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University, holds a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education from the University of Central Florida with a focus on Reading and Multilingual Learning, a Master of Education in Education Leadership from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a post-graduate certificate from the Perrone-Sizer Institute for Creative Leadership at Boston University, and is a current doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins University Graduate School of Education.