Mohammed Choudhury is the former state superintendent of schools at the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE). There, he rebuilt MSDE to implement the state’s landmark K-12 legislation, known as the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, and strengthened MSDE staffing infrastructure, centering his team’s work on comprehensive educational equity. In addition, Choudhury launched the Maryland Leads initiative, which incentivizes districts to adopt high-leverage, evidence-based strategies; the Maryland Works initiative, which helps districts expand apprenticeships that give young people paid experience in local, high-demand jobs; and the Maryland Tutoring Corps, which supports high-quality, school-day tutoring. During Choudhury’s tenure, student proficiency in reading improved to the highest level Maryland has seen in nearly a decade.
Prior to Maryland, Choudhury was chief innovation officer at the San Antonio Independent School District in Texas. In that capacity, he was responsible for incubating and scaling high-leverage school design and turnaround initiatives aimed at producing the greatest impact on student achievement.
Before his work in San Antonio, Choudhury was interim chief and founding director of the Office of Transformation and Innovation at the Dallas Independent School District in Texas. He spearheaded the district’s Public School Choice initiative. The program redesigned existing neighborhood campuses and created new open-enrollment school models to expand high-quality options for all students, regardless of their academic abilities or geographic constraints. Choudhury previously served in teacher leadership roles developing and operationalizing successful school turnaround and change-management initiatives within the Los Angeles Unified School District. He was also a Teach Plus teaching policy fellow and an Education Pioneers fellow.
Choudhury began his career in education as a middle school teacher in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Central Los Angeles. He is a NextGen Network leader at the Pahara-Aspen Institute. He holds a master’s in urban schooling from the Teacher Education Program at the University of California, Los Angeles and was a member of the fourth cohort of the Future Chiefs program.
