Rebecca Winthrop is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. Her research focuses on education globally, with special attention to the skills young people need to thrive in work, life, and as constructive citizens, which has gained increasing importance as education and work is transformed by AI.

Winthrop works to promote quality and relevant education, including exploring how education innovations and family and community engagement can be harnessed to leapfrog progress, particularly for the most marginalised children and youth. She advises governments, international institutions, foundations, civil society organisations, and corporations on education issues. 

She leads the Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education. The task force is made up of education leaders and artificial intelligence experts from across government, multilateral institutions, civil society, teacher organisations, philanthropy, business and grassroots student and family networks.  The goal of the task force is to help ensure generative AI can be harnessed to transform education for the better by unlocking every young person’s full potential. To do this, the task force hasconducted a pre-mortem on AI and education across 50 countries to anticipate potential negative consequences of generative AI in education in order to mitigate them and optimise AI’s benefits.

Winthrop also founded the global Family Engagement in Education Network. She has served as the chair of the UN Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group, helping to frame an education vision that focuses on access, quality, and global citizenship. With UNESCO Institute of Statistics, she co-led the Learning Metrics Task Force that involved inputs from education professionals in over 100 countries to identify how to measure what matters in education systems. She has been a member of numerous other global education initiatives including the G-20 Education Task Force, the Mastercard Foundation’s Youth Learning Advisory Committee, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils on education, and an education adviser to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Winthrop has authored numerous articles, reports, books, and book chapters, including most recently The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better with her co-author, award-winning journalist Jenny Anderson. The book reveals how the majority of teenagers are disengaged from school, simultaneously bored and overwhelmed. This is harming both their learning and their mental health. It explores explore why so many children lose their love of learning in adolescence, and what parents, teachers and education systems can do about it in an age of rapidly expanding AI.

Her work has been featured in the BBC, ABC News, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time Ideas, NPR, the Economist, the Financial Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg News, Glamour, and CSPAN, among others.

Winthrop was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Schools Summit 2025 and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from her alma mater, Teachers College, Columbia University.