Cindy Ward, EdD, is the Founder and Managing Director of ONWARD Education Consulting, where she partners with Colorado schools and districts on multi-year systems redesign to strengthen improvement efforts. She earned her doctorate in Education System Improvement Science from Clemson University, with a research focus on rural district improvement and the use of boundary infrastructure as an organizing mechanism in rural settings.
Cindy’s career spans the classroom, school, district, and state levels, with a consistent focus on schools and districts serving students from poverty and marginalized communities. She began as a special education teacher on the Navajo Nation before moving through roles as teacher, instructional coach, assistant principal, principal, and curriculum specialist in the Denver area. As a member of the Colorado Department of Education’s School and District Transformation Team, she led the design of Colorado’s School and District Conditions for Dramatic Improvement, evidence-based frameworks that guided SEA-led improvement statewide. She later led the Turnaround Learning Academy, CDE’s most intensive improvement partnership, and served as the state’s liaison bringing a systems lens to statewide implementation of Results Driven Accountability in special education.
Cindy’s expertise sits at the intersection of research, practice, and system design, grounded in the conviction that durable improvement takes root when the people closest to students have the evidence, tools, and organizational conditions to transform the systems they work within.