Kurt Hatch and the Idea That Education Starts With Love

Long before Dr. Kurt Hatch held a doctorate or a faculty title, he was a kid spending summers at Tacoma's Al Davies Boys and Girls Club. He does not point to that time as the moment he decided to work in schools. But it is where he first watched adults build trust with kids who did not automatically hand it over, a pattern he would spend a career studying from the inside.

Hatch grew up between Seattle and University Place, Washington, and went on to study history at Washington State University. History, he says, taught him to read systems before he ever stepped into one professionally. "You start to notice that institutions rarely change because someone wrote a better policy," he says. "They change because enough people inside them decide to act differently."

A first-grade classroom gave the idea a name

In 1994, Hatch started his career as a student teacher in a first-grade classroom in Tacoma Public Schools. His mentor there, Cindy Harkness, became the person who first showed him what it meant to center a classroom on care rather than control.

That early lesson stayed with him. Years later, reading bell hooks alongside Paulo Freire, Gandhi and Tolstoy gave him language for something Harkness had modeled without naming it. Hatch now describes his guiding belief plainly: "Education must be centered on a love ethic." It is the idea that shows up in nearly every role he has taken since, from classroom teacher to professor.

Carrying the idea into new buildings, and a new country

Hatch's teaching took him beyond Tacoma, including a stretch teaching in Shanghai, China. Working in a different country, with different expectations of students and teachers, tested whether his approach to education could travel. "A love ethic isn't a curriculum," he says. "It has to be rebuilt in every room, with every group of kids, in whatever context you're standing in."

Back in Washington, he moved into school leadership as an assistant principal in the Kent School District, then as a principal in the University Place School District and later North Thurston School District. Each move changed the scale of the problem he was solving. As a teacher, he answered to a classroom. As a principal, he answered to a building, its staff, and the families who trusted him with their kids.

From one building to a whole state

Hatch eventually left the principal's office for a role as Associate Director of the Association of Washington School Principals. The shift meant trading daily contact with one school for work that touched districts across the state: policy analysis, advocacy, and coalitions aimed at bringing legislative change.

It is also where his interest in systems leadership sharpened into something more deliberate. He had spent years watching individual principals try to build equitable, inclusive schools one decision at a time. At the state level, he saw how much of that work depended on policy and funding decisions made far from any classroom. "You start to see the pressure points," he says, "the gaps between what gets decided in a policy room and what's actually possible for a teacher on a Tuesday morning."

Now he teaches the idea itself

Hatch is the former Faculty Director of the Educational Administration program and Professor of Practice in the School of Education at the University of Washington Tacoma. He has also served as a Core Faculty member of the UW School Mental Health Research Assessment and Training Center and as Co-Principal Investigator of the Helping Educational Leaders Mobilize Evidence research project.

Through his own company, Leadership Solutions, he continues the advocacy and professional learning work he started at the state level, now focused on systems leadership, equity, and school behavioral and mental health.

Looking back across teaching, the principal's office, state advocacy, and graduate education, Hatch sees one line connecting it all. "Every role just gave me a different lever to pull on the same idea," he says. "Whether I was in a first-grade classroom or a statehouse hallway, the question was always whether kids could show up as themselves and still belong."

In addition to Leadership Solutions, Hatch enjoys volunteering with the Special Olympics and serving part-time with the Families Unlimited Network, work he describes as an extension of his career: the same belief, applied in a different setting.