Garth Larson, director of learning for the Winneconne Community School District, was among the first cohort of seven to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh with a doctorate in education in January 2018.

Larson maintains that the Ed.D. program not only benefits individual candidates on a personal level but also the school districts and the Wisconsin educational system as a whole. His dissertation research focused on “An Evaluation of Standards-Based Grading and Reporting in Wisconsin High Schools” where he identified the key ways high schools were effectively utilizing standards-based grading to the advantage of students and looked for the opportunities for other schools to learn from the high performing schools.