Ethan Ake-Little has spent his career in the middle of decisions that directly affect people’s working lives. Some of those decisions determine who gets hired. Others influence pay, benefits, or job security.
Today, he works in senior human resources roles in Pennsylvania while pursuing a law degree at Temple University Beasley School of Law, attending classes several nights a week.
Balancing a full-time leadership role with law school has forced Ake-Little to be intentional about his time. He is not naturally a morning person, so rather than rushing himself to be productive right away, he uses his commute as a transition. He might listen to music, call a family member, or put on an audiobook or history podcast.
“Those quiet routines help me shift mindsets,” he explained. “They give my mind the space to reset before a day that requires both analytical focus and interpersonal engagement.”
Once he arrives at work, Ake-Little is most productive when meetings are all grouped together. That’s when he pays close attention to what people are saying, looking for patterns in conversations and trying to understand where different viewpoints are coming from.
Later in the day, he uses those insights to write, make decisions, or think through longer-term strategy. With work, law school, and personal commitments all competing for his attention, Ake-Little has learned that structure doesn’t limit him. Instead, it allows him to show up fully wherever he’s needed.
Seeing Inequality Up Close
Ake-Little’s career began in the classroom, where his early teaching experiences offered a firsthand look at how institutional decisions play out on a daily basis.
His first position was at the Charter High School for Architecture and Design, a low-income public school in the heart of Philadelphia, where he taught biology. He later taught the same subject at The Agnes Irwin School, an independent preparatory school in the suburbs.
Teaching in both settings made the gap in resources impossible to ignore, pushing him to ask deeper questions. How much of a student’s experience was shaped by the classroom, and how much by decisions made elsewhere? Who determined what resources were available, and how were they distributed across schools?
Ake-Little found himself increasingly drawn toward work outside the classroom and closer to where those decisions were being made. Eventually, he made his way into administration, serving as Assistant Director of STEM Academies for the School District of Philadelphia.
There, he helped manage a multi-school STEM pilot program supported by a 10-year, $10 million grant from GlaxoSmithKline. The initiative expanded science and technology programming across several schools, showing how district-level decisions could dramatically improve opportunity.
It was then that Ake-Little began to see how closely student outcomes, educator support, and workforce systems were intertwined.
Consensus With Constraints
While completing doctoral work at Temple University, Ake-Little moved into labor advocacy, serving as President of the Temple University Graduate Students Association, AFT Local #6290.
In that role, he represented more than 800 graduate instructors and researchers across a wide range of departments. From 2018 to 2022, he led the union’s bargaining team, despite none of its members having prior contract negotiation experience.
“We were graduate students from vastly different disciplines trying to navigate an extremely technical, high-stakes process,” Ake-Little said. “We had to learn labor law, healthcare projections, institutional finance, and bargaining strategy in real time, often at the same time.”
The team was also responsible for representing a large and diverse group of peers whose priorities often conflicted. For some members, healthcare was the most urgent concern. Others focused on pay, workload, or long-term job security.
Differences between departments added another layer of complexity. Every issue mattered, but no agreement could fully address every concern.
“What allowed us to succeed was humility and rigor,” Ake-Little said. “We asked questions constantly, did more research than we thought possible, and learned to really listen to each other and to our members.”
The experience taught him that fairness isn’t just about the end result. It’s also about whether people feel heard, informed, and respected as decisions are made.
“That experience became the foundation of my leadership style,” he said. “Collaborative, analytical, and rooted in the belief that even the most complex problems can be solved when people are willing to learn together.”
Resisting Easy Conclusions
As Ake-Little moved deeper into roles where decisions carried long-term consequences, he wanted more than instinct to guide him. Disputes over compensation, retention, and fairness were common, but he believed data could help cut through questions that felt subjective.
That led him back to Temple University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Urban Education and worked as a Research Assistant. His work focused on large-scale quantitative analysis, building statistical models from longitudinal data to identify trends in education systems.
For his dissertation, Ake-Little taught himself to program in R so he could construct econometric models examining how compensation affected teacher retention statewide. The process was demanding and largely self-directed, but it fundamentally changed his approach to solving complex problems.
His dissertation later earned finalist recognition from the American Educational Research Association. Research gave him a way to turn complexity into strategy and ground his decisions in evidence rather than assumption.
Policies That Touch Real Lives
After years in labor advocacy, Ethan Ake-Little stepped into senior management roles within public school districts, serving as Director of Human Resources for the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District and later the Southern Lehigh School District. The transition placed him on the other side of decisions he had once negotiated from the outside.
Soon, he realized that human resources were far more than paperwork or compliance. His responsibilities included managing multi-million-dollar personnel budgets, developing compensation plans for administrators and support staff, and overseeing employee benefits through a countywide health insurance consortium.
Every decision required balancing policy, budget constraints, and the real-world impact on employees.
His work also extended beyond traditional HR functions. Collaborating with curriculum directors, Ake-Little helped redesign teacher onboarding programs and evaluation tools, linking staff performance to student outcomes. In doing so, he made human resources part of the instructional conversation rather than a separate administrative function.
An Inevitable Next Step
Ake-Little’s decision to pursue a law degree grew naturally out of his work. Now a student at Temple University Beasley School of Law, he’s building on years of experience in labor relations, policy, and the ethical challenges of human resources.
Along the way, two mentors have been especially influential. Christopher McGinley, a former superintendent and current professor, has worked closely with Ake-Little for more than a decade, emphasizing ethical leadership and evidence-based judgment.
Jeffrey Sultanik, one of Pennsylvania’s leading education attorneys, helped him see how the law can support institutions when it’s applied thoughtfully. Together, those relationships strengthened Ake-Little’s belief that law can serve as a bridge between policy and people.
Still, not every lesson came from positive examples. One of the most difficult jobs he held involved working under a supervisor who relied on fear over trust.
“He used HR as a punitive tool, a ‘gotcha’ mechanism that undermined trust and eroded morale,” Ake-Little said. “It was painful to watch talented colleagues be treated as liabilities, and even more painful to recognize the ethical conflicts it created.”
That experience clarified the kind of leader he never wanted to become. It also reinforced his belief that rules should exist to protect people, not be turned into tools that work against them.
Ready for the Work Ahead
Ethan Ake-Little credits much of his growth to a willingness to step into the unknown, along with a habit of staying curious and disciplined. Rather than following a straight path, he has moved between fields with intention, taking on roles that challenged him to understand how decisions are made and how they affect the people living with their consequences.
“Nearly every pivotal moment in my career, from leaving medicine to becoming a teacher, to becoming a district-level HR executive, and now pursuing law, emerged from saying ‘yes’ to opportunities that others might have seen as detours,” he explained.
Whether he’s reading across global perspectives, following developments in Data Analytics and AI governance, or comparing how different institutions approach the same problems, Ake-Little treats learning as a constant responsibility. Understanding how systems work at scale, he believes, makes it easier to lead fairly at the individual level.
Looking ahead, he sees his career not as a series of pivots, but as cumulative preparation. Each role has added depth to how he understands power, policy, and people, reinforcing the importance of process as much as outcome.
“You do not discover your purpose once,” he said. “You refine it continuously.”
Taken together, his work points toward a clear goal: helping organizations make decisions that are legally sound, data-informed, and ethical in practice. For Ake-Little, workplace fairness is not an abstract idea, but something built deliberately, one thoughtful decision at a time.
