Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Stanford University; Co Director Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, and Co-Director School Redesign Network
Nominated By: Mary B. Herrmann
Darling-Hammond holds a B.A. from Yale University and a Ed.D in Urban Education from Temple University. Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond has dedicated her life’s work to the pursuit of excellence and equity for all children. Her focus on effective instruction has sparked important conversations about what it takes to reform education. As she states so eloquently in her book, The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work,”Bureaucratic solutions to problems of practice will always fail because effective teaching is not routine, students are not passive, and questions of practice are not simple, predictable, or standardized. Consequently, instructional decisions cannot be formulated on high then packaged and handed down to teachers.”
Richard Riley, former U.S. Secretary of Education states the following: Linda Darling-Hammond asserts that “the United States needs to establish a purposeful, equitable education system that moves beyond a collection of disparate and shifting reform initiatives, only occasionally related to what we know about teaching and learning, to a thoughtful, well-organized, and well-supported set of policies that will enable all students to learn how to learn, create, and invent the new world they are entering.” Darling-Hammond in her latest book, The Flat World and Education: How America’s commitment to equity will determine our future, has given us a roadmap for educational excellence for all children in today’s flat world, by placing of the teacher front and center.
