Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is currently Charles E. Ducommun professor of education at Stanford University where she founded and oversees the School Redesign Network. The program works across the nation to transform schools to teach 21st century skills and support student success through innovations in district and school redesign, as well as in curriculum, teaching, and assessment. She also founded and co-directs the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, which conducts research and policy analysis on issues affecting educational equity and opportunity.

Darling-Hammond’s research and policy work have focused on issues of school reform, teaching quality, and educational equity at the federal, state, and local levels. She is a former president of the American Educational Research Association and member of the National Academy of Education. Her research, teaching and policy work focus on issues of school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity. From 1994-2001, she served as executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a blue-ribbon panel whose 1996 report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future, led to sweeping policy changes affecting teaching and teacher education. In 2006, this report was named one of the most influential affecting U.S. education and Darling-Hammond was named one of the nation’s ten most influential people affecting educational policy over the last decade. In 2008-09, she headed President Barack Obama’s education policy transition team.

Among Darling-Hammond’s more than 300 publications are Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and be Able to Do (with John Bransford, for the National Academy of Education, winner of the Pomeroy Award from AACTE), Powerful Teacher Education: Lessons from Exemplary Programs (Jossey-Bass: 2006); Teaching as the Learning Profession (Jossey-Bass: 1999) (co-edited with Gary Sykes), which received the National Staff Development Council’s Outstanding Book Award for 2000; and The Right to Learn, recipient of the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award for 1998.

Darling-Hammond received her B.A. (magna cum laude) from Yale University in 1973, and her Ed.D. in urban education (with highest distinction) from Temple University in 1978. She holds honorary degrees from many universities in the U.S. and abroad, and has received numerous awards for her research contributions.

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