Linda Darling-Hammond, President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor
of Education Emeritus at Stanford University where she founded the Stanford Center
for Opportunity Policy in Education and served as the faculty sponsor of the Stanford
Teacher Education Program, which she helped to redesign. Darling-Hammond is past president
of the American Educational Research Association and recipient of its awards for Distinguished
Contributions to Research, Lifetime Achievement, and Research-to-Policy. She is also
a member of the American Association of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy
of Education. From 1994–2001, she was executive director of the National Commission
on Teaching and America’s Future, whose 1996 report What Matters Most: Teaching for
America’s Future was named one of the most influential reports affecting U.S. education
in that decade. In 2006, Darling-Hammond was named one of the nation’s ten most influential
people affecting educational policy. In 2008, she served as the leader of President
Barack Obama’s education policy transition team. Darling-Hammond began her career
as a public school teacher. She served as Director of the RAND Corporation’s education
program and as an endowed professor at Columbia University, Teachers College. She
has consulted widely with federal, state and local officials and educators on strategies
for improving education policies and practices. Among her more than 500 publications
are a number of award-winning books, including The Right to Learn, Teaching as the
Learning Profession, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World and The Flat World and
Education.