With the Presidential election now just weeks away, TC is hosting three major events this fall that are likely to have a bearing on national education policy.

On Tuesday evening, October 21, the College will host “Education and the Next President,” a debate between Linda Darling-Hammond, education advisor to Senator Barack Obama, and Lisa Graham Keegan, education advisor to John McCain.

The event, which will be held in the Cowin Conference Center, will be moderated by TC President Susan Fuhrman. Seats will be made available by electronic RSVP. Details will be announced soon.

Darling-Hammond, who taught at Teachers College for many years, is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, where she has launched the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute and the School Redesign Network. She is an expert on issues of teaching quality, school reform and educational equity. Among her more than 200 publications is The Right to Learn, which earned the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award for 1998, and Teaching as the Learning Profession (co-edited with Gary Sykes), for which she received the National Staff Development Council’s Outstanding Book Award for 2000.

Keegan, who served for two terms in the Arizona House of Representatives and then as the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, is known in education circles as a leading advocate of charter schools (The National Review wrote that she “created the most effective charter school program in the country”), standardized testing and looser certification of teachers. At the 2008 National Republican Convention, she was a vice chairman of the GOP’s political platform committee and helped develop policy statements on education. She also spoke at the convention, during prime time, on education and disaster relief issues. In 1998 she received the Milton Friedman Foundation Award for free enterprise innovation in education. She has written numerous articles for the Hoover Institute, the Manhattan Institute and the Pioneer Institute.  

On October 22, Darling-Hammond and Joanna Duncan Poitier, New York State’s Senior Deputy Commissioner of P–16 education, will be the keynote speakers at “University-Assisted Public Schools as a Model for P–16 Education in New York State,” a working conference hosted by TC’s Office of School and Community Partnerships.

The conference will focus on the conditions for success in different models of partnership between universities and public schools; lessons from past start-ups of partnership schools; and how partnerships can inform curriculum and learning at the college level. Other speakers will include TC Trustee and Yale University faculty member James Comer; Jennifer Raab, President of Hunter College; Manuel Rivera, New York State’s Deputy Secretary for Education; and Merryl Tisch of the New York State Board of Regents.

For more information, visit www.tc.edu/oscp

And on November 17 and 18, TC’s Campaign for Educational Equity will host its fourth annual symposium, this year titled “Comprehensive Educational Equity: Overcoming the Socioeconomic Barriers to School Success.”

Speakers at the symposium will include Helen Ladd of Duke University; Geoffrey Canada, President and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone; Arne Duncan, Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools; Pedro Noguera of New York University; and from TC, faculty members Sharon Lynn Kagan, Jeannie Brooks-Gunn, Charles Basch and Equity Campaign Executive Director Michael Rebell. TC Professor Emeritus Edmund Gordon will also speak.

For more information, visit www.tcequity.org

Published Friday, Oct. 10, 2008