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TC Hosts Education Debate Between Obama and McCain Advisors
On Tuesday, October 21st, at 7 pm, Teachers College will host "Education and the Next President," a debate between Linda Darling-Hammond (right side of image), education advisor to Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama, and Lisa Graham Keegan (left side of image), education advisor to Republican nominee John McCain.
TC President Susan Fuhrman will moderate the debate, which will take place in the College's 600-seat Cowin Conference Center. The audience will consist primarily of Teachers College faculty, students and staff. The event will be live-streamed by Education Week & edweek.org at http://www.edweek.org/go/tcdebate, and by Teachers College at www.tc.edu/edadvisorsdebate. Both Education Week and Teachers College will archive the Webcast of the debate. The Education Week Webcast is being supported by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP).
Linda Darling-Hammond 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 a leading expert on school reform, teacher quality and educational equity. Darling-Hammond, who taught for many years at Teachers College before accepting a position at Stanford, is the author of 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.
Lisa Graham Keegan is a national leader in the area of education reform and accountability. Serving as Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction after two terms in the Arizona State Legislature, she won praise from The National Review for creating "the most effective charter school program in the country." At the 2008 National Republican Convention, Keegan was vice chairman of the GOP's political platform committee, and also spoke during prime time on education and disaster relief issues. The author of numerous articles for the Hoover Institute, the Manhattan Institute and the Pioneer Institute, Keegan received the 1998 Milton Friedman Foundation Award for free enterprise innovation in education.
Susan Fuhrman is a nationally known expert on education policy -- particularly state education standards -- and on university-public school partnerships. As Dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, she led the creation of a new university-assisted K-8 public school in West Philadelphia, and since assuming the presidency of Teachers College in 2008 has secured more than $8 million in funding to create partnerships between the College and local public schools, and also created new partnerships with education ministries and schools in India, Jordan, the Dominican Republic and other countries. Fuhrman also is the founding director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), the nation's first federally funded education policy center.
Fuhrman has publicly called for the Presidential candidates to focus greater attention upon education issues.
"If we're serious about overcoming entrenched racial attitudes and barriers, let's recognize how important education is to that conversation," she wrote in Education Week earlier this year, adding that the candidates must address students' lack of equal access to high-quality teachers, the need for expanded time spent on learning, and ways of creating a rich and broad curriculum for all students.
Published Friday, Oct. 24, 2008