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Obama education team

By JohnL on Nov. 24, 2008.

Late last week, Barack Obama named Linda Darling-Hammond as leader of the education policy team. Who are the people serving on President-elect Obama’s transition team for labor and education? Of particular interest are the two folks who will likely have substantial influence on education plans. The team is led by Seth Harris, who was an Obama campaign worker and New York Law School faculty member; although he doesn’t have a lot of education policy experience, some of the team’s planning is likely to go through him. The lead for education is Judith A. Winston; the Obama Web site describes her in this way:

Department of Education Review Team Lead
Judith A. Winston is a consultant on education and civil rights law and policy, and co-founder of the law firm Winston Withers & Associates. She served as General Counsel and Undersecretary in the Department of Education in the Clinton Administration. Previously, she was a law professor at American University and a Deputy Director of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. She is a member of the Board of the Historical Society of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Southern Education Foundation, and the Community Technical Assistance Center.

I scrounged around for a bit more information about Ms. Winston; here’s what I found:

• DoE General Council,
• Undersecretary,
• education and administrative law consultant,
• a bio-scketch for NPR;
• A resume through 2001 is available.
• Here’s a search via Google.

To learn more about Professor Darling-Hammond, see her Stanford University bio and resume, a Wikipedia page, and testimony regarding NCLB; note that, being html, the content of some of these is fungible.

The direction for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services is, of course, of particular interest to professionals in special education. There are difficult issues relating to funding, teacher preparation, balancing authority between parents and schools, identification of students with disabilities, the interface between IDEA and other federal initiatives (e.g., the up-coming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), promoting evidence-based practice, coordination between schools and other agencies for students with disabilities that span environments, graduation rates for students with disabilities, and etc. I find it hard to read any of the leaves in this tea, but I shall be watching.

Other members of education and labor team are Michael Camuñez, Deborah Jospin, Shirley Sagawa, Thomas A. Kochan, Nancy E. Peace, Phyllis Segal, Joseph Swerdzewski, Edward Montgomery, Cynthia Estlund, Linda A. Puchala, and Richard Huberman. The Obama transition team has a Web page about the members and their duties.

Lots of the folks who are serving on the transition team have accounts on Facebook, Linkedin, Zoominfo, and similar sites.

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