Renowned Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond is launching a new think tank aimed at shaping education policies nationwide.
With offices in Palo Alto, Calif., and Washington, the new Learning Policy Institute will seek to link research and policy, two worlds that are too often disconnected, Darling-Hammond said.
"It is time to get serious about how to support and enable our education system to respond to the massive changes in learning that some other nation's systems have been addressing more systemically, with much better results, over the last two decades," Darling-Hammond wrote in the Huffington Post on Thursday.
A former teacher, Darling-Hammond has testified often before Congress and was an adviser to Barack Obama during his 2008 campaign and transition to the presidency. But she has since been critical of the administration’s education policies, particularly the push to judge schools and teachers based on standardized tests that she argues fail to adequately measure students’ critical thinking and deeper learning.
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She is seen as an ally of the teachers’ unions, but in announcing her new think tank, Darling-Hammond emphasized that it will be an independent advocate for policies shown by research to improve learning for children.
“We will follow the evidence wherever it leads, and will work with those of any political affiliation or point of view who share that commitment,” she wrote.
Darling-Hammond will serve as the Institute’s president and chief executive. Now an emeritus professor at Stanford, she will continue to teach part-time at its graduate school of education. The executive director is Patrick M. Shields, who previously led education work at SRI International, a nonprofit independent research outfit headquartered in Silicon Valley.
The Learning Policy Institute will conduct its own research and will synthesize and communicate the work of others. It has an initial budget of $5 million and expects to hire between 30 and 50 staff members, according to EdSource, a Web site for California education news.
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Funders include the San Francisco-based Sandler Foundation, as well as the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Ford Foundation, the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stuart Foundation.
The organization will focus on research to inform “pressing policy questions” at the local, state and federal levels, according to Darling-Hammond.
She wrote Thursday that the nation’s public schools must be transformed into a system that asks children to think deeply and critically, and that assesses them “authentically” — i.e., not with multiple-choice tests.
Darling-Hammond — who once spoke of the nation's "aggressive neglect" of its children — has also long urged policymakers to pay more attention to equity in public schools and to the deepening problem of child poverty in America. She said those will continue to be important themes for the Learning Policy Institute.
“Today, the U.S. system provides the most unequal educational inputs and outcomes in the industrialized world,” she wrote in the Huffington Post. “Inequality is the single most fundamental reason for our country’s lackluster performance.”
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