Laura Chapman Reviews the Biden Transition Team for Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Laura Chapman Reviews the Biden Transition Team for Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Laura Chapman Reviews the Biden Transition Team for Education

The Biden campaign released the names of those who will serve on transition teams. Our reader, retired arts educator Laura Chapman, reviewed the members of the education transition team. According to the campaign (cited in Valerie Strauss’s article), the transition team will identify DeVos regulations that should be reversed, but the team will not set policy or staff. Chapman, like many readers of this blog, believes that President Obama’s Race to the Top was profoundly wrong because of its overemphasis on standardized testing (a fact acknowledged even by President Obama) and its advocacy for charter schools and evaluation of teachers by the test scores of their students. Biden promised a new vision and fresh policies for K-12 education, not more of the same failed policies.

Chapman writes:

Biden-Harris Transition teams are selected to review specific agencies. Volunteers are listed only by their “most recent employment.” Those serving in education CONTINUE READING: Laura Chapman Reviews the Biden Transition Team for Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is the Right Choice to Lead the Education Transition Team | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is the Right Choice to Lead the Education Transition Team | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is the Right Choice to Lead the Education Transition Team

The Schott Foundation applauds President-elect Biden's selection of Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond to lead the Department of Education transition team. Dr. Darling-Hammond is a highly-qualified leader who has a proven track record of success working with public schools, parents, educators and youth to provide all students a high quality education. As a professor at Stanford, founder of the Learning Policy Institute, and president of the California State Board of Education, her work has always been informed by a passion to tackle the root causes of racial and class inequities in public education. 

Schott has worked with Dr. Darling-Hammond across her career, and awarded her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. During her acceptance speech, she emphasized the importance of taking a systemic approach to educational justice: "we need to demand housing, healthcare and food security for all families. We need solid, equitable funding for every school." 

Schott looks forward to the transition team integrating and engaging the voices of grassroots leaders in completing the transition and setting the agenda for Biden's Department of Education.

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is the Right Choice to Lead the Education Transition Team | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Valerie Strauss: What Does the Biden Transition Team Tell Us About His Education Agenda? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Valerie Strauss: What Does the Biden Transition Team Tell Us About His Education Agenda? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Valerie Strauss: What Does the Biden Transition Team Tell Us About His Education Agenda?

We have all been guessing about what President-Elect Joe Biden will do in education. Will he keep his campaign promises and set federal policy on a new direction, away from No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, ESSA, high-stakes testing, and school choice, or will he stick with the stale and destructive status quo?

No one knows for sure but many have tried to divine his intentions by the composition of his transition team for education. At first glance, it is worrisome that so many of its members come from the Race to the Top era. But Valerie Strauss offers a different perspective on the transition team’s purpose and significance.

She writes:

Now that President-elect Joe Biden has named a 20-person education transition team, the education world is trying to glean insight from its makeup as to what the next president will do to try to improve America’s public schools.


Some progressives are worried that the list of members is heavy with former members of the Obama administration, whose controversial education policies ultimately alienated teachers’ unions, parents and members of CONTINUE READING: Valerie Strauss: What Does the Biden Transition Team Tell Us About His Education Agenda? | Diane Ravitch's blog

An Open Letter to President Elect Biden’s Department of Education Transition Team | janresseger

An Open Letter to President Elect Biden’s Department of Education Transition Team | janresseger

An Open Letter to President Elect Biden’s Department of Education Transition Team

I encourage you, as members of President Elect Biden’s Department of Education Transition Team, to recommend the appointment of Randi Weingarten or Lily Eskelsen Garcia as our next Secretary of Education. I believe that one of these women would provide the kind of leadership in public education policy that our nation and our children desperately need.

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, and Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the outgoing President of the National Education Association, have provided extraordinary leadership of efforts by the nation’s teachers significantly to change the long narrative of standardized test-based accountability as the primary driver of federal education policy. They are both public school educators who would turn away from Betsy DeVos’s obsession with vouchers. I believe their leadership helped shape the priorities embodied in the education plan President Elect Biden released during the campaign, an agenda designed to expand opportunity within the public schools serving our nation’s most vulnerable students. Biden’s plan, if implemented, will enhance educational equity and improve children’s experiences at school.

Here are three reasons either Eskelsen Garcia or Weingarten is the right choice to lead the U.S. Department of Education.

First:     We all watched the Red4Ed strikes and walkouts during 2018 and 2019—walkouts that taught America about the devastation of state public school budgets over the decade that CONTINUE READING: An Open Letter to President Elect Biden’s Department of Education Transition Team | janresseger