Professor Linda Darling-Hammond FBA
- Fellow type
- International Fellow
- Year elected
- 2025
- Subjects
- Education
- Sections
- Education
Summary
Linda Darling-Hammond is Founding President and Chief Knowledge Officer at the Learning Policy Institute, created to provide high-quality research for policies that enable equitable and empowering education for each and every child. She is also the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University.
Darling-Hammond’s work focuses both on the processes of teaching and learning for students and educators and on policy systems, seeking to bridge the divide between the two. Her work on teacher quality, school redesign, and educational equity has informed policy designs in states and nations around the world. Darling-Hammond is past president of the American Educational Research Association and recipient of its awards for Distinguished Contributions to Research, Lifetime Achievement, Research Review, and Research-to-Policy. She is also a member of the American Association of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Education. She led the Obama education policy transition team in 2008 and the Biden education transition team in 2020. She was appointed President of the California State Board of Education in 2019. In 2022, Darling-Hammond received the Yidan Prize for Education Research in recognition of her work that has shaped education policy and practice around the most equitable and effective ways to teach and learn.
Darling-Hammond began her career as a public school teacher and co-founded both a preschool and a public high school. She has consulted widely with federal, state and local officials and educators on strategies for improving education policies and practices and is the recipient of 14 honorary degrees in the U.S. and internationally. Among her more than 600 publications are a number of award-winning books, including The Right to Learn, Teaching as the Learning Profession, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World and The Flat World and Education. She received an Ed.D. from Temple University (with highest distinction) and a B.A. from Yale University (magna cum laude).