Trustees

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, EXECUTIVE-IN-RESIDENCE AT CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY and a Superintendent in Residency for Harcourt School Publishers. Ms. Byrd-Bennett is an experienced educator, supervisor, administrator, and researcher of public urban education. She began her career with the New York City Board of Education where she taught at elementary and high school levels. In New York City, she also served as a school principal and the Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Professional Development. She has been an adjunct professor at Malcolm King College in Harlem, City College in New York City, the College of New Rochelle, and Fordham University.

In Brooklyn, New York, Ms. Byrd-Bennett served as superintendent of Crown Heights/Flatbush School District, where she is credited with reestablishing order and instructional focus during an administrative takeover of the troubled district. Prior to that, she was the Supervising Superintendent of the Chancellor’s District in New York City, responsible for the direct oversight of the lowest-performing schools in the New York City public school system. While there, she was credited with dramatic improvements in student achievement. She left New York City to accept the appointment by then Mayor Michael R. White to serve as the first Chief Executive Officer of the Cleveland Municipal School District—the largest in the state of Ohio.

Ms. Byrd-Bennett is a member of numerous boards, commissions and advisory councils, including the United States Department of Education National Assessment Governing Board; the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards; the Education Commission of the States’ National Center for Education Accountability; the Ohio Governor’s Commission on Student Success; the Commission of Governors’ Blue Ribbon Task Force on Financing Student Success and a member of the board of directors for the Albert Shanker Institute and the transition teams for the Governors of Ohio and New York State. She has also served as the President of the Urban Superintendents’ Association of America.

Ms. Byrd-Bennett is the recipient of numerous local, state and national honors including the Council of Greater City Schools 2001 Urban Superintendent of the Year. Her passion for education stems from one relentless goal: success for each child in each classroom in each school.

June 2, 2009 • Common Core releases Why We’re Behind: What Top Nations Teach Their Students But We Don’t, a report showing that the nations that consistently outrank us on international comparison tests provide their students with a fulsome education in the liberal arts and sciences. Why is this news? Because the U.S. is moving further and further away from this model. Read brief excerpts from the documents featured in the report here and Education Week’s take here.

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Want to learn more about our recent panel questioning the tenets of the 21st century skills movement? See what NYU historian Diane Ravitch, Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham, and Partnership for 21st Century Skills president Ken Kay have to say in this brief, seven-minute video.

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Watch the entire panel discussion (approximately 2 hours). To view the video in full screen mode, click on the full screen icon in the video menu bar. And read coverage of the panel in USA Today and Education Week. The full text of panelists' presentations can be found here.

Common Core's report shows a nation STILL AT RISK. Nearly a quarter of students polled could not identify Adolf Hitler and half had no idea what the Renaissance was. To learn more read the report, press release or stories at ABC News, CBS News, The New York Times, and USA TODAY. Or take the test yourself.

Read Emory Professor Mark Bauerlein on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills

"Anybody who has sat in on curriculum meetings and projects in the humanities has experienced those awkward moments when it comes down to selecting certain contents and materials as essential and required. Traditionalists in the room want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas, and on various grounds of historical influence, civic inheritance, and aesthetic virtue they stick with a generally Eurocentric tradition."

Full article