Dr Linda Darling-Hammond

My heartfelt congratulations to Linda Darling-Hammond for the 2022 Yidan Prize for Education Research. Linda is the founding president of the Learning Policy Institute and an Emeritus Professor of Education at Stanford University.

The vision of Charles CHEN Yidan is to create a better world through education, and Linda fits that vision just perfectly. With an incredible drive to see every learner reach their potential, regardless of social background, gender, and geography, she has spent her life building the kind of research tools that support policy and practice to create better and fairer educational opportunities. She has not only advanced the types of evidence used in research and approaches to analysis, but also deeply influenced the questions being asked by policymakers, practitioners, and researchers around the world.

Her work reflects Linda’s commitment to two broad ideas: first, the design of effective policies and practices needs innovative and actionable research; and second, researchers need to engage with policymakers to create a better world through education. It is her capacity to unite these two perspectives that has made her research actionable and established its credibility with both practitioners and policymakers. She continually sought to foster strong teaching and powerful learning by promoting systems that make sure teachers and leaders are well-prepared, that curriculum and assessment focus on meaningful learning, and that schools are equitably and adequately resourced.

And having been a teacher herself, Linda really understands the transformational impact that teachers have on learners, but also the need for a transformation of the teaching profession itself if research evidence is to lead to good educational practice and, ultimately, for good practice to become embedded in educational culture.

Linda is the rare researcher who has developed a deep understanding of how diverse children learn, how they can be effectively taught, and how teaching and learning can be supported by effective organizational designs and policy strategies to make excellent education equitably available.

Her mastery of a wide range of research methods has enabled her to take a truly systemic approach that helps policymakers and practitioners see the forest among the trees and gives them the tools to reimagine the teachers, the spaces, the time and the technology to achieve better and more relevant learning.

Darling-Hammond is a past president of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.

But there is something that perhaps fewer people know about Linda, and that is her incredible generosity in spirit, her deep sense of public service, and her commitment to real change and transformation in education. To this end, she worked extensively with policymakers and educators and led the education policy transition teams in 2008 and 2020.

She currently serves as president of the California State Board of Education. And however busy, she is always ready to listen, always ready to provide advice, always ready to respond to that extra email, and she does all of that always with a human heart.