Darling-Hammond was born on Dec. 21, 1951, in Cleveland, Ohio. Darling-Hammond received her B.A. magna cum laude from Yale University in 1973, and an EdD, with highest distinction, in Urban Education from Temple University in 1978.

Prior to her appointment at Stanford, Darling-Hammond was the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Darling-Hammond was president of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She has served on the boards of directors for the Spencer Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the Alliance for Excellent Education.

Darling-Hammond began her career as a public school teacher and has co-founded a preschool and day care center, as well as a charter public high school. Darling-Hammond has been engaged in efforts to redesign schools so that they focus more effectively on learning and to develop standards for teaching. As Chair of the Model Standards Committee of the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium , she led the effort to develop licensing standards for beginning teachers that reflect current knowledge about what teachers need to know to teach diverse learners. As Chair of the New York State Council on Curriculum and Assessment she oversaw the process of developing the state’s learning standards, curriculum frameworks, and assessments during the early 1990s.

Policy work on equity, quality, and teaching

From 1994-2001, Darling-Hammond served as executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, chaired by Governor James B. Hunt, a blue-ribbon panel whose work put the issue of teaching quality on the map nationally and led to sweeping policy changes affecting teaching and schooling. Under her leadership, the commission carried out a strategy to build understanding and action for leveraging major improvements. The commission developed a national coalition as well as state and local partnerships in more than 25 states that built engagement and commitment to the issue of teacher quality, leading both to legislative changes and organizational reforms of schools and teacher education programs. The commission also carried out an public education campaign that brought the issue of teacher quality to a high level of public visibility. In 2006, Education Week named the commission’s lead report, "What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future," one of the most influential research studies affecting U.S. education. In 2006 Education Week said that Darling-Hammond was one of the nation's 10 most influential people affecting education policy over the last decade She has received honorary doctorates from seven universities in the United States and abroad. She has also received numerous awards for her work over the course of her career.

Learning and teaching standards

While William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia, Darling-Hammond co-founded the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching (NCREST), which documented highly successful school models and supported a range of school reform initiatives in New York and nationally. Darling-Hammond has been engaged in efforts to redesign schools so that they focus more effectively on learning and to develop standards for teaching: As Chair of New York State's Council on Curriculum and Assessment in the early 1990s, she helped to fashion a comprehensive school reform plan for the state that developed new learning standards and curriculum frameworks for more challenging learning goals and more performance-oriented assessments. This led to an overhaul of the state Regents examinations as well as innovations in school-based performance assessments and investments in new approaches to professional development.

As Chair of the Model Standards Committee of the Chief State School Officers’ Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), she led the development of licensing standards for beginning teachers that reflect current knowledge about what teachers need to know to teach challenging content to diverse learners. These were ultimately incorporated into the licensing standards of more than 40 states and became the foundation for a new generation of teacher certification pointed at teaching competencies rather than merely the counting of course credits. She has been instrumental in developing performance assessments that allow teachers to demonstrate their classroom teaching skills as they are applied in practice, as an early member of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and, later as a co-founder of the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT). The PACT consortium, comprising more than 30 university- and school-based teacher preparation programs, has designed and is implementing a performance assessment that examines how teachers plan, teach, and evaluate student learning in the classroom. The PACT assessments are now authorized for use in licensing California teachers.

Developing schools and programs

Darling-Hammond has been active in developing innovative schools. She began her career as a public school teacher and has co-founded both a preschool/day care center and a charter public high school serving low-income students of color in East Palo Alto. In a community where only a third of students were graduating and almost none were going onto college, this new Early College High school — an open admissions school which admits students by lottery — has created a pipeline to college for more than 90 percent of its graduates. The school, along with seven others, is a professional development school partner with the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP), which prepares a leadership corps of teachers for high-needs schools. Darling-Hammond led the redesign of the STEP program for this new program, and its successes have been acknowledged through recognition in several studies as one of the nation’s top programs.

Darling-Hammond has worked with dozens of schools and districts around the nation on studying, developing, and scaling up new model schools...as well as launching ground-breaking preparation programs for teachers and leaders...that facilitate greater success for diverse students. Through the School Redesign Network at Stanford, she works with a network of urban districts to redesign schools and district offices, strengthen leadership and teaching, and monitor and enhance equity in resources and outcomes, while studying the outcomes of reforms. See School Redesign Network district partner web site.

Darling-Hammond has said, "Lagging far behind our international peers in educational outcomes--and with one of the most unequal educational systems in the industrialized world--we need, I believe, something much more than and much different from what NCLB offers.” She also praised the law for drawing attention to achievement gaps and for the right of all children to well-qualified teachers. She has suggested that, in addition to these major breakthroughs, “We badly need a national policy that enables schools to meet the intellectual demands of the twenty-first century (and) we need to pay off the educational debt to disadvantaged students that has accrued over centuries of unequal access to quality education.” She has suggested that federal spending on education is inadequate to achieve the goals of the law.

Darling-Hammond on Teach for America

Though Darling-Hammond has acknowledged that Teach for America has brought new talent into the teaching profession, she is better known as a prominent critic of the program. In the spring of 2005, a study published by Stanford researchers including Darling-Hammond, concluded that teachers in Houston who entered without completing training and certification, including Teach for America teachers, were initially less effective than traditionally credentialed teachers and left the teaching profession at higher rates. "Our study doesn't say you shouldn't hire Teach for America teachers," said Hammond, "Our study says everyone benefits from preparation, including Teach for America teachers...that they became more effective when they became certified."

In 2008, Darling-Hammond was viewed as one of the most likely candidates for Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. At the time, others rumored to be under consideration included New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Jonathan Schnur, chief executive of New Leaders for New Schools, and Arne Duncan, chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools. Duncan was eventually chosen to become Obama's secretary of education. Citing commitments in California, Darling-Hammond later indicated that she would not be taking any other positions in the Obama administration.

In 2001, Darling-Hammond founded Stanford New School, a K-12 charter school, in East Palo Alto. Despite a board that featured Stanford administrators and professors, Silicon Valley connections to Google and Cisco, and the resources to spend $3,000 per student above the state average, the school was denied an extension of its charter in April 2010 after several members of the school board labeled it a failure. Based on 2009 standardized testing and reporting results, only 16 percent of the students were proficient or advanced in English and math. Darling-Hammond was angered by the state’s assessment of Stanford New School as a persistently worst-performing school. “It is not the most accurate measure of student achievement," she argued to the New York Times, "particularly if you have new English language learners.”

Darling-Hammond has written a number of books, including:

• The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (2010)
• Powerful Learning: What We Know About Teaching for Understanding." (coauthored with Brigid Barron, P. David Pearson, Alan H. Schoenfeld, Elizabeth K., Stage, Timothy D. Zimmerman, et al.; forthcoming).
• Powerful teacher education: lessons from exemplary programs (2006)
• Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do (coauthored with John Bransford, 2006)
• Instructional Leadership for Systemic Change: The Story of San Diego's Reform (Leading Systemic School Improvement) (2005)
• A good teacher in every classroom: preparing the highly qualified teachers our children deserve (coauthored with Joan Baratz-Snowden, 2005)
• Professional development schools: schools for developing a profession (coauthored with Judith Lanier, 2005)
• Learning to teach for social justice (coauthored with Jennifer French and Silvia Paloma Garcia-Lopez, 2002)
• Teaching as the learning profession: handbook of policy and practice (Coauthored with Gary Sykes, 1999)}
• A license to teach: raising standards for teaching (coauthored with Arthur Wise and Stephen P. Klein, 1999}
• The right to learn: a blueprint for creating schools that work (1997)
• Authentic assessment in action: studies of schools and students at work (coauthored with Jacqueline Ancess and Beverly Falk, 1995)
• Review of Research in Education, Volume 20 (Editor, 1994)
• Review of Research in Education, Volume 19 (Editor, 1993)