Kevin S. Huffman

Kevin S. Huffman (born 1970 or 1971) is an American lawyer and education administrator who is currently the Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Education. He was appointed to the position by Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam and has served since April 2011.^[1] Previously he had held a senior management position in Teach for America and had worked as an attorney specializing in education.^[2]

Career

Huffman graduated from Bexley High School in Bexley, Ohio, in 1988.^[3] He then attended Swarthmore College, receiving a B.A. in English literature in 1992.^[1]

He began his career in education in 1992 after graduation from Swarthmore, becoming a Teach For America corps member in Houston, Texas. In Houston he taught bilingual first and second grade students. He was a member of his school's elected shared-decisionmaking committee, and trained new teachers as a faculty advisor and school director at Teach For America's summer training institutes.^[1]

After finishing his assignment as a teacher for Teach for America, Huffman attended New York University School of Law, where he was a member of the law review and graduated in 1998. After law school, he joined the Washington, DC, law firm of Hogan & Hartson, where he represented school districts, state departments of education and universities, working on policy and litigation matters including challenges to state finance systems, desegregation litigation, and special education hearings and trials.^[1]

In 2000, Huffman became a staff member for Teach For America. In more than a decade with that organization, he served successively as general counsel, senior vice president of growth strategy and development, and executive vice president of public affairs.^[1]

In March 2011, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam announced that he was appointing Huffman to head the state's Department of Education. Huffman started work in April.^[1] He was the first Teach For America participant to assume the leadership of a state's public education program.^[3]

In his first months as head of the Tennessee Department of Education, Huffman oversaw the implementation of a controversial new evaluation system for teachers and school principals.^[4][5] He has called the evaluation system "a model for the rest of the country."^[5]

In September 2013, A petition was sent to the governor. The petition was signed by 55 of the states' school Directors, It alleges that Kevin Huffman "has no interest in a dialogue" with officials at the local school level. Low teacher morale, excess paperwork, inaccurate testing data, fear of job loss, and salaries being tied to test scores are just a few things being mentioned for the reasoning behind the controversy. It is reported that many teachers do not teach or even see many of the students their evaluation is based upon. A large portion of the states classroom teachers do not administer the states standardized tests, therefore making the growth portion of teacher evaluation nearly impossible. Consequently these teachers are required to choose from a pool of growth measures that generally do not relate directly to their classroom performance.

An advocate of charter schools, in September 2012 he ordered that $3.4 million in state funding be withheld from Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools after its school board refused to authorize a proposed Great Hearts Academies charter school in West Nashville.^[5][6][7]

Family

While teaching, Huffman met fellow Teach for America Corps member Michelle Rhee.^[8] The couple married two years after they met and had two daughters before they divorced in 2007.^[5][8] While Rhee was Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, their children attended the Oyster-Adams Bilingual Elementary School, considered one of the best in Washington, DC.^[8][9]

At the time of his appointment to the Tennessee leadership position, Huffman and his second wife, Amy, were expecting another child.^[2]

References