David Steiner (academic)

David Milton Steiner (born 1958)^[1] is executive director of the new Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and professor of education at Johns Hopkins University.^[2] His previous appointments include New York State Commissioner of Education in the New York State Education Department, director of Arts Education at the National Endowment for the Arts, and most recently, the founding director of the City University of New York Institute for Education Policy at Roosevelt House and the Klara and Larry Silverstein Dean at the Hunter College School of Education.

Biography

He was born in Princeton, New Jersey, to academic George Steiner, a French-born American Holocaust survivor of Austrian-Jewish descent who emigrated to New York to escape Nazism,^[3] and was raised in Cambridge, England. He attended The Perse School in Cambridge^[4] and earned degrees from Balliol College, Oxford University (B.A. and M.A.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.).^[5]

From 1999 to 2004 he was a professor of education in Boston University's School of Education in its department of administration. He then served as the Director of Arts Education at the National Endowment for the Arts from 2004-2005 where among his accomplishments he designed and inaugurated the first national program to fund intensive teacher-preparation to present major, complex works of art in classrooms. He strengthened assessment and accountability systems to evaluate learning outcomes in the NEA’s arts grants programs. Finally, he worked with Jazz at Lincoln Center to co-develop the Endowment’s first on-line jazz curriculum. He left his position at the NEA in 2005 to serve as the Klara and Larry Silverstein Dean at the Hunter College-CUNY's School of Education, where he remained until 2009.

In 2009, the New York State Board of Regents, led by Chancellor Merryl Tisch, chose Steiner to replace the out-going Richard Paul Mills, who had served as commissioner of education since 1995.^[6][7] Steiner's accomplishments in his tenure as commissioner were broad. They include advancing the New York State Regents Reform Agenda by leading the successful $700M NYS application for the Federal Race to the Top Award and other competitively sourced funds.^[8] He was integral in the reformation of teacher and principal standards, which included a redesign of teacher certification requirements incorporating performance-based assessments for all teacher candidates. Commissioner Steiner also raised standards on New York State public school assessments.

In 2010 he approved a controversial waiver of job requirement standards for publisher Cathie Black, for chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Under an agreement made with Mayor Bloomberg, the waiver for Cathie Black was granted along with the creation of a new position of Chief Academic Officer at the New York City Department of Education which was filled by Shael Polakow-Suransky

In 2011, Steiner announced that he was leaving his position in Albany to return to academia. He returned to Hunter College as dean of the School of Education and as founding director of the CUNY Institute for Education Policy. Under Steiner's leadership, the Hunter College School of Education became the only education school in the nation to have three programs rated as three-stars or above in the inaugural 2013 US News/NCTQ evaluation of teacher preparation programs.^[9] In 2014, Hunter College School of Education was awarded the Christa McAuliffe Excellence in Teacher Education Award by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.^[10]

Selected bibliography

• Steiner, David M. “Education Reform: Not Complicated -- but Seriously Difficult.” The Huffington Post. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Mar. 2015.
• Steiner, David. "The Politics of Liberal Education." Journal of Higher Education. 64.6 (1993): 730+. Academic OneFile. Web. 9 Mar. 2015.
• Steiner, David M. Rethinking Democratic Education: The Politics of Reform Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Print.
• Steiner, David M. "Trusting Our Judgment: Measurement and Accountability for Educational Outcomes." Teachers College Record 115.9 (September 2013): 1-8. Print.
• Steiner, David. “Urban Hero.” Education Next. 7.4 (Fall 2007). Web. 9 Mar. 2015.

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