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The three driving concerns of Darling-Hammond's career were put in place by her early work and personal experiences: the serious and thoughtful training of highly professional teachers, the elimination of inequities in school funding, and the increased personalization of schools that are too large and have too many children per teacher.
FOR HER entire career, Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommon Professor of Teaching and Teacher Education at Stanford University, has been a drumbeater for better training for teachers, increased equity in schools, and more personal schools. Darling-Hammond grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where she and her learning-disabled brother collectively experienced several of that system's schools and many tracks in the 1960s. Young Linda could not help but notice the difference between her rigorous education in the upper echelons of the 13track junior high school they attended and the much inferior education of her brother. Her parents moved several times "to find better schools in the community for their children. There was always the sense that education was the most important thing and that I would go to college, although no one in my immediate family had yet had that opportunity."
Darling-Hammond graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 1973 and then got her teacher certification at Temple University in Philadelphia. She student taught in Camden, New Jersey, and began her first full-time job at Penncrest High School in Media, Pennsylvania. There she experienced some of the difficulties of schooling, particularly for poor children of color, from the perspective of a first-year English teacher. Linda "had some of the usual beginning teacher experiences: no classroom (I was a floater), the most preparations, many of the kids who had failed English the year before, very little mentoring, and the almost immediate realization that I was underprepared by my education program for the real needs of the classroom. The tracking system compounded the inequities. I had 170 kids each day, many of them poor learners, and it was impossible to get to know all of them and be available to them or to protect them outside my class. All of this radicalized me."
While Darling-Hammond's emphases as a teacher, researcher, and college professor over the next 25 years would shift somewhat from job to job, the...