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Giuliani’s Education Advisers

By Michele McNeil — December 14, 2007 1 min read
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Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has assembled his education advisory committee, and given that he thinks school choice will turn around America’s schools in just three years, his list holds few surprises.

Among the school-choice advocates on the 16-member advisory committee are Terry Moe, who is Giuliani’s education chairman and a Stanford University professor and Hoover Institution senior fellow. One of the most prominent proponents of vouchers, Moe has written books on the issue and penned this for EdWeek in 2000.

Other school choice advocates are Clint Bolick, the former leader of the Alliance for School Choice and a former vice president for the Institute for Justice, which helps defend school choice programs in court.

Giuliani, who’s taken a hard line against illegal immigration along with many of his fellow Republicans, has put the controversial Herman Badillo on his team. My colleague who covers English-language learners, Mary Ann Zehr, wrote about him recently, for being a lightning rod in the Hispanic community as Bill Cosby is in the black community.

Another notable name made the cut: ex-U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who enraged the nation’s largest teachers’ union in 2004 by referring to the National Education Association as a “terrorist organization.”

Giuliani also tapped several New Yorkers, including one of his former deputy mayors, Tony Coles, who championed the then-mayor’s attempts to bring merit pay to some New York City teachers.

For more about Giuliani’s education advisers, read The New York Sun story here.

And for even more about who’s advising the candidates on education, check out my previous post here about former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, This Week in Education’s compilation here, and some verbal warfare over U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s picks here and here.