Grawemeyer Award for Education Will Go to Stanford Professor

Next year's Grawemeyer Award for Education will go to a Stanford University professor who was at one point a candidate to be U.S. Secretary of Education.Linda Darling-Hammond will receive the award for her book “The Flat World and Education.” In it, she outlines the need to make education funding and access equal across all schools.“We need to be focusing on reducing the inequalities in funding and educational investments between and among communities so that all kids have a level playing field," she says. “Our kids in our top schools—affluent schools—score better than any country in the world in reading. But our kids in our schools with concentrated poverty—which is a growing number of our schools—score at the rate of about the 50th nation in the world, very close to the bottom.”Darling-Hammond works with needy schools near Stanford and says she will use the $100,000 Grawemeyer prize to finance that work.The 2011 Grawemeyer for Education was awarded to Greg Mortenson, author of "Three Cups of Tea" and other books about his work building schools in Central Asia. However, following reports that he had fabricated some his accounts, Mortensoneventually declined the award.The University of Louisville presents the Grawemeyer Awards.