John F. "Jack" Jennings founded the Center on Education Policy in January 1995 and was its CEO and president until he retired in 2012. According to a poll of national leaders conducted by Education Week, that Center was one of the ten most influential organizations affecting school policy in the United States.
From 1967 to 1994, Mr. Jennings served as subcommittee staff director and then as a general counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and Labor. In these positions, he was involved in nearly every major education debate held at the national level, including the reauthorizations of such important legislation as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Vocational Education Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Higher Education Act, and the National School Lunch Act.
Mr. Jennings served on the board of trustees of the Educational Testing Service, the Title I Independent Review Panel, the Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform, the Maryland Academic Intervention Steering Committee, and the Maryland Visionary Panel. Mr. Jennings is currently a member of the National Academy of Education, and serves on the board of governors of the Phi Delta Kappa Foundation. He also served as chair of the PDK Foundation board.
Over the years, he has received awards from dozens of organizations, and recently was the recipient of awards for distinguished public service from the American Educational Research Association and from Phi Delta Kappa. Most recently, he has been honored with the Education Visionary Award by the Learning First Alliance (a coalition of the country’s major national public education organizations), the Outstanding Friend of Public Education Award from the Horace Mann League, and the Meritorious Service Award from the National Association of Federal Education Program Administrators.
Mr. Jennings’s book Why National Standards and Tests? Politics and the Quest for Better Schools was published by Sage Publications in 1998. He has also edited four volumes on National Issues in Education which were published by Phi Delta Kappa: The Past is Prologue (May 1993), Community Service and Student Loans (June 1994), Goals 2000 and School-to-Work (January 1995), and Elementary and Secondary Education Act (July 1995).
Mr. Jennings writes a blog for the Huffington Post. He has also written numerous articles, including twelve for the Kappan, more than any other single contributor for that prestigious magazine. He is one of the authorities on education most cited in the news media. For example, he was quoted in Education Week more than 500 times from 1995 to 2011.
He holds an AB from Loyola University and a JD from Northwestern University School of Law, and has been a member of several legal bars, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
Michael J. Feuer is the dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at The George Washington University and president of the National Academy of Education.
