The Aspen Institute Education and Society Program (referred to as "Aspen Education Program") was founded in 1974 almost a decade after the first federal education legislation was passed. Then called The Aspen Program for Education in a Changing Society," this was one of the first five policy programs of the Aspen Institute. The original director, Francis Keppel, was former U.S. Commissioner of Education for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Keppel had been an architect of the groundbreaking 1964 federal legislation that established a comprehensive set of incentives and support for public education improvement. Nancy Pelz-Paget was his deputy in this phase the Program. Designed as a 3-year program with the purpose of identifying a new generation of education leaders and to project a strand of new national education policies, the Program ran from 1974 to 1976 with support from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

After 1976 when Keppel retired from Aspen work and returned to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he had once been the dean, the Program was on hiatus until the late 1980's when Keppel launched a series of once-a-year Aspen policy workshops working with Nancy Pelz-Paget and two colleagues who had served in federal education policy positions: Michael Timpane, former Director of National Institute of Education and Michael O'Keefe, former Deputy Secretary of Education. After Keppel's death in 1990, these annual workshops, continued under the leadership of  Pelz-Paget, Timpane and O'Keefe who were all employed at other institutions during this time and volunteered their time. Funding during this period until 1999 was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Atlantic Philanthropy, Annie E. Casey, the Danforth Foundation, Gund, Rockefeller and Spencer Foundations. In1999, the Aspen Institute decided to invest in developing a new full-time Aspen Education and Society Program and asked the team to design the new program. In 2000, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and later from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Broad and Wallace Foundations, the Aspen Education Program was re-established as a full time program with Nancy Pelz-Paget as director and Michael Timpane and Michael O'Keefe as Co-chairs. Mike Timpane and Michael O'Keefe have since retired, and the program co-chairs now include Robert Schwartz, Academic Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Since its founding, the Education and Society Program of the Aspen Institute has played a significant role in shaping national policy debates and the intellectual and practical frameworks for governments and institutions seeking to improve student achievement and build pathways to success for young people. For example, Aspen's 1991 workshop on the development of a strategy for carrying out standards based reform influenced the implementation of standards-based reform nation-wide. Bob Reischauer (then director of the Congressional Budget Office), Mary Jo Bane, Marshall Smith and Lauren Resnick were part of the discussion - and by 1993 were in important positions in the Clinton Administration or leading important outside reform organizations. Aspen's workshops on high school reform from 2002 to 2005 brought together many of the key players in this arena - including program officers at Gates and the Carnegie Foundation, key state and district leaders such as Vicki Phillips (former superintendent and state secretary of education and now head of education for the Gates Foundation), and key policy players including Hillary Pennington (former president of Jobs for the Future), Bob Schwartz, and Mike Cohen (who was for several years the Aspen Program's senior fellow and former co-chair; is now president of Achieve Inc.) - significantly shaping their thinking, the confluence of work across these organizations, and the shape of the national high school reform effort.

While it's hard to trace the genesis of important policy directions and the ability to engage leaders who will be in future positions of national authority is somewhat serendipitous, Aspen remains strategically placed to develop new thinking and engage leaders who are likely to be influential in the coming decade. The Aspen Education Program has a long history of working with national and state education policy leaders and foundation officers and currently facilitates network of senior congressional education staff, urban school district superintendents and related networks of chief academic officers and content supervisors of math and adolescent literacy. Our ability to move ideas into a wide variety of leadership networks is significant.