SOF Discussion Reception: Schools, Cities, and the Future of Education
Join us for this conversation featuring Secretary Arne Duncan, former U.S. Secretary of Education, in conversation with Sandy Speicher, Partner and Managing Director at IDEO San Francisco, discussing important trends in urbanization and education.
Biography:
Arne Duncan served as U.S. Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2016. Previously, from 2001 to 2008, Arne served as Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Public Schools where he was Deputy Chief of Staff for the CEO.
In 1992, he returned to Chicago (after graduating from Harvard) to direct the Ariel Education Initiative, which creates outstanding educational opportunities for inner-city children on Chicago’s South Side. In 1998 he joined Chicago Public Schools.
Arne currently serves on the boards of the Ariel Education Initiative, Chicago Cares, The Children’s Center, the Golden Apple Foundation, the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, Jobs for America’s Graduates, Junior Achievement, the Dean’s Advisory Board of the Kellogg School of Management, the National Association of Basketball Coaches’ Foundation, Renaissance Schools Fund, Scholarship Chicago and the South Side YMCA. He also serves on the Board of Overseers for Harvard College and the Visiting Committees for Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. In 2003, he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Lake Forest College, and in 2006, the City Club of Chicago named him Citizen of the Year. He was also a fellow in the Leadership Greater Chicago’s class of 1995. Arne is former co-captain of Harvard’s basketball team and was named a first team Academic All American. From 1987 to 1991, he played professional basketball in Australia, where he also worked with children who were wards of the state. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1987, majoring in Sociology. Arne and his family live in Washington, DC. He is a 2002 Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
Sandy Speicher is a Partner at the global design and innovation firm IDEO. She is the Managing Director of IDEO’s Education practice, which looks to people’s unmet needs, desires, and aspirations to inspire new solutions for a wide variety of challenges—from the ways that people are learning to the ways that systems are operating.
Working with organizations across the public, private, and social sectors, Sandy is constantly exploring ways that we can design more effective and inspiring systems. She and her teams have helped to create a scalable, affordable school model in Peru, strategies to improve schools for the poor in India, digital learning platforms that meet the needs of today’s students, and a new vision for the food system in San Francisco’s schools. Recently, she collaborated with Carnegie Corporation to launch 100k in 10, which President Clinton has referred to as a new model for social change.
She is passionate about design as a process to empower everyone—including students, parents and teachers—to improve the world around them. To this end, Sandy has partnered with Riverside School in India to create the Design for Change Contest, which engages students around the globe in creating new solutions for social challenges in their communities, and Design Thinking for Educators, a free downloadable toolkit that empowers teachers to be change agents in their schools.
Sandy serves as a strategic adviser to the K-12 Lab Network at the Stanford d.school, and recently taught a class at Stanford on the design of school models. She is on advisory boards of 100k in 10, and Pioneer Academies in South Africa.
Prior to joining IDEO, Sandy taught visual communications at Washington University in St. Louis, and spent six years teaching design thinking to fifth-graders at a public school in San Francisco. She launched her design career at MetaDesign, where she developed visual brand and interactive systems.
Sandy holds an MA in Education from Stanford University and a BFA in Visual Communications from Washington University. She loves to travel and learn by immersing herself in other cultures. She also takes pride in her fairly robust, yet still enigmatic, collection of Mona Lisa kitsch.