Contributor
Lisa Graham Keegan, Principal, The Keegan Company
Biography provided by participant
Lisa Graham Keegan is Principal Partner at the Keegan Company, where she consults, writes and speaks on critical issues and emerging sectors in American education. Keegan's expertise and outspoken nature, have made her a sought after education reform expert who has worked with national education leaders, the media, U.S. Congress, state legislative bodies, business groups, policy organizations, community groups, and the education industry.
Currently, Keegan advises the Education Equality Project, a civil rights and education movement dedicated to eliminating the nation's shameful achievement gaps, as well as other organizations and businesses. From 2006 through 2008, she served as a volunteer education advisor and spokesperson for the McCain 2008 Campaign for President.
Keegan was Chief Executive Officer of the Education Leaders Council (ELC) in Washington DC from 2001 until 2004. Prior to ELC, Keegan spent a decade serving as an Arizona state official, where she led that state's education reform movement. She was the elected state school chief from 1995 to 2001 and from 1991 to 1994 she served as Vice-Chairman and Chairman of the House Education Committee and authored much of Arizona's education reform legislation in the early 1990's.
In Arizona, Keegan advanced clear and challenging academic standards gauged by publicly transparent assessments, and fought successfully for the implementation of school choice, including Arizona's landmark charter school and tuition tax credit laws. She also led efforts to revise the state's school finance formulas to reflect a commitment to equal access a job she considers unfinished.
Keegan's leadership in Arizona earned her a national reputation as a strong advocate for student-based education policies. In March of 1999, Drs. Milton and Rose Friedman personally presented Keegan with the first Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation Award for Leadership in Educational Choice. She was honored in the same year by the National Republican Women Leaders Forum as Educator of the Year. In 2000, she was education advisor to the John McCain Campaign for President, and was later interviewed by President-Elect Bush for the job of US Secretary of Education.
Her work has appeared or been cited in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, Newsweek, Forbes Magazine, Education Week, and Phoenix Magazine. She has also discussed education issues on NPR, The PBS News Hour, Fox News Channel, CNBC, and local stations nationwide.
Keegan graduated from Stanford University in 1981 with a Bachelor of Arts in human language. She earned a Masters Degree in communication disorders from Arizona State University (ASU) in 1983. Keegan lives with her husband, Justice of the Peace John Keegan, who served as Mayor of Peoria, Arizona for a decade. They have five children and one grandson.
Recent Responses
October 20, 2009 10:52 PM
The incredible number of affirmative suggestions here make the obvious moreso: There exists a great deal of experience and organizational support for any school that wants to know how to evaluate quality teaching and teachers. I think it is silly to suggest that there is one single best way to do this, and pursuing such a belief only ends us up where Secretary Spellings suggests...everybody gets a star. Schools are different; they value different kinds of behaviors.The point is that in order to be excellent, they must engage in vigorous and ongoing self-evaluation in all sectors of the school. There is not an excellent school in the…
Read moreOctober 15, 2009 11:49 PM
What bothers me in some of the commentary here is the passion for eliminating the AYP requirement, period. I can well imagine that there may be tremendously innovative and deserving applicants who do not reach AYP as currently defined. So fine; allow the exceptionally grand applications to "win" even in the absence of meeting the AYP requirement, but make everybody report their current AYP status. Just so we know. AYP is not a perfect formula, but it is far superior to having student achievement get defined in so many ways that it has no defnition and children go invisible. Let's fix it, but…
Read moreSeptember 24, 2009 01:00 PM
Increasing high school graduation rates will be a direct consequence of increasing the quality of all schools. As has been noted, students don't leave schools when they are deeply engaged and see a connection to their futures. There are a myriad of ways to excel in high school instruction, including through the use of new technologies with which our children are already fluent. The critical issue for us is to focus on improving what we offer students. They aren't leaving because they can't focus; and making school "compulsory" to a higher age is a sorry substitute for making it matter.…
Read moreSeptember 11, 2009 02:34 PM
I count myself among the skeptics here... our children have 21st Century skills. We are struggling to give them the serious intellectual capacity worthy of the tools of our age. The "movement" is problematic in that it positions itself in opposition to serious academic pursuit. It need not do that, but it does, per the examples already alluded to. I think plenty of the businesses and folks who support this and don't look really closely think they are merely supporting the latest technoloogies and workplace skills. Not so. …
Read moreAugust 17, 2009 02:19 PM
Every child's "intellectual highway" is under its fastest paced construction in the first years. Most everything they learn later will be limited or advantaged by the number and quality of well worn pathways available to travel down. Children can enter school with a virtual brain superhighway, complete with multiple off-ramps, intersections and available routes for new information to travel...or not. This is literally a neurological reality we can see reflected in brain scans. If children are not exposed to rich, varied and extensive vocabulary and interaction, they simply will not develop the infrastructure they need for later learning. As a…
Read moreAugust 5, 2009 05:36 PM
Eliza's question deserves responses from the people who actually run some of the most successful schools in the country so they can explain if and how they use student achievement data to evaulate their teachers. I know of not a single school that does not do that, and if one exists I would like to learn about it...then ask them how they know they are successful. The point here is not to create some state or district sponsored, one size fits all teacher review process. The point is to lift the prohibitions that currently exist. The point is to allow…
Read moreAugust 4, 2009 11:08 AM
I love the suggestion that providing evidence that the young children in American classrooms can read is a statist restriction on their creativity. Let’s grow up. Today’s reality: when a school principal sits down for a one on one evaluation with a teacher, she is allowed to review precisely NONE of the academic progress information for that teacher’s students as part of the formal evaluation. In some states, special interests have been able to insert this into state law, in most others; it sits cozily embedded into school district policy. Bottom line, ANY inclusion of student achievement as a factor…
Read moreJuly 6, 2009 09:40 AM
Mayoral control works when mayors choose superintendents of great courage, who demand improvements and who add quality school choices for the community. Providing better quality of schools and choices makes them far more accountable to the public than a school board mired in the conflicting political agendas of each member. School boards may create effective environments, they just usually don't. Mayoral control increases the odds for students. We have yet to create the superior governance system for our public schools, which will hopefully be a collection of different boards and elected officials who have each been granted authority to authorize…
Read moreJune 30, 2009 12:29 PM
I have a simple suggestion. Let’s admit that people, schools, districts, states and organizations are not going to change their fundamental philosophies or cultures in response to an unprecedented influx of federal money. Those whose actions have consistently reflected a lack of concern for student achievement, or simply an unwillingness to confront the impediments that prevent it, will not be convinced by having more money. If that were the case, surely the past decade would have seen widespread greatness. We know who the education players are, what they believe, and how they perform. Thankfully, after the last decade, we have…
Read more
About This Blog
This Education Blog is funded by support provided, in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the purpose of creating an educational forum for sharing research, ideas and opinions regarding issues related to college readiness and college completion. The Blog may not be used to post partisan political statements supporting or opposing candidates for public office. All statements and materials posted on the Blog, including any statements regarding specific legislation, reflect the views of the individual contributors and do not reflect the views of National Journal or the Bill& Melinda Gates Foundation. National Journal and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation take no positions regarding any legislation discussed in the Blog. National Journal reserves the right to monitor material placed on this site and to remove any posting they may deem inappropriate.
