Contributor
Michael L. Lomax, President and CEO, UNCF
Biography provided by participant
Dr. Michael Lomax is the president and CEO of UNCF -- the United Negro College Fund -- the nation's largest and most effective minority education organization. UNCF provides operating and program funds to its 39 member private historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and their 60,000 students, and manages more than 400 scholarships-including the Bill and Melinda Gates Millennium Scholarships-supporting more than 8,000 students at over 900 colleges and universities.
Immediately before joining UNCF, he served seven years as president of Dillard University in New Orleans.
He graduated from Morehouse College, received his M.A. degree from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in American and African American literature from Emory University. He taught literature at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges and the University of Georgia.
He served as the first head of the Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs; and was elected to the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, serving as first African American chair.
Lomax is a trustee of Emory University and member of the Council of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
He serves on the board of Teach for America, The KIPP Foundation, The Carter Center, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bill T. Jones Dance Company, National Black Arts Festival, and President's Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Recent Responses
October 28, 2009 11:33 AM
Count me as a supporter and advocate of private investment in public schools, not merely as a stop-gap strategy in hard economic times, but as an integral and deliberate part of the process by which public school reforms are developed, implemented, tested and, if successful, taken to scale. As the contributors to this blog know better than anyone, there is no shortage of ideas for improving public education. But we all also know too many examples of ideas that went from conception straight to full implementation, with disastrous results. Not every idea is a good one, and not every good idea…
Read moreSeptember 16, 2009 10:54 AM
This week’s question goes to the very heart of UNCF’s mission and work. College completion, we believe, must be not just a goal but the goal. It’s the goal of everything that UNCF does, and in fact our largest program, the twenty-year, $1.6 billion Gates Millennium Scholars Program (GMS) has yielded some very encouraging results. GMS, which this year is marking its tenth class of Gates Scholars, is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Independent research on the Program reflects considerable success in achieving college completion. The key finding: The low-income African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans and Pacific…
Read moreSeptember 3, 2009 10:53 AM
This has been an informative and stimulating exploration of the processes that give us the best chance of changing failing schools into successful schools. Because UNCF’s base of experience relates primarily to the college experience, we may bring a slightly different perspective to the discussion. Most other contributors come from what we might call the production side of K-12 education. UNCF comes from the consuming side: Our historic mission is to educate the students who come out of the 5,000 schools the Administration wants to turn around, and the students who come from the nation’s 90,000 other schools as well. More recently,…
Read moreAugust 27, 2009 10:48 AM
UNCF joins the nation and the world in mourning the passing of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. For his entire forty-seven-year career in the United States Senate, he stood with us and with all friends of education in the fight to see that all Americans have the opportunity to get the education they need and that the nation needs them to have. He was an early and stalwart supporter of the fight to outlaw legalized discrimination of every stripe--race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability and age—in every facet of American life: voting rights, public accommodations, medical care and, closest to our hearts, education. But…
Read moreAugust 3, 2009 04:12 PM
I think Secretary of Education Arne Duncan makes a lot of sense in proposing to include student achievement data as one of the factors that can be used to evaluate teachers. At UNCF—the United Negro College Fund—college is our middle name. But students who have been given an inadequate education before college face long odds of succeeding in—or even being admitted to—college. That’s what makes this issue our concern, and the concern of our students and of the 39 historically black colleges and universities that are members of UNCF. As I noted in my last post to this blog, just…
Read moreJuly 27, 2009 07:53 AM
How Can We Do Better At Closing The Achievement Gap Given Our Country's Limited Progress In This Arena? The first step to closing the achievement gap is to understand it. For example, there’s not just one education achievement gap but several. There’s a gap that opens in pre-school and kindergarten between children who are getting a structured preschool education and children who are essentially being baby-sat with no intellectual stimulation. There’s an elementary school gap between children who receive a strong, fundamental education and those—many of them minorities, but low-income and rural white children as well—who are being taught by…
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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.
