It's been rumored before, and it's not quite official, but Jim Shelton, until Friday a program director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has started work at the U.S. Department of Education. He told colleagues in an email that he will lead its "innovation portfolio." I'm making a little leap of faith to assume that he means he will head the Department's Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII).
If true, this is another great appointment. (I'll save the Reform-o-Meter treatment* for another day, once the news is confirmed.) But I won't wait to say how it makes me happy to know that OII will be in such good hands. I was fortunate to get to play a role in creating OII, and those of us that got it off the ground consciously tried to model it after Gates and other "venture" philanthropies. That's most apparent in the rhetoric we used to describe the office, which we wanted to be the "nimble, entrepreneurial arm of the U.S. Department of Education" that "makes strategic investments in innovative educational practices." As a part of a government bureaucracy, it hasn't always been able to live up to those lofty ideals, but it is still considered to be the best place in the whole agency to work, and, thanks to its excellent career staff, is respected for its thoughtful management of myriad federal grant programs.
Jim's background is a perfect fit for OII's "portfolio." And OII is a perfect fit for President Obama's "innovation" agenda.
* Let me give a shout-out to Andy Smarick for grabbing the keys to the Reform-o-Meter last week and rating President Obama's big education speech while I was resting and relaxing 5,000 miles away. At first I thought he'd gone a little soft in giving the speech a "Warm" rating, but our readers seem to think it was Red Hot. Which only goes to show that I should stay away longer next time!
