Crossing the River Jordan Award

Previous Winners

NAME (2004)
Richard I. Beattie, founding chairman of the board of New Visions for Public Schools, has been an education activist for 30 years. During the Carter Administration, Mr. Beattie was deputy general counsel, executive assistant to the secretary, and then general counsel of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In 1980, he was in charge of organizing the newly created US Department of Education. During the 1980s, at the request of then Mayor Koch, Mr. Beattie chaired a commission on special education in New York City, which led to significant changes in the organization and education of handicapped students. He subsequently served on New York City’s Board of Education. Mr. Beattie sits on the boards of various nonprofit organizations to include the National Women’s Law Center, Sesame Workshop, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases. He is chairman of the executive committee of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, where he specializes in mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, and corporate law and finance, and a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.