Crossing the River Jordan Award

Previous Winners

David Hornbeck (1994)
David Hornbeck has been at the front lines of public school improvement at the local, state, and national levels for more than three decades, playing a major role in some of the nation’s most significant education reform efforts. As an ordained minister, practicing lawyer, school administrator, tireless advocate, government official, and private citizen, he has focused his energy and attention on the moral, as well as the practical, dimensions of ensuring quality education for all children.

From his experience as a state education official in Pennsylvania, then as the Maryland State Superintendent of Schools, Mr. Hornbeck gained a wealth of knowledge about the institutions and administration of the contemporary public education system. His years as an attorney with the law firm Hogan & Hartson, and as an educational consultant, provided him with a crucial “outsider” perspective on educational structures and systems.

In 1990, the Kentucky state legislature passed one of the most comprehensive public education reform plans ever enacted. The Kentucky Educational Reform Act (KERA) of 1990, a package of educational standards, finance reform, and administrative accountability measures, laid out a clear blueprint for improving education across the state. David Hornbeck was a key consultant to the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, who drafted the Reform Act; many of his central ideas about educational improvement were incorporated into the final bill. In the decade since the passage of KERA, there have been measurable improvements in student achievement at schools throughout the state.

In 1994, Mr. Hornbeck took on perhaps his greatest challenge. He set out to implement many of his most deeply held beliefs and theories about educational improvement in the nation’s fifth largest urban school system, as superintendent of the Philadelphia Public Schools. Faced with an often-skeptical school board, increasingly desperate parents, and the outright opposition of the city’s teachers union, he sought to implement the sort of comprehensive school improvement program that he had been advocating for years. That comprehensive program, known as Children Achieving, received over $160 million worth of support from the corporate and nonprofit sectors, achieved notable concessions from the teachers union, and very quickly began to make serious strides toward a functional reorganization of the school system.

In addition to his direct contributions to public schools, David Hornbeck has always been vitally involved with the nonprofit sector’s efforts to support and sustain public education, and improve the options of underprivileged children. He has served on numerous taskforces and commissions on adolescent development, chaired the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and has chaired the boards of directors of the Children’s Defense Fund and Public Education Network for more than a decade.

In recognition of the ambitious school reform effort in one of the nation’s largest urban school systems, in acknowledgement of the results he helped to achieve, and in honor of his years of service to public education and to the local education fund movement, David Hornbeck received the very first Crossing the River Jordan Award. Although Mr. Hornbeck moved on from his role as Philadelphia’s superintendent in 2000, the changes he put into place and the improvements he made in student achievement in the city’s schools stand as a testament to his influence on the lives of millions of children.