School & District Management

Broad Foundation Adds Six Big Names to District Prize Judges’ Panel

By Christina A. Samuels — February 27, 2012 1 min read
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Six nationally known leaders in media, politics and education will be augmenting the nine-member panel that selects the winner of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, the Broad Foundation announced today.

The new panelists will be:


  • Former Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, who is currently the chairman and chief executive office of the Motion Picture Association of America;
  • Donald Graham, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Washington Post Company;
  • Michael Lomax, the president and chief executive officer of the United Negro College Fund;
  • Former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell;
  • •Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University; and
  • Mortimer Zuckerman, the chairman and editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report and publisher of the New York Daily News.

These panelists will join Henry Cisneros, the former U.S. secretary of housing and urban development; Susan Hockfield, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; former North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt; Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and former chairwoman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Donna E. Shalala, president of the University of Miami and former U.S. secretary of health and human services; Andrew Stern, a senior fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law and Public Policy at Columbia University, and president emeritus of Service Employees International Union; and three former U.S. secretaries of education—Roderick Paige, Richard Riley, and Margaret Spellings.

The 15-member jury will select which of four finalists will receive the $550,000 Broad Prize, which is used for to provide scholarships for the winning district’s graduating seniors. The three other finalists receive $150,000 each, totaling $1 million in all.

The Broad Prize has a two-step selection process. Seventy-five districts from around the country are deemed eligible each year to receive the prize, based on their population, demographics, and urban location. A panel of 24 education leaders
narrows the 75 potential candidates down to four, which are presented to the selection jury.

This year’s Broad Prize finalists will be announced in April, the foundation said. The 2011 winner was the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C. district.

A version of this news article first appeared in the District Dossier blog.