Blog

Your Education Road Map

Politics K-12®

ESSA. Congress. State chiefs. School spending. Elections. Education Week reporters keep watch on education policy and politics in the nation’s capital and in the states. Read more from this blog.

Federal

Press Secretary Daren Briscoe Leaving Education Department

By Michele McNeil — July 08, 2013 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

U.S. Department of Education spokesman-in-chief Daren Briscoe, who has helped manage the communications effort around No Child Left Behind Act waivers, will leave his post at the end of August to become a vice president for GMMB, a public relations and consulting firm in Washington.

This continues the exodus of top-level folks from the Education Department.

Briscoe came to the Education Department in May 2011 as deputy press secretary and rose to the top spokesman slot late last year. He’s a journalist-turned-bureaucrat who joined the Obama administration in 2009 after covering the campaign for Newsweek.

In addition to working spin on waivers, he ushered through the release of a flood of information from the office for civil rights’ data collection effort and tried to help his boss, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, prove that sequestration really, really, really was going to cost educators their jobs. Among the more crazy claims he got to debate were those that Duncan was trying to control local school curriculum and even map kids’ brains via the common core.

It’s not known yet who will take his post (though a new deputy, Cameron French, was just hired).

Related Tags: