Don Moore

In reporting for her insightful and engaging account of the birth of local school councils, Mary O’Connell asked her interviewees whom they thought was most responsible for the historic legislation that created them. Don Moore and Designs for Change, the research and advocacy organization he founded in 1977, easily took first place.

Local school councils and their power to select principals and approve budgets and curriculum were the hallmark of a comprehensive set of reforms that decentralized the school system, shifting funds from central office to schools, giving principals authority to fill teacher vacancies themselves, and ending the iron grip that school engineers had on the hours schools could be open...