Key Note Speaker:
Bill Symonds, Director of Pathways to Prosperity Project at Harvard Graduate School of Education

Bill Symonds is the director of the Pathways to Prosperity Project, which is based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The Pathways Project was created in 2008 to find promising solutions to our increasing national failure to prepare many young adults for success. In February, 2011, the Pathways Project released a major report summing up its research and recommendations in Washington, at an event that included keynote remarks from Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other key officials. The report is entitled, Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century. The report has generated enormous interest from around the nation, including speaking invitations from organizations in more than 10 states. The Pathways Project now hopes to work with several states that would like to implement the Pathways vision for preparing their young people.
Symonds helped create the Pathways Project while he was a senior fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2007-8. Prior to that, he spent nearly 25 years as a senior correspondent and bureau chief for Business Week Magazine. During his career at Business Week, he covered business in the U.S. and abroad, and led bureaus in Pittsburgh, Denver, Boston, Toronto and Rome, Italy. He also served as Business Week’s chief education correspondent for many years, and wrote extensively about the role of U.S. business in school reform.

Download Keynote Presentation