Susan Ochshorn

Susan Ochshorn is the founder of ECE PolicyWorks, a consulting firm dedicated to laying the foundation for healthy, successful, and productive citizens. She has long been committed to progressive policies that integrate early childhood into the larger education reform conversation. A former journalist, her work appears across new and old media, and in the nonprofit sector, including monthly pieces at Huffington Post. She is the creator of ECE Policy Matters, where she blogs to foster policy literacy and thought leadership among early childhood professionals.

While at Mesa Refuge, she worked on a book, ECE Policy Matters: A Road Map for Change, which examines critical issues in 21st –century early childhood policy.

Her most recent book, Squandering America’s Future (Teacher’s College Press 2015), is eliciting interest and excitement in the early childhood field, in education writ large, and in the social justice community. It was July 2015’s selection of the online “book club,” hosted by the National Center for Children in Poverty, at the Mailman School, at Columbia, following Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, featured in May. The book was also in the running for the 2015 Sidney Hillman prize. Praise for the book has been been stellar, coming from all corners: Deborah Meier, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Janet Gornick, Linda Darling-Hammond, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Samuel Meisels, Jose Luis Vilson, among others. Linda called the book “eye-opening—an urgent call to action that could change the course of the nation’s future,” and Janet, “a delightful read on a dead-serious subject.”