 Assistant
Secretary of Education Terrell Lynn Halaska, ’89, is an expert
on the workings of Capitol Hill. In recent years, she’s served
as a congressional press aide, as a deputy chief of staff at the
Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS), and also as a domestic policy advisor in
the George W. Bush White House.
Confirmed by the U.S. Senate last July to be the next Education
Secretary for Legislation and Congressional Affairs, the 38-year-old
Halaska
now finds herself as point woman for Bush’s 2006 education
agenda in congress.
A winter-weary Chicago-area native who followed her older sister
Jill out to sunny UCSD in the mid-1980s, Halaska says she benefited
greatly from a University-sponsored study-abroad program in her junior
year. “I spent that entire school year at the University of
Lyon, in France,” she recalls, “and it was extremely
interesting to sit in on international relations classes and see
how things looked from a European perspective.”
Inspired by those classes, Halaska earned a master’s
degree in Policy Studies at the Monterey Institute of International
Studies
before setting off for Washington and her
first job as a press aide to Wisconsin GOP Congressman Scott Klug.
“I have a real passion for policy issues,” Halaska says, “especially
those that affect
the children of this country.” Halaska battled hard behind
the scenes for Bush’s 2002 “
No Child Left Behind” elementary school assistance program.
“The data are now beginning to emerge,” she says. “And
they show that initiatives
of this kind can be very helpful in getting kids off to a good
start in the classroom. I think this is a model program that
we can all
learn from.” So what’s the biggest challenge she faces in her new job? “We’ve
got one million
public high school students dropping out each year in this country,
and it’s costing the economy at least $260 billion per year.
“That’s an economic issue, and it’s also a national security
issue. The high school dropout rate is an urgent problem, and we
have to do everything we can to fix it.”
— Tom Nugent
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