Biography
Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether, a national nonprofit working to transform education so young people can achieve outcomes that lead to fulfilling lives and thriving communities. Starting March 2026, Rotherham will be collaborating with EdPolicyWorks as a one-year Visiting Scholar and EPW Affiliate. The work is intended to support efforts to deepen connections to Virginia’s education policy landscape and to provide value to faculty, students, and external partners.
Rotherham is known for heterodoxy, empiricism, and student-focused pragmatism. He works at the intersection of research, policy, news media, and practice. He served at the White House as special assistant to the president for domestic policy during the Clinton administration. Andy twice served on the Virginia Board of Education under governors from both political parties where he was a champion of more transparency, accountability, and greater focus on quality for students. Rotherham has taught in a variety of settings, including at UVA where he helped design and launch the popular EDLF 2050 course.
A longtime independent voice in national education debates, Rotherham writes the blog and newsletter Eduwonk.com and has authored or edited four books on education policy, along with more than 500 published op-eds, articles, papers, and book chapters. He was a founding board member of several influential education organizations including The PIE Network, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, The Mind Trust, and The 74. He is on advisory boards for the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, RAND, and the National Association of State Boards of Education’s EdTech Advisory Group on AI. He recently served as a commissioner on the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Commission on the American Workforce and holds senior fellowships at the Progressive Policy Institute and The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development.