Today's interview questions

We've focused a lot on your early life and education through your time working in Greece as a Fulbright scholar. I want to focus today on your time at the Office of Education. I was reviewing your curriculum vitae and pairing it up with important language policies, and I wanted to talk a bit about what the Office of Education was like when you began in 1961, which was three-four years after the passage of the NDEA. What was the relationship of the Office of Education, and specifically your division, to the NDEA?

Now, I noticed that you became chief of the Language Research Section in 1965, the same year that the Higher Education Act was passed in Congress. Did your office and you have any involvement with the formation of the legislation for the HEA?

In 1966 you moved on to Georgetown and TESOL. In 1968 Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act. Did TESOL provide any expertise in writing the legislation, influence through lobbying members of Congress, etc?

(Tie this into educational leadership - listening to the trends of the day, sometimes being ahead of the curve. How did he do that? How did he pay attention to the breadth of information and stay current?)

Thanks to JNCL-NCLIS for providing some background for this reasearch!

National Language Policies: Pragmatism, Process and Products. (pdf)
Dr. James E. Alatis Curriculum Vitae.