Education, Equity, and Health: Roberto Rodriguez on Building Opportunity
Raised in West Michigan as the child of immigrants from Venezuela and Mexico, Roberto Rodríguez experienced firsthand how access to education shapes the trajectory of a life. That perspective would come to guide a career at the intersection of education policy, equity, and public service.
Currently a Doris Duke Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, Rodríguez has held senior leadership roles across government and civil society, including serving as deputy assistant for education to President Barack Obama in the White House and as chief counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the U.S. Senate.
During a talk with the Conversations in Health: Global to Local class on February 24, 2026, Rodríguez reflected on a career that spans grassroots advocacy and federal policymaking. His experiences demonstrate how education policy functions as a structural determinant of health and long-term opportunity.
For Rodríguez, the importance of education is personal.
During his upbringing, which coincided with a period shaped by court-ordered desegregation in West Michigan, Rodríguez attended a magnet school that brought together students from across his community. He described the experience as formative, recalling the “beauty” of encountering aspects of his city and perspectives he otherwise would not have been exposed to. Education created opportunities to encounter new perspectives and communities. “Education was in my DNA,” Rodríguez recalled.
Rodríguez carried that conviction into his academic and professional life. As an undergraduate studying organizational studies at the University of Michigan, he founded an organization to support Latino students. He later earned a master’s degree in education from Harvard University and worked in college access initiatives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Across these experiences, a consistent theme became apparent: education is an avenue for opportunity and a responsibility that extends beyond the individual.
As Rodríguez emphasized, education was a defining part of his grounding and force. He then went on to direct research and policy analysis at UnidosUS and later served as president and chief executive officer of Teach Plus, where he built an equity-driven teacher leadership movement that engaged thousands of educators in shaping public policy and classroom practice. His work in these spaces ultimately led him to the U.S. Senate and the Obama administration, where he helped develop national education initiatives aimed at expanding opportunity across the educational continuum.
Throughout the conversation, Rodríguez’s remarks framed education as a form of civic infrastructure — an infrastructure that shapes health outcomes, economic mobility, and opportunity. Whether serving on the local school board or influencing federal policy, Rodríguez underscored the importance of listening to communities that education systems are meant to serve. Parents, teachers, and students themselves, he argued, must be part of the policymaking process if reforms are to produce meaningful change.
Under Rodríguez’s leadership, federal education efforts expanded access to early childhood education, strengthened STEM education, and increased college access through Pell Grant expansion. His work also contributed to the bipartisan passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which replaced many mandates of No Child Left Behind by shifting more authority to states while maintaining accountability for underserved students.
Rodríguez’s career is proof that sustained engagement across multiple levels of governance drives systemic reform. Education policy is inseparable from broader questions of public health and social equity, demanding the courage to rebuild systems until opportunity is no longer determined by circumstance.
Nazgol Missaghi (C’28) is an undergraduate student majoring in global health at Georgetown University.