Mickey Muldoon
Policy and Operations Associate
Mickey Muldoon is the Policy and Operations Associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where his responsibilities span development, writing and editing, research, accounting, executive assistance, and occasional translation. His areas of interest include the high school-to-college transition, educational technology, and the economics of education.
Prior to the 2008 presidential election, he was a field organizer for Barack Obama in Richland County, Ohio. He is grateful to the residents of Mansfield and Shelby, Ohio for their hospitality and wisdom, and was honored to receive the 2009 Shelby Area Democratic Club’s Truman-Kennedy Award.
Mickey is a proud graduate of Evanston Township High School and Harvard University, where he earned an A.B. in Psychology in 2007. His interest in education reform matured at ETHS, which regularly sends its top graduates to elite colleges and art schools, but has also been unable to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind.
In college, Mickey became interested in computer science, Romance languages, and the problem of consciousness. His attempts to synthesize these interests resulted in an unsuccessful “grand unified theory” of physics, linguistics, and psychology. In a more successful experiment, he learned basic French over the course of one week, using a computer program that he created to maximize memorization speed.
During and after college, he traveled extensively throughout Brazil, where he met his wife, Luana Oliveira Muldoon. He worked as an English teacher in Sao Paulo and Bahia, where he saw firsthand the potential of technology to deliver world-class instruction in the developing world. He learned about life from the residents of Bairro do Mellos, a small mountain valley town in the interior of Sao Paulo state.
He enjoys playing soccer video games and playing guitar.
