Dr. Elena Darling-Hammond's path into this work began in 2005, when she started as a paraprofessional in a mixed elementary classroom during her student teaching. Over the next five years, she worked across elementary grades — in general education classrooms, special education settings, and math academies, supporting students who were performing below grade level.

By 2010, she had seen the same thing from every angle: students whose brilliance was being dimmed by systems that were never designed to serve them. That year, she founded Learn for Life Education and began working directly with families, tutoring students of all ages and across a wide range of learning differences, sitting alongside parents in IEP meetings, and coaching teachers in their children's classrooms. Before entering her doctoral program at Stanford, she spent three years as a teacher educator, preparing the next generation of teachers to build inclusive, accessible classrooms from day one.
 

At Stanford, she co-taught courses in literacy and disability justice, supported research-practice partnerships with schools and industry around literacy, and published peer-reviewed research on the impact of educational technology on student learning outcomes. Her doctoral research examined what actually helps beginning teachers use inclusive practices — a question rooted in everything she had seen and done in the years before.
 

That through line — student, family, educator, and system — has shaped everything she does.