James Osborn
Director of National Field Operations
Osborn is the Director of National Field Operations for EdWorks, which includes day-to-day management of the Ohio High School Transformation Initiative (OHSTI). He began his work with EdWorks’ parent company, KnowledgeWorks Foundation, in fall 2003 as a coach for small school leaders in the Ohio High School Transformation Initiative. He was recruited to be the full time staff Field Manager for OHSTI in fall 2004. As Field Manager for OHSTI, Osborn leads a group of nationally-recognized school change coaches and oversees the field-based application of OHSTI’s coaching and technical assistance curricula. Osborn has more than 30 years of experience in public education, having served a teacher, coach, middle and high school principal and as a hearing officer for the Columbus Public Schools. He has presented at numerous educational conferences on high school reform and was selected as Ohio’s most Distinguished Secondary Principal of the year in 1993. Osborn literally lived this work in the field. Nearly a decade before small schools burst onto the national scene, Osborn converted his Columbus high school to small learning communities with no additional funding or outside assistance. Osborn has been a nationally-recognized school leader since the early 1990s, when the Federal Education Commission sought his expertise in the development of the document, "Prisoners of Time"