Meet the Department of Education’s new chief lobbyist, Micah Lasher.
At the Post’s Daily Politics blog, Liz Benjamin reports that Lasher, a 27-year-old political whiz kid fresh off a stint in Rep. Jerry Nadler’s office, is now the DOE’s executive director of public affairs. That’s the position held by Terence Tolbert until his sudden death at the beginning of November while he was on leave working for the Obama campaign in Nevada. Lasher has already updated his Facebook profile (above) to reflect his new job.
As the DOE’s top lobbyist, Lasher is now responsible for pushing the DOE’s agenda in Albany. At the top of that agenda, of course, is convincing lawmakers to preserve mayoral control before the 2002 law giving control of the city schools to the mayor expires at the end of June. Lasher will also have to work some magic if the city’s schools are to escape relatively unscathed in this year’s budget fight. (Fortunately, he has experience working magic; he published a book on the subject when he was just 14.)
By the time Lasher graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1999, he had already worked on several local campaigns. In 2002, while he was still enrolled at New York University, Lasher helped found Knickerbocker SKD, the political communications firm that counts among its clients the Fund for Public Schools, the DOE’s non-profit fundraising wing, and Caroline Kennedy, who worked as a DOE fundraiser from 2002 to 2004.