Mary Alice Heuschel is standing wide-eyed over a cardboard box full of identical, blue, hard-bound books. “Wow. I’ve seen this on paper before, but never like this!” These are copies of her dissertation, which she completed at Seattle Pacific University in the middle of a meteoric rise from working as a principal to accepting one of the most influential positions in education in the U.S. Due to the fast pace of her career, she hasn’t had a chance to pick up these important volumes until now.

Mary Alice Heuschel is the deputy superintendent for the State of Washington’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), and the leader in implementing “No Child Left Behind” in Washington state. “I take very little credit for the success of what we’ve accomplished,” she says, “because we’ve had over 200 stakeholders involved in developing the plan. At a federal level, we are the leader in the country—without question.”

Heuschel had already spent several years of teaching all over the U.S. and Europe (including a gig at West Point), and four years as a principal with the Yelm school district, when she set foot on SPU soil. She entered the Superintendent Certificate program, focusing on school administration and leadership. David Steele, associate professor of educational administration, describes Heuschel as being “in the top one percent of those who make significant contributions to education [in the U.S.].”

After SPU, Heuschel’s plan to become an assistant superintendent in a district did not pan out. “Politics played a role in that not happening,” she explains.

So did SPU. In 1999, Steele gave her a tip about an opening at OSPI, where they needed someone experienced in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. She was hired as the assistant superintendent for ‘the CIA’—Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment. Eight months later, when the deputy of Learning and Teaching chose to vacate the position, it became a matter of “right place, right time,” and … of course … right person.

In 2003, Heuschel received the Washington Association of School Administrators (WASA) Leadership Award for exemplary efforts in maintaining Washington State’s education reform model while staying in compliance with the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. She was honored for exemplifying outstanding leadership abilities as she assembled teams of educators to collaborate on a solution that offered flexibility in a highly rigid federal structure. No one at OSPI has ever received such an honor. Heuschel later received the Association of Washington School Principals (AWSP) Leadership Award.

Heuschel remains a big fan of SPU. “I see SPU —particularly under associate professor of Educational Leadership Lisa Bjork’s leadership—trying to align the training and the programs to the grade-level expectations, to the state’s Essential Academic Learning Requirements, to education reform. SPU does provide the foundation of the importance of what’s happening at a state level and a national level.”

Looking back, she says, “My experiences with SPU have been absolutely tremendous, both educationally and personally. When you have big universities and large classes, you don’t always have the individual relationships with professors. I benefited from the focus on the superintendency, and from the professors having that experience, bringing in school board members, [helping us learn] beyond the books and the research papers. The real-life application was a tremendous value.”