Dr. Lindsay Whorton

Dr. Lindsay Whorton is proud to be a founding member of The Holdsworth Center. She helped design the Center’s programming and has served as president since 2019.

She is the author of “A New School Leadership Architecture,” which calls for a fundamental redesign of how leadership roles are structured and practiced in schools, offering a bold new blueprint to make jobs sustainable and give teachers the coaching and support they need so that students thrive.

Under Lindsay’s leadership, Holdsworth has grown from serving seven public school districts through its initial offering – the Holdsworth Partnership – to serving more than 1,900 leaders in 89 public school districts across several programs, all designed to build a bench of stronger superintendents and principals for Texas public schools.

Lindsay’s story with Holdsworth began in 2015, when Charles Butt, Chairman of H-E-B, tapped her to work with an organizing board designing the center’s first programs. At the time, Lindsay was working as a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Washington D.C. She officially joined The Holdsworth Center team shortly after its launch in January 2017.

In her role as managing director of district support, Lindsay helped create and evolve Holdsworth’s model for supporting partner districts to develop aspiring leaders, place them in leadership roles and support them as they progress along their leadership journey.

Lindsay’s dive into education research began in 2009, when she was named a Rhodes Scholar and went on to earn a master’s degree in comparative social policy and a doctorate in social policy from Oxford University.

During her time at Oxford, Lindsay spent a year at the University of Helsinki, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She visited schools and classrooms to understand Finland’s world-renowned teacher education system. In 2016, Routledge published her book “Teachers Unions and Education Reform in Comparative Contexts,” which examined the impact of teachers’ unions on performance-related pay reform in Finland, Switzerland, Texas and Florida.

A native of Independence, Missouri, Lindsay earned bachelor’s degree in secondary education and English from Drake University in Iowa, where she served as a captain of the women’s basketball team. Lindsay helped lead the underdog team to a Cinderella finish in 2007 by winning the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament championship and was named the tournament’s outstanding player and a First-Team Academic All-American.