From desegregation to Fisher case, lawyer has spent lifetime on education access And when he read about music, he felt the opposite of pride when he learned that his favorite musical groups were recording successful covers of black artists" music without paying them fair royalties. He still credits those childhood passions with leading him to his lifelong vocation, as a lawyer at the Education Department, advocating for equitable services for students of all racial, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds for more than 40 years. Rosenfelt has been nominated for the prestigious Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal for his career achievements at the Department of Education, where he has defended students" rights to a good education since the Nixon administration. During that time, he has offered legal guidance to the department on a wide variety of cases. He arrived in 1971 after working for two years as a lawyer advocating for New York City tenants" rights. He'd attended college at the University of Pennsylvania and law school at Columbia, where he slept outside an administration building during the 1968 student protests to try to keep police from removing the student occupiers inside. One of his first assignments at the Department of Education was a desegregation case in Alabama. When he arrived in that state with a team from Washington, Rosenfelt recalled, the local superintendent made a point of showing the guns in his holster as he asked, "Now what can I do for you feds?" Rosenfelt was not intimidated. The school district, threatened with the loss of federal Title I funding for programs for poor students, quickly desegregated. "It just kind of amazed me how quickly, sometimes, when you're focused on the law, that you can really get positive results," Rosenfelt said. For two years, he has served as designated general counsel of the Department of Education, supervising the workforce of more than 100 lawyers and playing a role in every major question of education law. "Frequently, he knows more about the law than any other member of the team, and he's also very creative about using the law to do the right thing," said Joseph Conaty, senior adviser to the deputy secretary of education. Rosenfelt has worked on numerous cases that have reached the Supreme Court, including the affirmative-action case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin that was decided this year. He helped devise legal strategies for offering No Child Left Behind waivers to many schools and helped craft a plan for quickly disbursing almost $100 billion in stimulus money for education programs. He said he prides himself on several Supreme Court cases - one that decided that poor students at parochial schools could access federal supplementary services on school grounds and two others that proved that the federal government could recover money from misused grants. Asked what his to-do list looks like on a day-to-day basis, the Falls church resident replies, "It's sort of a day-to-night job." Yet despite the long hours, he finds time for numerous pursuits outside of work. For 19 years, he has coordinated an annual exchange program between the McLean High School orchestra that his daughters once played in and a school in Germany. He still travels with the group on every trip, although his daughters have long since graduated. Both followed in their father's footsteps, becoming lawyers in Washington - one at a law firm, the other at the Department of Justice. He represents the Department of Education on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and he delivered a paper while representing the United States at the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. "Studying about how law and education could be corrupted for really bad purposes - it gives me an incredible grounding of what's ethical and what's not," he said. He has worked as a rock music critic, harkening back to his childhood interest, and has taught education law at the Catholic University of America. He has even taken a few turns as a stand-up comedian. But Conaty, who nominated Rosenfelt for the medal, brushes aside Rosenfelt's many interests outside of work. "He's got all these interesting sidelights - rock-and-roll, the Holocaust Museum - but the main storyline is what he does day-to-day to help us provide support to impoverished children, children with special needs, adult education and everything else he does around here," Conaty said. This is about a lifetime of work serving the public, and that's what he has done from his earliest days.