Jay Urwitz is a Deputy General Counsel dealing with accountability, compliance, remediation, and programmatic issues.

Prior to joining the Department, Mr. Urwitz was a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where he practiced education law for over 30 years. Before that, he was the Legislative Assistant for Domestic Policy for Senator Edward Kennedy and clerked for the Hon. Irving L. Goldberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Urwitz attended school in Queens, New York (P.S. 154, 164, 179, 216, and Francis Lewis High School); Harpur College, the State University of New York at Binghamton; and received his M.P.P. at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, and his J.D. at Harvard Law School, where he was a Senior Editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Urwitz has been a member of the Board of Trustees of Teachers College, Columbia University, and of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, where he served on the Executive Committee, and chaired the Finance and Development Committees.

He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Education Week, and other publications.