Susan J. Bodilly is Acting Director, RAND Education and Senior Policy Scientist at RAND. She has analyzed an array of K-12 improvement initiatives such as the General Electric College Bound program; attempts by high schools to integrate academic and vocational education; attempts by the federal government to return Section Six schools on military bases to local control; and attempts by schools to implement Perkins legislation as evaluated under the National Assessment of Vocational Education. Bodilly was a lead evaluator of the New American Schools Initiative. She is currently focused on how to improve the contribution of the arts to learning and improving early childhood and out-of-school-time offerings.
Ronald F. Ferguson, Lecturer in Public Policy, is an economist and Senior Research Associate at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and has taught at Harvard since 1983. His teaching and publications cover a variety of issues related to education and economic development. Much of his research since the mid-1990s has focused on racial achievement gaps, appearing in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution, and the U.S. Department of Education, in addition to various books and scholarly journals. He is the creator and Director of the Tripod Project for School Improvement and is also the Faculty Cochair and Director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University.
Norm Fruchter is the Director of the Community Involvement Program (CIP), formerly part of New York University for more than a decade, now part of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. He has previously worked as Director of the NYU Institute for Education & Social Policy and Clinical Professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, Education Grants Officer for the Aaron Diamond Foundation, Senior Consultant for the Academy for Educational Development and Advocates for Children of New York, and director of the Institute for Citizen Involvement in Education in New Jersey. Additionally, Fruchter was one of the founders and directors of Independence High School in Newark, an alternative high school for drop-outs. For ten years, he served as an elected school board member in Brooklyn's District 15. He has published several novels and his latest education book, Urban Schools, Public Will, is due from Teachers College Press early in 2007.
Susan Moore Johnson is the Pforzheimer Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she served as the Academic Dean from 1993-1999. A former high school teacher and administrator, Johnson studies and teaches about teacher policy, school organization, educational leadership, and school improvement in schools and school systems. Johnson is a member of the board of directors of the National Academy of Education and a recipient of a Senior Scholar Grant from the Spencer Foundation. She is the author of Teacher Unions in Schools (1983), Teachers at Work (1990), Leading to Change: The Challenge of the New Superintendency (1996), Finders and Keepers: Helping New Teachers Survive and Thrive in Our Schools (2004) and many published articles.
Jim Kemple leads MDRC's work in education, with expertise in evaluation design, site selection and engagement, experimental and quasi-experimental impact analyses, field research, and project management. He advises on evaluation design and site selection for the demonstration and evaluation of Academic Curricula in After School Programs and for the evaluation of Professional Development for Early Grade Literacy, and has served as principal investigator for MDRC's Career Academies evaluation and for the evaluation of the Talent Development Middle School and High School models. Kemple also advises on research design and impact analysis for MDRC's evaluation of Project GRAD and Scaling Up First Things First. Kemple holds a masters degree and a doctorate in education policy from Harvard University.
Hamilton Lankford is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where he is involved in a variety of activities that link research to education policy. In New York, these have included his research and expert testimony in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, research and consultancy for the New York State Special Commission on Educational Structure, Policies, and Practices (1993-94), and work as a member of two NYS Board of Regents Technical Study Groups. More recently, he organized a symposium concerned with New York’s Teacher Workforce (2001) and participated in the Symposium on Education Finance and Organization Structure in NYS Schools (2004), both sponsored by the Education Finance Research Consortium. His academic publications in both economic and education policy journals include research on the teaching workforce, the allocation of education resources, the determinants of school choice and the effects of enhanced school choice. In ongoing research, he is a principal investigator on Teacher Pathways Project, focusing on the linkages between teacher preparation, teacher labor markets and student outcomes. This project, which is now in its fourth year and focuses on New York City teachers and students, has received funding from the Carnegie Corporation, City University of New York, National Science Foundation, NYS Education Department, Spencer Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.
Henry (Hank) M. Levin is the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education and Director, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education (NCSPE) at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research focuses on a multitude of issues including the economics of education, cost-effectiveness analysis, school reform, and educational vouchers. He is also the David Jacks Professor of Education and Economics, Emeritus, at Stanford University where he spent 31 years.
Susanna Loeb is an associate professor of education at Stanford University, specializing in the economics of education and the relationship between schools and federal, state and local policies. She studies resource allocation, looking specifically at how teachers' preferences and teacher preparation policies affect the distribution of teaching quality across schools and how the structure of state finance systems affects the level and distribution of funds to districts. She also studies poverty policies including welfare reform and early-childhood education programs. Susanna is also director of the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at Stanford, co-director of Policy Analysis for California Education, an associate professor of business (by courtesy) at Stanford, and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Pedro Noguera is a professor in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. He is also the Executive Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education and the co-Director of the Institute for the study of Globalization and Education in Metropolitan Settings (IGEMS). An urban sociologist, Noguera’s scholarship and research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions in the urban environment.
David Rindskopf, Distinguished Professor in the Ph.D. Programs in Educational Psychology and Psychology at the City University of New York (CUNY) is considered to be one of the leading experts in the applications of statistical methodology to important research problems in psychology, education, and related fields. He has made pioneering contributions in a wide variety of areas, including structural equation modeling, latent class analysis, categorical data analysis, missing data analysis, meta analysis, and hierarchical linear models. Many of his papers, published in prestigious journals, have become standards in the field of applied statistics. He has also written numerous book chapters and co-authored the textbook Applied Statistics: A First Course (Prentice-Hall, 1988). Rindskopf has taught at The Graduate Center for over twenty-five years and was also a visiting professor at UCLA (1990-1). He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a rare honor for someone outside of statistics and biostatistics departments, and he served as President of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology in 2003-2004. He received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University
Lauren B. Resnick is University Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where she directs the prestigious Learning Research and Development Center. She founded and directs LRDC’s Institute for Learning, which is helping several major U.S. urban school districts raise academic achievement for all students. The institute focuses on professional development based on cognitive learning principles and effort-oriented education. Dr. Resnick is also co-founder of the New Standards Project, which has developed standards and assessments that have widely influenced state and school district practice. Her current research focuses on school reform, assessment, the nature and development of thinking abilities, and the role of talk and discourse in learning.
Dr. Resnick is a past president of the American Educational Research Association, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education, and a member of the executive committee of the European Association on Research for Learning and Instruction.
Melissa Roderick is the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a co-director at the Consortium on Chicago School Research. Professor Roderick is an expert in urban school reform, high school reform, high stakes testing, minority adolescent development, and school transitions. Her work has focused attention on the transition to high school as a critical point in students' school careers and her new work is examines the transition to college among Chicago Public School students. In prior work, she led a multi-year evaluation of Chicago's initiative to end social promotion and has conducted research on school dropout, grade retention, and the effects of summer programs. From 2001 to 2003, Professor Roderick joined the administration of the Chicago Public Schools to establish a new Department of Planning and Development. At SSA Professor Roderick is the faculty director of a new program in community schools and youth development and is a co-leader of the Network for College Success, a network of high school principals in the Chicago Public Schools. She is a founding board member and currently serves as the chair of the board of North Lawndale College Preparatory Charter High School.
Leanna Stiefel is Professor of Economics at the Wagner School of Public Policy. Her areas of expertise are school finance and education policy, applied economics and applied statistics. Some of her current and recent research projects include: patterns of resource allocation in large city schools; costs of small high schools in New York City; effects of school organization on student achievement; racial test score gaps; measurement of efficiency and productivity in public schools; and segregation, resource use and achievement of immigrant school children. She is author of Statistical Analysis for Public and Non-Profit Managers (1990) and co-author of Measuring School Performance and Efficiency: Implications for Practice and Research (2005) as well as The Measurement of Equity in School Finance (1984), and her work appears in journals and edited books. She is past president of the American Education Finance Association, a member of the National Center of Education Statistics Technical Planning Panel (US Department of Education), on the policy council of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), and a governor on the New York State Education Finance Research Consortium. She has been a consultant for organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the Education Commission of the States, the New York ACLU, and the Campaign for Fiscal Equity.
Richard Arum (ex-officio) is program director of Educational Research at the SSRC as well as professor of sociology and education at New York University. Arum is editor of The Structure of Schooling: Readings in the Sociology of Education as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles on education appearing in American Sociological Review, Criminology, Annual Review of Sociology, International Journal of Sociology and Sociology of Education. His recent book, Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), analyzes variation in court decisions and how these judicial opinions have affected public school disciplinary practices across jurisdictions and over time. He is coeditor with Adam Gamoran and Yossi Shavit of a comparative study on expansion, differentiation and access to higher education in fifteen countries (forthcoming Stanford University Press).
