The University of Chicago Committee on Education

Stephen Raudenbush (Chair)
Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Sociology and the College
sraudenb@uchicago.edu
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Stephen Raudenbush, Ed.D., is the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Chairman of the Committee on Education. He received an Ed.D. in Policy Analysis and Evaluation Research in 1984 from Harvard University and was a professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan from 1998 until 2005.

He is a leading scholar on quantitative methods for studying child and youth development within social settings such as classrooms, schools, and neighborhoods. He is best known for work developing hierarchical linear models, with broad applications in the design and analysis of longitudinal and multilevel research. Raudenbush has been a Scientific Director of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, an ambitious study of how family, neighborhood and school settings shape the academic learning, social development, mental health and exposure to violence of children growing up in Chicago. He is currently studying the impact of residential and school mobility on student learning and developing new measures of school and classroom quality.

In 2008 he gave the annual Brown Lecture, established to commemorate the anniversary of the 1954 Supreme Court Decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which banned legally segregated school systems.

Elaine Allensworth
Co-Director
Consortium on Chicago School Research
elainea@ccsr.uchicago.edu

Guanglei Hong
Assistant Professor
Department of Comparative Human Development and the College
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Guanglei Hong obtained a Master's degree in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Michigan in 2004. Before joining the University of Chicago faculty in July 2009, she had been an Assistant Professor in the Human Development and Applied Psychology Department in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

She has focused her research on developing causal inference theories and methods for evaluating educational policies and instructional programs in multi-level, longitudinal settings. Her work addresses issues including (1) how to conceptualize and evaluate the causal effects of educational treatments when students’ responses to alternative treatments depend on various features of the organizational settings, (2) how to adjust for selection bias in estimating the effects of concurrent multi-valued educational treatments, (3) how to study instruction as time-varying treatments for students, and (4) how to conceptualize and analyze the mediating role of implementation in evaluating educational interventions.

Because advancements in these quantitative research methods are best illustrated and utilized through empirical investigations of prominent educational issues, she communicates with a broad audience through applying the causal inference methods to studies of specific policies and instructional practices such as grade retention, within-class grouping, language and reading instruction for English language learners, and elementary math instruction.

Her research has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the American Educational Research Association Grants Program, and the William T. Grant Foundation among other sources of funding. She has been elected to serve on the Editorial Boards of the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis journal and the Effective Education journal.

Selected Publications:

Hong, G., & Hong, Y. (2009). Reading instruction time and homogeneous grouping in kindergarten: An application of marginal mean weighting through stratification. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 31(1), 54-81.

Hong, G., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2008) Causal inference for time-varying instructional treatments. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 33(3), 333-362.

Hong, G., & Yu, B. (2008). Effects of kindergarten retention on children’s social-emotional development: An application of propensity score method to multivariate multi-level data. Special Section on New Methods in Developmental Psychology, 44(2), 407-421.

Hong, G., & Yu, B. (2007). Early grade retention and children’s reading and math learning in elementary years. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 29(4), 239-261.

Hong, G., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2006). Evaluating kindergarten retention policy: A case study of causal inference for multi-level observational data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 101(475), 901-910.

Hong, G., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2005). Effects of kindergarten retention policy on children's cognitive growth in reading and mathematics. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 27(3), 205-224.

Hong, G., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2003). “Causal inference for multi-level observational data with application to kindergarten retention study,” 2003 Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Social Statistics Section [CD-ROM, pp.1849-1856], Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association.

Awards:

William T. Grant Scholar, William T. Grant Foundation, 2009-2014

NAE/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, 2006-2007

AERA Mary Catherine Ellwein Outstanding Dissertation Award – Measurement and Quantitative Research Methodology, American Educational Research Association, Division D, 2005

Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for Research Related to Education, Spencer Foundation, 2003-2004

Joint Statistical Meetings Student Paper Competition Award, American Statistical Association, 2003

AERA Dissertation Grant, American Educational Research Association, 2002-2003

Micere Keels
Assistant Professor
Department of Comparative Human Development
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Micere Keels is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development and faculty affiliate with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. Her research centers on understanding children's development in context. Current research on neighborhood effects focuses on urban children's perception of their neighborhood, peer, school, and family environments. The key goal is to illuminate how children experience their structural and social environments. She is also developing research on parents' knowledge and beliefs about child development and how this affects their interactions with their children, leading to children starting kindergarten with different levels of “readiness to learn”. She received her Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy in 2005 from Northwestern University.

Timothy Knowles
Lewis-Sebring Executive Director
Center for Urban School Improvement
tknowles@uchicago.edu Show/Hide Biography

Timothy Knowles is Lewis-Sebring Executive Director and Senior Research Associate of the Center for urban School Improvement. Previously he served as Deputy Superintendent of the Boston Public Schools where he was responsible for overseeing school improvement and professional development, developing community partnerships, supervising school leaders and creating pilot schools citywide. He do-directed the Boston Annenberg Challenge, a $30 million effort to improve literacy instruction, and founded the Boston Leadership Academy and the Boston Teacher Residency non-profit organizations dedicated to creating a pipeline of educators for Boston Public Schools. Prior to Tim’s work in Boston, he served as founding director of a full service kindergarten to eighth-grade school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York City, and the Founding director of Teach for America-New York. He began his career teaching African and American history in Botswana and Boston. Timothy Knowles received his B.A. in anthropology and African history from Oberlin College and his doctorate in administration, planning and social policy from Harvard. He has written and talked extensively on school leadership and improving urban schools at scale.

Susan C. Levine
Professor
Department of Psychology and the College
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Susan Levine received her B.A. with honors from Simmons College in 1972, majoring in Psychology, Mathematics and Education and her Ph.D. in Psychology from M.I.T. in 1976. She joined the faculty at the University of Chicago that year. Professor Levine is co-director of the Center for Early Childhood Research and serves as the chair of the Psychology Department's program in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience. In addition, she chairs the department's Curriculum Committee and serves on the board of Chapin Hall.

Susan Goldin-Meadow
Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Psychology and Comparative Human Development and the College
sgm@uchicago.edu Show/Hide Biography

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Irving B. Harris Professor in the Department of Psychology and Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago. A year spent at the Piagetian Institute in Geneva while an undergraduate at Smith College piqued her interest in the relationship between language and thought, interests she continued to pursue in her doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. 1975). At Penn and in collaboration with Lila Gleitman and Heidi Feldman, she began her studies exploring whether children who lack a (usable) model for language can nevertheless create a language with their hands. She has found that deaf children whose profound hearing losses prevent them from learning the speech than surrounds them, and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign, invent gesture systems which are structured in language-like ways. This interest in how the manual modality can serve the needs of communication and thinking led to her current work on the gestures that accompany speech in hearing individuals. She has found that gesture can convey substantive information — information that is often not expressed in the speech it accompanies. Gesture can thus reveal secrets of the mind to those who pay attention.

Professor Goldin-Meadow's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the March of Dimes, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke. She has served as a member of the language review panel for NIH, has been a Member-at-Large to the Section on Linguistics and Language Science in AAAS, and was part of the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development sponsored by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine and leading to the book Neurons to Neighborhoods. She is a Fellow of AAAS, APS, and APA (Divisions 3 and 7). In 2001, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship which led to her two recently published books, Resilience of Language and Hearing Gesture. In addition, she edited Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought in collaboration with Dedre Gentner. She has received the Burlington Northern Faculty Achievement Award for Graduate Teaching and the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago. She will give the APS William James Distinguished Lecture at EPA this spring and will give the Nijmegen Lectures in December of 2004. She is currently the President of the Cognitive Development Society and the editor of the new journal sponsored by the Society for Language Development, Language Learning and Development.

Derek Neal
Professor
Department of Economics and the College
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Derek Neal received his PhD in economics from the University of Virginia. He began his academic career at the University of Chicago in 1991. From 1998-2001, he served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin before returning to Chicago. His current research focuses on measuring black-white labor market inequality and its causes. In related work, he is trying to understand the determinants of the black-white skill gap among young persons as well as black-white differences in family structure.  In other work, he has examined the performance of private versus public schools while paying particular attention to the performance of Catholic schools in large cities. His recent work explores why black-white skill gaps stopped closing during the 1990s and why black children in large cities have fared so poorly in terms of their achievement during the past two decades or more.

Professor Neal directs the Chicago Workshop on Black-White Inequality. Beginning in 2006, the workshop will hold bi-annual conferences that explore various aspects on black-white inequality and why relative progress for blacks in the United States stopped in many respects during the past two decades. In 2006, he began work with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach on a project to evaluate the extent to which high-stakes testing in Chicago Public schools has led to increased achievement generally or simply increased performance on specific assessments. He has served as an Advisory Editor for Economics Letters and as a co-editor for the Journal of Human Resources. He now serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Labor Economics.

Charles Payne
Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor
School of Social Service Administration
cmpayne@uchicago.edu Show/Hide Biography

Charles M. Payne is the Frank P. Hixon Professor in the School of Social Service Administration. His interest include urban education and school reform, social inequality, social change and modern African American history. He is the author of Getting What We Ask For: the Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Education (1984)) and I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississipppi Civil Rights Movement (1995). The latter has won awards from the Southern Regional Council, Choice Magazine, the Simon Wisenthal Center and Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. He is co-author of Debating the Civil Rights Movement (1999) and co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope; A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950 (2003). Currently, he is finishing So Much Reform, So Little Change (forthcoming, Harvard Education Publishing Group) which is concerned with what we have learned about persistence of failure in urban districts, and an anthology, Teach Freedom: The African American Tradition of Education for Liberation (forthcoming, Teachers College Press), which is concerned with Freedom School-like education. He is the recipient of a Senior Scholar grant from the Spencer Foundation and is a Resident Fellow at the foundation for 2006-2007. With the support of the Carnegie Scholar's Program, he is conducting a study of how school reform dialogue in other countries compares to the American situation. His work on urban schools is also supported by an Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for 2007-2008. Fletcher fellowships support work that contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U. S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

Payne was founding director of the Urban Education Project in Orange, New Jersey, a nonprofit community center that broadens educational experiences for urban youngsters. He has taught at Southern University, Williams College, Northwestern University and Duke University and won several teaching awards.Payne held the Charles Deering McCormick Chair for Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University and the Sally Dalton Robinson Chair for excellence in teaching and research at Duke University. He holds a bachelor's degree in Afro-American studies from Syracuse University and a doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University.

Melissa Roderick
Herman Dunlap Smith Professor
School of Social Service Administration
Co-Director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research
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Melissa Roderick is a Professor at the School of Social Service Administration and is a co-director at the Consortium on Chicago School Research. Professor Roderick is an expert in urban 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 examines the transition to college among Chicago Public School students. In prior work, Professor Roderick led a multi-year evaluation of Chicago's initiative to end social promotion. She has conducted research on school dropout, grade retention, and the effects of summer programs. She is an expert in mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in evaluation.

Her new work focuses on understanding the relationship between students' high school careers and preparation, their college selection choices, and their post-secondary outcomes through linked quantitative and qualitative research. In this joint project between the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Consortium on Chicago School Research, Professor Roderick is assisting CPS in tracking successive cohorts of Chicago students into college and building new indicators to assess the preparation of CPS graduates for college. Her research is drawing on analysis of school transcripts, surveys, and postsecondary tracking data to develop an understanding of how high schools may better prepare students for college access and success and may better build systems of support for students and their parents in translating college aspirations into concrete plans and academic readiness. The first report of this new research project From high school to the future: An analysis of the college attendance patterns, college qualifications, and college graduation rates of Chicago Public School graduates will be out in Spring 2006. As part of this work, Professor Roderick is leading a longitudinal study that is following 105 CPS juniors from three high schools from the 11th grade through two years after high school graduation, and is examining differences in the educational demands of their classroom environments through a linked study of high school and college classrooms.

From 2001 to 2003, Professor Roderick joined the administration of the Chicago Public Schools to establish a new Department of Planning and Development. As director of Planning and Development, Professor Roderick assisted in the development of a new Education Plan for the Chicago Public Schools and in developing planning initiatives around human capital, accountability, high school reform, post-secondary, the status of youth involved in the child welfare system, health, and after-school.

In 2004, Professor Roderick was honored by the Chicago Sun-Times as one of “Chicago's 100 Most Powerful Women.” At SSA, Professor Roderick is the faculty director of a new program in community schools and youth development. She is a founding board member and chair of the board of North Lawndale College Preparatory Charter High School. Nationally, she serves on the Carnegie Foundation's National Council on Adolescent Literacy and on MDRC's Education Studies Committee. Professor Roderick has a Ph.D. from the Committee on Public Policy from Harvard University, a Master's in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and an A.B. from Bowdoin College.

Paul Sally
Professor
Department of Mathematics and the College
Director, Undergraduate Mathematical Studies
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Paul Sally is professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago where he has taught since 1965. Professor Sally served as chairman of the department from 1977 to 1980. Throughout his estounding teaching career, he has produced over 20 Ph.D. students in the area of research; harmonic analysis on semisimple groups over real and p-adic fields.  Professor Sally began his involvement in the Chicago Public Schools in 1969 conducting mathematics competion classes for students and teachers. In 1983, he was appointed the first director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP), a position he held until 1987 when he became actively involved in the staff development programs of UCSMP. In 1992, he founded Seminars for Elementary Specialists and Mathematics Educators (SESAME), a staff development program for elementary school teachers from the Chicago Public Schools. Since the inception of SESAME, the program has invovled more than 1200 teachers from 125 Chicago public schools. In 1988 Professor Sally directed the University of Chicago Young Scholars Program for matematically talented 7 - 12 grade students.

His professional affiliations include membership in the U.S. Steering Committee for the Third International Mathematical and Science Study since 1991, serving in various capactities and Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the American Mathematical Society. He received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1966); the AMOCO Award for Distinguished Career in Undergraduate Teaching (1995); the Boston College Alumni Award for Excellence in Education (1999); the American Mathematical Society Award for Distinguished Teaching (2002); and the University of Chicago Provost's Teaching Award (2005). Professor Paul Sally received a B.S. and M.A. from Boston College and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University.

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach
Assistant Professor
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
whitmore@uchicago.edu Show/Hide Biography

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, assistant professor, is a labor economist with research interests in poverty policy and the economics of education. Her current research focuses on the interaction between schooling and student health. In recent work, she has studied the effect of the Federal school lunch program on childhood obesity, on food stamps' impact on household consumption. In addition, she has studied the effect of class size reductions in the early grades on students' long-term outcomes. Schanzenbach is affiliated with the Center on Human Potential and Public Policy and the Population Research Center and at the University of Chicago. From 2002–04, she was a post-doctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of California at Berkeley. She graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College in 1995 with a B.A. in economics and religion, and received a Ph.D. in economics in 2002 from Princeton University. She served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers in 1996–1997.

Penny B. Sebring
Co-Director
Consortium on Chicago School Research
p-sebring@ccsr.uchicago.edu

Margaret Beal-Spencer
Professor
Department of Comparative Human Development
mbspencer@uchicago.edu Show/Hide Biography

Margaret Beale-Spencer received a PhD in Child and Developmental Psychology from the University of Chicago.  Her adolescent-focused research addresses resiliency, identity, and competence formation processes of African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, and Curo-American youth.  the current emphasis on multi-ethic youth evolves from a longstanding interest in the development of African-American and particularly male children and youth who gro up in low-economic resource families and communities.  Her research and programming applications explore youths' emerging capacity for healthly outcomes and constructive coping methods while developing undergenerally unacknowledged and highly stressful conditions.  She has published approximately 100 articles and chapters since 1973, completed three edited volumes, and received funding for more than three dozen research proposals from foundations and federal agencies.  Most recently, she was awarded the 2006 Fletcher Fellowship, which recognized work that furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.  She joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, Department of Comparative Human Development and the College in 2009.

Susan Stodolsky
Professor
Department of Comparative Human Development and the College
Faculty Director
Urban Teacher Education Program
s-stodolsky@uchicago.edu Show/Hide Biography

Susan S. Stodolsky is Professor Emerita, Department of Comparative Human Development, the Committee on Education, and the College. She is also Faculty Director of the Urban Teacher Education Program (UTEP). Her research interests include the influence of subject matter on teachers work and professional associations, student attitudes toward different areas of learning, professional development for teachers, improvement of Jewish education, educational evaluation and qualitative methods. Some recent publications include:

Stodolsky, S. S. and Grossman, P. L. Changing students, changing teaching. Teachers College Record, 2000, 102 (1), 125-172. Also Teachers College Weekly, May 28, 2001 (online).

Grossman, P. L., Stodolsky, S. S., & Knapp, M. Making subject matter part of the equation: The intersection of policy and content. Occasional Paper (Document 0-04-1), Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, University of Washington, Seattle, 2004

Stodolsky, S.S., Dorph, G.Z., Feiman Nemser, S. Professional culture and professional development in Jewish schools: Teachers perceptions and experiences. Journal of Jewish Education, 2006, 72, in press.

Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick
Committee on Education Postdoctoral Scholar
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Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick is a Postdoctoral Scholar  at the University of Chicago Committee on Education.  She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago.  Her research interest include parent engagement in schools, informal organizational accountability and the social production of social and cultural capital in organizational settings.  Elizabeth is the co-editor, with Stephen Raudenbush, of the Chicago Model Book Project about the University of Chicago Charter schools.  She also serves as a data analyst for the University of Chicago Lottery Studies project which is used to refine and improve the University of Chicago Model as well as disseminate data other researchers, practitioners, and policy makers acorss the country.  In addition to her work as an academic scholar, Elizabeth has been a classroom teacher in public and private schools in the United States and abroad.  She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berekely, and served in the United States Peace Corps as a high school math teacher in Cameroon, West Africa and participated in the Return Peace Corps Fellows program that places teachers in high poverty schools in the United States.  While teaching elementary students on the Navajo reservation, Elizabeth completed her M.A. in elementary education at the University of New Mexico.  Before leaving teaching to pursue her M.A. and PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago, Elizabeth taught in Seattle, Washington at at private school.  She received the 2006 Benjamin Bloom Dissertation Fellowship for ther dissertation work as well as a Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation.  Elizabeth has presented her research at several peer reviewed conferences including the American Statistical Association and the American Educational Research Association and coauthored an article that appears in the American Journal of Education entitled "Parent Surveilance in Schools: A Question of Social Class."