2009 Annual CALDER Conference Biographies
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The 3rd Annual CALDER research conference featured the following prominent scholars, policy experts, and practitioners:
Jane Hannaway is a senior fellow and founding director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she oversees the work of the Center and is a member of the Institute's senior management team. Hannaway is also the director and overall principal investigator of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), which is using longitudinal data from multiple states to inform educational policy. She is an organizational sociologist whose work focuses on the effects of education reforms on student outcomes as well as on school policies and practices. Her recent research is heavily focused on the effects of various accountability policies and issues associated with teacher labor markets. She is co-author/editor of seven books, including the recently released Creating a New Teaching Profession (with Dan Goldhaber), which makes the compelling case that current systems for training, hiring, retaining, and rewarding teachers not only are imperfect, but are detrimental to building the best teacher workforce possible. She has published numerous articles in education and management journals. Dr. Hannaway has held a number of national positions including serving on the National Academy Committee on Value-Added Methodology for Instructional Improvement, Program Evaluation and Accountability and Aspen Institute’s NCLB Commission. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Panel I Speakers
Helen F. Ladd is the Edgar Thompson Professor of Public Policy Studies and professor of economics at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She is a prolific researcher in the field of education policy, and has written extensively on charter schools, school-based accountability, market-based reforms in education, parental choice and competition, teacher quality and student achievement. She is a principal investigator with CALDER, leading its North Carolina work. She has taught at Dartmouth College, Wellesley College, and at Harvard University, and from 1996-99 co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Education Finance. With Edward Fiske, Dr. Ladd is the editor of The Handbook of Research on Educational Finance and Policy, the official handbook of the American Education Finance Association and is the coauthor of When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale (Brookings Institution, 2000). She holds B.A. from Wellesley College, an M.A. from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.
Michael Hansen Michael Hansen is a research associate with the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and an affiliated researcher with CALDER. His research interests include the economics of education, applied microeconomics, and labor economics. Prior to the Urban Institute Hansen worked as a research assistant with the Center on Reinventing Public Education in Seattle. Recently Hansen was a finalist in the National Council on Teacher Quality Research Competition. He has completed research on teacher incentives, value-added measurement, district-level contract choice for teachers, and national board certification and license testing for teachers. His work has been published in Education Finance and Policy and the American Educational Research Journal. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Washington. Panel II Speakers
Damon Clark Damon Clark is Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University, on leave from his position as Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Florida. He was previously a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Labor Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research has focused mainly on high schools. At Berkeley he worked on a project entitled The Performance and Competitive Effects of School Autonomy. He won the 2005 Young European Economist award for this paper, which was recently published in the Journal of Political Economy. Since moving to Florida, Dr. Clark has analyzed selective high schools in the U.K. (funded by a National Association of Education/Spencer Post Doctoral Fellowship) and high school exit exams in the U.S. (with Paco Martorell, funded by a grant from the Institute of Educational Sciences). He is a researcher with CALDER, leading its Florida work. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Nuffield College, Oxford University, UK.
Tim R. Sass Tim R. Sass is the Charles and Joan Haworth Professor of Labor Economics at Florida State University. He has over 20 years of experience empirically analyzing public policy issues in areas including land-use regulation, professional licensure, safety regulation, voting rights and antitrust law. He has published over 25 peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals and numerous contributions to books and monographs. For the last ten years his research has focused on the economics of education. He has been the principal investigator on a study of charter schools funded by the Spencer Foundation and co-PI on two USDOE-IES funded projects to study the determinants of regular education teacher effectiveness and to analyze the effects of teacher preparation on the quality of special education teachers. Dr. Sass has also served as co-PI on a grant project to evaluate the certification system of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. He has acted as a consultant to the RAND Corporation, Berkeley Policy Associates and the National Academies on various education policy issues and has served on advisory panels to the New York City and Washington DC public school systems. He leads CALDER’s Florida work. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Washington.
Jacob L. Vigdor Jacob L. Vigdor is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University, and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests are in the broad areas of education policy, housing policy, and immigration. Within those areas, he has published numerous scholarly articles on the topics of residential segregation, housing affordability, the consequences of gentrification, the determinants of student achievement in elementary school, the causes and consequences of delinquent behavior among adolescents, teacher turnover, civic participation and voting patterns, and racial inequality in the labor market. These articles have been published in outlets such as the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. He is a member of the CALDER North Carolina team. Dr. Vigdor has taught at Duke since 1999. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. Panel III Speakers
Susanna Loeb Susanna Loeb is Professor of Education at Stanford University; Director of the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at Stanford (IREPP) whose mission is to support high quality, multi-disciplinary empirical research that is informed by collaboration with stakeholders and practitioners and that guides the improvement of education policy and practice; and Co-director of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), which links academic research more closely to policy needs at the state level. She specializes in the relationship between schools and federal, state and local policies. Her research addresses teacher policy, looking specifically at how teachers' preferences affect the distribution of teaching quality across schools, how pre-service coursework requirements affect the quality of teacher candidates, and how reforms affect teachers’ career decisions. She also studies how the structure of state finance systems affects the level and distribution of resources across schools. Dr. Loeb is a member of the CALDER management team, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, member of the Policy Council of the Association for Policy Analysis and Management, and President-Elect of the American Education Finance Association. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics form the University of Michigan.
David N. Figlio David N. Figlio is the Orrington Lunt Professor of Education and Social Policy, and Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, and Economics (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. He is Co-Investigator with CALDER, Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, and Associate with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the inaugural co-editor of Education Finance and Policy (MIT Press). His research centers on education and social policy, with a particular focus on school accountability, standards, welfare policy, and policy design. In recent work, Dr. Figlio has examined the efficacy of pre-kindergarten programs and the determinants and effects of teacher expectations on students and he has studied the consequences of accountability systems such as the Florida Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program, the largest school voucher program in the U.S, on student outcomes. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
James H. Wyckoff James H. Wyckoff is a Professor in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. He currently serves on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Study of Teacher Preparation Programs, directs the Education Finance Research Consortium, and serves on the Policy Council for the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management. He is also a member of the Scientific Review Panel of the U.S. Department of Education. He has published on a variety of topics in education policy including issues of teacher labor markets, school resource allocation, and school choice. Currently, he is working with colleagues to examine the attributes of New York City teachers and teacher preparation that is effective in increasing the performance of students and the retention of effective teachers. This research has received support from the Carnegie Corporation, the City University of New York, the National Science Foundation, the New York State Education Department, the Spencer Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education. This research also received the 2007 Teacher Educators Distinguished Research Award. Dr. Wyckoff is a member of the CALDER New York team. He has served as president of the American Education Finance Association. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Panel IV Speakers
Richard A. Flanary Richard A. Flanary serves as the Senior Director of NASSP’s Leadership Programs & Services Team. He leads the design and delivery of NASSP’s leadership development programs & services for prospective and practicing principals and assistant principals. He chairs the Educational Leadership Constituent Council (ELCC) and is currently heading the revision of the ELCC Program Standards. Flanary co-chaired the development of the Educational Leadership Policy Standards: ISLLC 2008 for the National Policy Board for Educational Administration (NPBEA). He serves an a member of the steering committee for the National Board Certification of Educational Leaders and as an affiliate member of the Executive Board for the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA). He was the founding director of the Southwestern Virginia Regional Principals’ Assessment Center based at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He also worked as a middle-level principal, assistant principal, guidance counselor, and teacher in Prince William County, Virginia.
Kathleen Nadurak Kathleen Nadurak has over 30 years experience in the field of education, as both an educator and an administrator. As Executive Vice President of Programs, Nadurak oversees all pre-service training programs for aspiring principals and in-service support programs for school leaders. She also works closely with the Leadership Academy’s National Initiatives team which offers school leadership advisory services to other school districts and states across the country. Prior to joining the Leadership Academy, Nadurak spent 18 years at the New York City Department of Education where she held a number of key positions, including Executive Director for the Office of Financial and Management Reporting, Chief of Staff to the Chancellor, and Special Assistant to the Deputy Chancellor of Operations, where she played a significant role in the strategic planning and implementation of Chancellor Joel I. Klein’s Children First reforms.
Jon Schnur is Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools, a national non-profit organization with one mission: to ensure high academic achievement for every student by attracting and preparing outstanding leaders and supporting the performance of the urban public schools they lead at scale. New Leaders partners with large urban school districts in ten cities to recruit, train, and support outstanding new principals, and then creates evidence, tools, and policy recommendations to help partner states, school systems, and schools improve student achievement through policies focused on principal effectiveness and teacher effectiveness. Schnur has served as co-chair of the Obama presidential campaign’s education policy committee, as a member of President-elect Obama's presidential transition team, and then senior advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. He has been recognized by Time Magazine, National Public Radio, Fast Company magazine, the New York Times, and his hometown newspaper the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, among others. Before founding New Leaders for New Schools, he served as Special Assistant to Secretary of Education Richard Riley, President Clinton's White House Associate Director for Educational Policy, and Senior Advisor on Education to Vice President Gore. He has developed national education policies from preschool to higher education - with special focus on teacher and educator quality, reforming urban school systems, charter schools, after-school programs, and early learning and preschools. Schnur spent several months at Harvard designing the business plan for New Leaders for New Schools while taking coursework at the Graduate School of Education, the Business School and John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is a graduate of Princeton University. |  |
