APPENDIX
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff
Lorraine McDonnell (Co-Chair) is a professor of political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the politics of testing, the design and implementation of educational reform initiatives, and the development and use of educational accountability systems. Dr. McDonnell was co-vice chair of the NRC’s Board on Testing and Assessment and currently serves on the Committee on Performance Levels in Adult Literacy. Previously, she served as co-chair for the NRC Committee on Goals 2000 and as a member of the Committee on Appropriate Test Use and the Committee on Reporting Results for Accommodated Test Takers. She has a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.
Barbara Plake (Co-Chair) is the W.C. Meierhenry Distinguished University Professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and the director of the Buros Center for Testing. She has broad expertise in all aspects of educational assessment; one of her specific research interests is standard-setting. Dr. Plake is coeditor of the Mental Measurements Yearbook and Applied Measurement in Education. She serves on the American Psychological Association’s Committee on Psychological Tests and Assessments. Previously, she served on the NRC Committee on Assessment and Teacher Quality. She has a Ph.D. in educational statistics and measurement from the University of Iowa.
Maria Carlo is an assistant professor in the department of teaching and learning at the University of Miami. Her research focuses on the development of literacy skills in bilingual children and adults, and has included studies on adult literacy in bilingual populations, visual word recognition in bilinguals, and processing of cross-language ambiguity. Dr. Carlo previously served as project director for the Adult Literacy for Bilingual Populations Project at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Massachusetts.
Naomi Chudowsky (Senior Program Officer) is a staff member at the National Research Council, where she has worked on a number of reports, including one about advances in the cognitive sciences and measurement and their implications for improving educational assessment. She also works as a consultant to several national research organizations, where she works on projects related to high stakes testing. Dr. Chudowsky’s previous experience includes coordinating test development for President Clinton’s Voluntary National Testing Initiative at the U.S. Department of Education. She also served as project manager for Connecticut’s statewide high school assessment. She has a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Stanford University.
Stuart W. Elliott (Study Director) is the director of the Board on Testing and Assessment at the National Research Council, where he has worked on projects related to literacy, science assessment, incentives and accountability, and information technology. Before coming to the
National Research Council, he worked as an economic consultant for several private sector consulting firms. Dr. Elliott was also a research fellow in cognitive psychology and economics at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Steven Ferrara is the director of research and technical development in the assessment program at the American Institutes for Research. He conducts research on educational assessment and develops components of large assessment programs. Some of his current projects include development of the NAEP Foreign Language Assessment in grade 12 Spanish, and design of a speaking proficiency assessment for the 17-state English Language Development Assessment collaborative project. Dr. Ferrara has served on technical advisory panels to many state, federal, and foreign assessment programs and is currently editor of Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice. Previously, he was Maryland's state director of student assessment. He has a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford University.
Michael Fix is an attorney and principal research associate at the Urban Institute, where he directs the Immigration Studies Program. In the area of immigration, his research has focused on citizenship policy, immigrant children and families, the education of immigrant students, the impact of welfare reform on immigrants, and the impact of immigrants on the U.S. labor force. Mr. Fix currently serves on the Immigration Task Force of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, and is a member of the Advisory Panel to the Foundation for Child Development’s Young Scholars Program. He recently chaired the Working Group on Social Rights and Citizenship of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Comparative Citizenship Project. He also served on the NRC Committee on the Health and Adjustment of Immigrant Children and Families. He has a J.D. from the University of Virginia.
Michael Hanchard is a professor of political science at Northwestern University, where he is also the director of the Institute for Diaspora Studies in the program of African studies. He studies comparative politics and racial politics. Major research projects have included a comparative analysis of the transnational political movements involving black political actors in the United States, Ghana, and Jamaica from 1955 to 1970. Another effort is a web interactive pilot project called “Global Mappings: A Political Atlas of the African Diaspora.” Dr. Hanchard has written about racial inequities in Brazil, and is the editor of Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil. He has a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.
Michael Hout is a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and director of the Survey Research Center. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. Dr. Hout is a world leader in the use of innovative quantitative methods in studies of social stratification and social mobility, sociological demography, ethnicity, education, political change, and the sociology of religion. Dr. Hout's current projects include a book on major social and cultural trends of the 20th century and research on the social consequences of growing economic inequality in the U.S. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University.
Huynh Huynh is the E. Smythe Gambrell Professor in the college of education and affiliated professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on technical and policy issues in large-scale assessments. He has served on technical advisory committees for the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, National Assessment of Educational Progress,
National Adult Literacy Survey, Voluntary National Tests, General Education Development Tests, and the state assessment programs of South Carolina, Arkansas, and Maryland. He has a Ph.D. in educational statistics and measurement from the University of Iowa.
Guillermina Jasso is a professor of sociology at New York University. Currently she is co-principal investigator of the New Immigrant Survey, the first national longitudinal survey of immigrants in the United States. Previously, she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and as Director of Research for the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. Dr. Jasso has served on many advisory boards, including panels advising the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. She was a member of the Core Research Group of the Binational Study of Migration Between Mexico and the United States; she served as a member of the NRC's Panel on the Demographic and Economic Consequences of Immigration. She has a Ph.D. in sociology from Johns Hopkins.
Michael Jones-Correa is an associate professor of government at Cornell University. His research interests include immigrant naturalization and political mobilization, racial and ethnic politics and identity, interethnic conflict, negotiation and coalition-building in U.S. urban areas, institutional approaches to urban politics and intergovernmental relations, and social movements. Over the past year, Dr. Jones-Correa has been a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he is working on a research project about immigrants and minorities in suburban America. He has a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.
Jane Junn is an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University. Her primary interests are political participation and elections in the U.S., political behavior and attitudes among American minorities and immigrants, theories of democracy, survey research, and social science methodology. Her book, “Education and Democratic Citizenship in America,” won the 1997 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award for the best book published in political science in 1996. Dr. Junn is director of the Association of American Universities project, Assessing Quality in University Education and Research. Previously she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea. She has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago.
David Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan professor of history at Stanford University. His scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His most recent book, “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War,” won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History. Dr. Kennedy is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University.
Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling, Jr. Professor of history and social policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. An historian by training, he has specialized in the excavation of issues that have contemporary policy implications. His current interests include election reform, the history of democracies, and the history of poverty. Dr. Keyssar's most recent book, “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” was named the best book in U.S. history by the American Historical Association
and the Historical Society and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University.
Jeffrey Mirel is associate dean of the school of education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is also a professor of education and history, and faculty associate in the Center for Russian and East European Studies. His major areas of interests are the history and politics of urban education and the history of school reform. His current research focuses on the history of educating for democratic citizenship. Dr. Mirel is the author of “The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit 1907-81,” which won Outstanding Book Awards from the American Educational Research Association and the History of Education Society. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
Paul Sackett is a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. One major theme of his research is the tension between goals of maximizing job performance versus maximizing ethnic, racial, and gender diversity in the design of personnel selection systems. He is also interested in the measurement and prediction of counterproductive behavior in the workplace, methodological and psychometric issues in personnel decision making, the assessment of managerial potential, and the role of personality in personnel selection. Dr. Sackett served as the co-chair of the Joint Committee for the Revision of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing of the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education. He has also served on numerous NRC committees and boards, including as chair of the Committee on the Youth Population and Military Recruitment, as vice-chair of the Roundtable on Work, Learning, and Assessment and as a member of the Committee on Appropriate Test Use, the Committee on the General Aptitude Test Battery, and the Board on Testing and Assessment. He has a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology from Ohio State University.
John Strucker is a research associate with the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy and a lecturer in the graduate school of education at Harvard. His interest in adult literacy began when he worked as a labor and community organizer in Chicago in the 1970s. He then taught at the Community Learning Center in Cambridge, MA, where he specialized in the diagnostic assessment and teaching of adults with reading difficulties. Dr. Strucker’s other interests include teacher training in adult education, the application of technology to literacy learning, the development of adult literacy assessment tools, and family literacy. He has an Ed.D. from Harvard University.
Monica Ulewicz (Program Officer) is a staff member at the National Research Council, who has worked on a wide range of issues at the Center for Education, particularly in the area of international education. She has worked on projects related to cross-national assessments and on the role of human capital investment in labor standards compliance. Her professional experience includes teacher professional development and evaluation of programs with the Eisenhower Regional Consortium for Mathematics and Science Education at AEL, Inc. In addition, Ms. Ulewicz served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda. She has a Masters of Environmental Management from Duke University.
Heide Spruck Wrigley is a senior research associate for Aguirre International in California. Her work involves research and evaluation in all areas of adult literacy education and training,
with a special emphasis on minority populations. As manager of a national study entitled, “What Works in Adult ESL Literacy,” she is responsible for the design of a framework for literacy development and language acquisition. For two projects funded by the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor, she is developing models for implementing and assessing workplace literacy and on-the-job-training for those with low levels of literacy and limited English proficiency. She has also helped design performance-based assessments for state and national agencies. Dr. Wrigley's international work has included evaluating the Peace Corps' English as a second language program in Poland, and technical assistance to teacher training institutions in the People's Republic of China. Dr. Wrigley also serves on the NRC Committee on Performance Levels in Adult Literacy. She has a Ph.D. in education from the University of Southern California.
Michael Zuckert is the Nancy R. Dreux Professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. His extensive writing spans several subfields within political science, including the history of political philosophy, politics and literature, constitutional law, and American political thought. Dr. Zuckert has won several National Endowment for the Humanities grants to bring important aspects of the American Founding to a larger public through radio and public television series. He has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago.
