Appendix B
Biographical Sketches of Steering Committee Members and Speakers
BETHANNE BARNES (Speaker) is director of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. Previously she served as special advisor for evidence-based policy at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB). As head of OMB’s evidence team, her work focused on helping federal agencies strengthen their capacity to use and build evidence to improve their effectiveness. She also worked on a variety of job training and social safety net programs at OMB, as well as cross-agency data access and evidence-building policy issues. She has a bachelor’s degree from Evergreen State College and a master’s degree in public administration from the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.
JON BARON (Speaker) is vice president of evidence-based policy at the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, responsible for the foundation’s strategic investments in rigorous research of evidence-based social programs and scaling those shown to produce meaningful improvements in people’s lives. Previously, he founded and served as president of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that worked to advance important evidence-based reforms. He previously served as a presidentially appointed member and chair of the National Board for Education Sciences and as counsel to the Committee on Small Business of the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, an honorary fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, and a recipient of the Public Service Award of the Society for Prevention Research. He has a B.A. from Rice University, a master’s degree
in public affairs from Princeton University, and a law degree from Yale Law School.
NAOMI GOLDSTEIN (Speaker) is deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) at the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where she earlier served as director of OPRE’s Division of Child and Family Development. Previously, she directed the United States Postal Service Commission on a Safe and Secure Workplace, an independent commission that examined workplace violence affecting the postal service and the nation. She also previously served as project manager at the Urban Institute and as executive officer in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS. She was awarded the presidential rank of distinguished executive. She has a B.A. in philosophy from Yale University, a master’s in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.
JEAN GROSSMAN (Speaker) is on the faculty of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a senior research fellow at MDRC. Previously, she held positions at Public/Private Ventures and Mathematica Policy Research and served as the chief evaluation officer for the U.S. Department of Labor overseeing all of the department’s program evaluations. Her work focuses on programs that serve disadvantaged youth, especially mentoring programs and out-of-school time programs, as well as on the mechanisms of mentoring, exploring the role of the match length, rematching, and the quality of the relationship. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
JUDITH GUERON (Member, Steering Committee) is an independent scholar in residence and president emerita at MDRC, a nonprofit organization involved in designing interventions, evaluating programs, and providing technical assistance for social programs using strict research standards. At MDRC, she directed many of the largest federal and state evaluations ever undertaken of interventions for low-income adults, young people, and families. She is a past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), has served on several federal advisory panels, and has frequently testified before Congress. She is a member of the board of directors of Alcoa and of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. She is a recipient of the Myrdal Prize for Evaluation Practice of the American Evaluation Association, the inaugural Richard E. Neustadt Award from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and APPAM’s Peter H. Rossi Award for contributions to the theory or practice of program evaluation.
She has a B.A. summa cum laude from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
RON HASKINS (Speaker) is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program and codirector of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution and senior consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Previously, he served as the senior advisor to the President for welfare policy and as a member and director of the staff of the Human Resources Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Prior to his government service, he was a senior researcher at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, a lecturer on history and education at UNC, Charlotte, and a lecturer in developmental psychology at Duke University. His areas of expertise include welfare reform, child care, child support, marriage, child protection, and budget and deficit issues. He has a bachelor’s degree in history, a master’s degree in education, and a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, all from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
REBECCA MAYNARD (Member, Steering Committee) is on the faculty of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where she previously directed the university’s predoctoral training program in interdisciplinary methods for field-based education research. Previously, she served as commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance at the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education, where she oversaw the institute’s evaluation initiatives, the What Works Clearinghouse, the Regional Education Laboratories, and the National Library of Education (including ERIC). She also previously served as senior vice president at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Her work focuses on the design and conduct of randomized controlled trials in the areas of education and social policy. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
JACK MOLYNEAUX (Speaker) is director of independent evaluations at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, where he also works as an applied microeconomist Previously he implemented and managed impact evaluations for Indonesia, working with the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Indonesia, Statistics Indonesia (the Indonesian statistical agency), the RAND Corporation, and the World Bank. At the World Bank, he coordinated impact evaluations of sanitation and hygiene investments in five countries. His work focuses on evaluation and analysis in the fields of health, reproduction, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene, labor, educa-
tion, agriculture, transportation and prices and wages. He has a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
MARTHA MOOREHOUSE (Member, Steering Committee) is an independent consultant in Los Altos, CA. She was formerly director of the education program at the Heising-Simons Foundation, which focused on children from birth to 8. Previously, she served as senior advisor for evaluation policy for human services at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she also served as the director of ASPE Children and Youth Policy Division. She also previously served with the evidence team at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and as was on the psychology faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her worked has focused on research, practice, and policy concerning children and their families. She has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Cornell University.
RUTH NEILD (Speaker) is director of research for Action’s Philadelphia Education Research Consortium. Previously she was deputy director for policy and research at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education. Prior to being deputy director she served as commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. Her work at IES included reorienting the federal regional educational laboratories network toward research-practice partnerships, increased the reach of the What Works Clearinghouse through improvements in dissemination and communication, and oversaw federal evaluations. Prior to her government service, she was a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization of Schools, where she worked on research projects that ranged from descriptive and correlational to studies of impact. She has an A.B. in history and sociology summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.
DEMETRA NIGHTINGALE (Speaker) is an institute fellow at the Urban Institute, where her research focuses on social, economic, and labor policy issues. She was chief evaluation officer for the U.S. Department of Labor from 2011 to 2016, responsible for coordinating the department’s evaluation agenda and working with all its agencies to design and implement evaluations. She is an expert in employment policy, workforce development, labor markets, and social policies and programs, and has conducted many evaluations of federal, state, and local programs aimed at increasing employment, skills, and income for workers and families. She also teaches program evaluation at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at George Washington University. Previously, she was
a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University’s graduate program in public policy. She has been a senior research consultant with the World Bank and was an expert advisor to President’s Clinton Welfare Reform Working Group. She has a B.A. in political science and Ph.D. in public policy, both from George Washington University.
LARRY ORR (Speaker) is an associate at the Institute for Policy Studies at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches program evaluation. He also works as an independent consultant on the design and analysis of evaluations of public programs, and he is currently serving as an evaluation specialist on an evaluation of results-based aid in the education sector in Ethiopia for the U.K. Department for International Development. Previously, he worked at Abt Associates and in the U.S. government, holding positions at the Office of Economic Opportunity, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the U.S. Department of Labor. His work involved responsibility for the design and oversight of a number of large-scale surveys and field studies, including the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Job Training Partnership Act Study. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
HOWARD ROLSTON (Member, Steering Committee) is an independent consultant in Arlington, VA. He was previously a principal associate at Abt Associates, where he directed two large-scale, multi-site random assignment evaluations: the pathways for advancing careers and education project for the Administration for Children and Families and the benefit offset national demonstration for the Social Security Administration. Prior to Abt Associates he served at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he worked in evaluating welfare reforms, employment programs, early childhood interventions, and other social programs. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University.
WILLIAM SABOL (Member, Steering Committee) is a vice president at Westat, overseeing projects on justice, child welfare, and family services. Previously, he was the director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), where he was responsible for managing data collection and statistical operations, developing administrative records, publishing statistical reports, and coordinating and implementing comprehensive statistical program plans. He also previously served as acting director of the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice, as assistant director for homeland security and justice at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, as associate director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Social
Change at Case Western Reserve University, and as senior research associate at the Urban Institute. He has a Ph.D. in policy research and analysis from the University of Pittsburgh.
GROVER WHITEHURST (Chair, Steering Committee) is a senior fellow in the Center on Children and Families in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was the first director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education, which received a citation from the Office of Management and Budget for having “transformed the quality and rigor of education research within the Department of Education and increased the demand for scientifically based evidence of effectiveness in the education field as a whole.” He also served previously as chair of the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and academic vice president of the Merrill-Palmer Institute. His specializations include program evaluation, teacher quality, preschools, national and international student assessments, reading instruction, education technology, and education data systems. He has a Ph.D. in experimental child psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
