Committee Members

Robert Hauser (Chair), University of Wisconsin, Madison

Elaine Allensworth, University of Chicago, IL

G. Lavan Dukes, Florida Department of Education, Tallahassee

Kenji Hakuta, Stanford University, CA

Russell Rumberger, University of California, Santa Barbara

J. Robert Warren, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Patricia Wright, Virginia Department of Education, Richmond

Biographical Sketches

Robert M. Hauser (chair) is Vilas Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has directed the Center for Demography and Ecology and the Institute for Research on Poverty. He currently directs the Center for Demography of Health and Aging. Dr. Hauser is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Statistical Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Hauser has worked on the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study since 1969 and directed it since 1980. His current research interests include trends in educational progression and social mobility in the United States among racial and ethnic groups, the uses of educational assessment as a policy tool, the effects of families on social and economic inequality, and changes in socioeconomic standing, health, and well-being across the life course.

Dr. Hauser has contributed to studies of educational performance and attainment; he has directed a national study of social mobility; and his Wisconsin Longitudinal Study has followed the life course of 10,000 Wisconsin high school graduates and their families for almost 50 years. He has contributed to statistical methods for discrete multivariate analysis and structural equation models and to methods for the measurement of social and economic standing. He has served on the National Research Council's Committee on National Statistics, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and Board on Testing and Assessment. He has also served on numerous research panels of the National Research Council, and has chaired panel studies of high stakes testing and standards for adult literacy. He recently served on the Secretary of Education’s task force on the measurement of high school dropout. Dr. Hauser received a B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of Michigan.

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Elaine Allensworth is Co-Director for Statistical Analysis at the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on the structural factors that affect high school students’ educational attainment, particularly the factors that affect graduation and dropout rates. She was the lead author on a number of studies on graduation rates in the Chicago Public Schools, including The On-Track Indicator as a Predictor of High School Graduation (2005), What Matters for Staying On-Track and Graduating in Chicago Public High Schools (2007), and Ending Social Promotion: Dropout Rates in Chicago after Implementation of the Eighth-Grade Promotion Gate (2004). She recently began a mixed-methods study of the transition to high school which will follow a cohort of students from eighth grade into their second year in high school. This study looks at students’ perceptions of the challenges of high school, the school practices that can foster successful freshman-year performance, and the practices that can hinder students. As a member of the CCSR postsecondary project, Dr. Allensworth has been examining students’ transition out of high school, particularly the factors that affect performance on the ACT. She is leading several studies on the effects of high school curricula on students’ experiences in their classes and their academic outcomes. Dr. Allensworth holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and an M.A. in Sociology and Urban Studies from Michigan State University.

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G. Lavan Dukes is Educational Policy Information Director at the Florida Department of Education. In this role, he establishes policy direction for the database of information on students and teachers in the Florida state public school system. Mr. Dukes also provides policy guidance to staff regarding the department’s major statistical publications and presentations and serves as representative of the state commissioner on issues dealing with state and federal reporting requirements. Mr. Dukes led the work to establish Florida’s longitudinal database of student and staff information, including the development of data elements for the system, collecting the information, and devising automated reporting systems. He has made a number of presentations based on information gathered from the database, including several pertaining to Florida’s graduation rates. Mr. Dukes has served on many national task forces and committees dealing with data reporting, systems, design, and student, staff, and financial information systems. He currently serves as Florida’s representative on the National Cooperative Education Statistics System and on the Education Information Advisory committee of the Council of Chief State School Officers. In 2002, he served on the NRC’s Committee on Improving Measures of Access to Equal Educational Opportunity. Mr. Dukes began his career as a middle school English teacher. He obtained his Masters in Education from Florida State University in 1972.

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Kenji Hakuta is the Lee J. Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University. An experimental psycholinguist by training, he is best known for his work in the areas of bilingualism and the acquisition of English in immigrant students. He is the author of numerous research papers and books, including Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism and In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second Language Acquisition. He co-edited a book on affirmative action in higher education, Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education. Dr. Hakuta is also active in education policy. He has testified to Congress and other public bodies on a variety of topics, including language policy, the education of language minority students, affirmative action in higher education, and improvement of quality in educational research. He has served as an expert witness in education litigation involving language minority students. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1989, except for three years (2003-2006) when he helped start the University of California at Merced as its Founding Dean of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. His prior academic appointments have been at Yale University (Psychology), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (Education). He was a Fellow at the Center Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, is an elected Member of the National Academy of Education and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Linguistics and Language Sciences). He currently serves on the Board of the Educational Testing Service, and is Vice-Chair of the Board of the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Hakuta chaired a National Academy of Sciences report Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children and also served on the NRC Committee on Educational Excellence and Testing Equity. He received his BA Magna Cum Laude in Psychology and Social Relations, and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, both from Harvard University.

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Russell W. Rumberger is Professor of Education in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California (UC) Santa Barbara and Director of the UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute (UC LMRI), a UC multi-campus research unit established in 1984 to foster interdisciplinary research and to improve academic achievement of children from diverse language backgrounds. A faculty member at UCSB since 1987, Professor Rumberger, has published widely in several areas of education: education and work; the schooling of disadvantaged students; school effectiveness; and education policy. He has been conducting research on school dropouts for the past 25 years and has written over 27 research papers and essays on the topic. He also served as a member of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute of Statistical Sciences/Education Statistics Services Institute Task Force on Graduation, Completion, and Dropout Indicators (2004) and as a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Increasing High School Students’ Engagement and Motivation to Learn (2003). He is currently directing the California Dropout Research Project, which is producing a series of reports and policy briefs about the dropout problem in California and a state policy agenda to improve California’s high school graduation rate. He received a Ph.D. in Education and a M.A. in Economics from Stanford University and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University.

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J. Robert Warren is associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Warren’s research focuses on inequalities in educational and health outcomes. Dr. Warren’s recent work focuses on the measurement of states’ high school completion rates; the consequences of state high school exit examinations for educational and labor market outcomes; the magnitude of “panel conditioning” (or time in survey) effects in longitudinal surveys; changes over time in the association between socioeconomic status and health; and the effects of life-course trajectories of work and family roles on health and financial outcomes in late adulthood. He has published numerous journal articles on these topics, and currently serves as deputy editor of Sociology of Education. He received a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology from Carleton College (1987) and masters and doctorate degrees in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1994 and 1998, respectively).

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Patricia I. Wright is the Chief Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction with the Virginia Department of Education. In this position, Dr. Wright serves as the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s designee for day-to-day operations of the agency and facilitates policy development for the Commonwealth’s public education system. She works closely with the Governor’s office, the Virginia Board of Education, professional organizations, and local school divisions in designing and implementing Virginia’s standards-based accountability and support system. Dr. Wright served as a leader in the revision of the Virginia Standards of Learning and has been an invited speaker on standards-based reform in several states. She also served as the Virginia Department of Education’s liaison for the development of the state mathematics assessment program. Dr. Wright serves as the Virginia Department of Education’s coordinator for the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, responsible for policy development and implementation. She currently serves as President of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) Deputies Leadership Commission, as the Vice-Chair of the Regional Educational Laboratory-Appalachia, and as a member of the National High School Center Advisory Board. She also serves on the board of directors for the Virginia Association of Secondary School Principals, the Virginia Advanced Studies Strategies (National Mathematics and Science Initiative), and the Virginia Commonwealth University Alumni Association. Dr. Wright received her doctorate in mathematics education from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in mathematics education from Virginia Commonwealth University.

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