Committee Members

Henry Braun (Chair), Education Testing Service, Princeton, NJ

Jane Hannaway, Education Policy Center, Washington, DC

Kevin Lang, Boston University, MA

Scott Marion, National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, Dover, NH

Lorrie Shepard, University of Colorado, Boulder

Judith Singer, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA

Mark Wilson, University of California, Berkeley

Biographical Sketches

Henry Braun (Chair) holds the Boisi Chair in Education and Public Policy in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He also serves as distinguished presidential appointee (retired) at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, N.J. Dr. Braun joined ETS in 1979 as a research scientist in the Division of Measurement, Statistics and Data Analysis Research. His early experience included the application of empirical Bayes methods to test validity problems, the design of a universal grade scale for American law schools, the investigation of the predictive validity of the SAT® and GRE® for students with disabilities, and the design and implementation of an innovative study to explore the statistical calibration of essay readers in the Advanced Placement Program®. In 1990, he was named Vice President of Research Management and was responsible for a staff of more than 200 and a budget of $25 million. In 1999, Dr. Braun stepped down from his role as an officer to become an ETS distinguished presidential appointee and became more involved in education policy issues. Among the more recent reports Dr. Braun authored or co-authored are: Reconsidering the Impact of High Stakes Testing (2003); A Portrait of Advanced Placement Teachers’ Practices (2005); and An Introduction to the Measurement of Change Problem (2005). Dr. Braun has done considerable work in the area of value-added modeling. He recently authored Using Student Progress to Evaluate Teachers: A Primer on Value-Added Models (2005) and is program chair for an upcoming conference on value-added modeling at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Education Research.

Dr. Braun has also given numerous presentations by invitation at conferences in the United States and abroad and has served on several international advisory boards. Dr. Braun has published broadly in the fields of probability, statistics and educational measurement, and has consulted for a variety of private, public and governmental organizations. He was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1991. He is a co-recipient of the 1986 Palmer O. Johnson Award of the American Educational Research Association and a co-recipient of the National Council for Measurement in Education’s 1999 Award for Outstanding Technical Contribution to the Field of Educational Measurement. Prior to his work at ETS, Dr. Braun was a faculty member in the Department of Statistics and the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. He has also served as a consulting statistician at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and at the Centers for Disease Control. Dr. Braun currently serves as a member on the NRC Committee on Incentives and Test-based Accountability. Dr. Braun earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from McGill University. He received his master’s degree and doctorate, both in mathematical statistics, from Stanford University.

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Jane Hannaway is the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Dr. Hannaway is an organizational sociologist whose work focuses on the study of educational organizations. Her areas of expertise include elementary/secondary schools, employment and education, school and teacher evaluations, standards-based reform, and vouchers. Her recent research focuses on structural reforms in education, particularly reforms promoting accountability, competition, and choice. Dr. Hannaway was recently appointed director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Databases in Education (CALDER) at the Urban Institute. Many of the studies conducted by CALDER researchers use value-added methods in conducting education policy analyses. Through her role as director of CALDER, Dr. Hannaway is well apprised of the various methodologies used in education policy research. Dr. Hannaway is currently involved in several large longitudinal studies. One involves analyzing the effect of accountability reform in Florida on students, teachers, and schools. Another focuses on analyzing shifts over time in resource allocation patterns among schools and school districts as a consequence of standards-based and accountability reforms. A third study involves analysis of the effectiveness of the Teach for America program. Dr. Hannaway is currently a member of the Committee on the Evaluation of Teacher Certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, whose report is scheduled for release in May 2008. Dr. Hannaway previously served on the faculties of Columbia (assistant professor), Princeton (assistant professor), and Stanford Universities. She has authored or co-authored several books, and numerous papers in education and management journals. She is a past vice-president of the American Educational Research Association and has served on the AERA Executive Board. She was elected to the Council of the Association for Public Policy and Management (APPAM). Dr. Hannaway has served on the editorial board of a number of journals and is past editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the main policy journal of the American Educational Research Association. She is currently on the Executive Board of the American Education Finance Association. Dr. Hannaway holds a Ph.D. in sociology of education from Stanford University.

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Kevin Lang is professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Boston University. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration (University College, London), a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality (Stanford University), and has for many years been a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Employment Research Forum. He is a co-editor of Labor Economics, the Journal of the European Association of Labor Economists. Until recently, Dr. Lang was an editor (with Paula England and George Farkas) of the monograph series Sociology and Economics: Controversy and Integration published by Aldine de Gruyter. Before coming to BU, he spent a year at the NBER as an Olin Foundation Fellow and prior to that was an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine. During his tenure at Boston University, he has twice held appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, once as a visiting scholar and once as a visiting professor. He spent three months at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research on a Fulbright Fellowship, and he was the recipient of a Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship. Dr. Lang is currently a member of the NRC Committee on Incentive and Test-based Accountability. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a M.Sc. in economics from the University of Montreal, and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford University.

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Scott F. Marion is Vice President of the non-profit National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, Inc. As Vice President, Dr. Marion consults with numerous states on such issues as optimal design of assessment and accountability systems, creating or documenting legally defensible approaches to accountability, gathering validation evidence for accountability programs, and designing programs to support low-performing schools. His most recent work has involved helping state assessment programs meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, including helping states develop growth models for use as alternatives to the status models currently required for NCLB adequate yearly progress measures. Dr. Marion is well acquainted with the policy issues related to enacting growth models and is familiar with value-added methods used in the Tennessee Value-Added Analysis System (TVAAS) developed by William Sanders. Dr. Marion is a regular contributor to the annual conferences of AERA, NCME, and CCSSO. Previously, Dr. Marion served as Wyoming’s assessment director (1999-2003), where he managed the K-12 testing program, the Wyoming Comprehensive Assessment System, overseeing the state’s Uniform Reporting System, and generally overseeing all assessment-related activities at the Wyoming Department of Education. Wyoming’s innovative high school competency assessment system—The Body of Evidence System—was the most ambitious project of his administration. Before assuming the position with the Wyoming Department of Education, Dr. Marion was a research assistant at the School of Education, University of Colorado at Boulder, working on a variety of projects funded by the Center for Research on Student Standards and Testing (CRESST) under supervision of Lorrie Shepard and Robert Linn. Prior to moving west to earn his doctorate at the University of Colorado, Dr. Marion was a part time faculty member in the College of Education, University of Maine where he received his Master’s of Science in Science and Environmental Education.

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Lorrie Shepard is professor of education and chair of the Research and Evaluation Methodology program area at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Dr. Shepard is also currently dean of the School of Education. She was elected to the National Academy of Education in 1992 and is its current President. Her research focuses on psychometrics and the use and misuse of tests in educational settings. Technical topics include validity theory, standard setting, and statistical models for detecting test bias. Her studies evaluating test use include identification of learning disabilities, readiness screening for kindergarten, grade retention, teacher testing, effects of high-stakes testing, and classroom assessment. At the graduate level, Dr. Shepard teaches courses in statistics, research methods, and testing and assessment policy. In the teacher education program, she teaches assessment in collaboration with colleagues in content methods courses. Dr. Shepard is a past president of the American Educational Research Association and past president of the National Council on Measurement in Education. She has been editor of the Journal of Educational Measurement and the American Educational Research Journal and interim editor of Educational Researcher. In 1999 she won NCME’s Award for Career Contributions to Educational Measurement. Dr. Shepard currently serves on the National Research Council’s Committee on Incentives and Test-based Accountability; previous NRC service includes membership on the CFE Advisory Board, Board on Testing and Assessment, and the committee on Assessment in Support of Learning and Instruction. Dr. Shepard holds a Ph.D. in Research and Evaluation Methodology, and an MA in Counseling from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BA History from Pomona College.

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Judith D. Singer is the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and former academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. One of the nation’s leading applied statisticians, her professional life focuses on improving the quantitative methods used in social, educational, and behavioral research. She is primarily known for her contributions to the practice of multilevel modeling, survival analysis, and individual growth modeling; and to making these and other statistical methods accessible to empirical researchers. Dr. Singer’s wide-ranging interests have led her to publish across a broad array of disciplines, including statistics, education, psychology, and medicine/public health. In addition to writing nearly 100 papers and book chapters, she has co-written three books, including By Design: Planning Better Research in Higher Education and Who Will Teach: Policies that Matter, both published by Harvard University Press. Her most recent book with longtime collaborator John B. Willett is Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence, for which they received Honorable Mention from the Association of American Publishers for the best Mathematics and Statistics book of 2003. Recently, Dr. Singer was a member of the Committee on Promising Practices, and she participated in the Workshop on the Use of School-Level Assessment Data. She is also a member of the National Academy of Education. Dr. Singer holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from Harvard University.

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Mark Wilson is professor of policy, organization, measurement, and evaluation cognition and development in the Graduate School of Education at University of California, Berkeley. He is also the developer of the Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research Center. His research focuses on educational measurement, survey sampling techniques, modeling, assessment design, and applied statistics. He currently advises the California State Department of Education on assessment issues as a member of the Technical Study Group. Dr. Wilson has recently published three books: Constructing Measures: An Item Response Modeling Approach, which is an introduction to modern measurement; Explanatory Item Response Models: A Generalized Linear and Nonlinear Approach, introduces an overarching framework for the statistical modeling of measurements that makes available new tools for understanding the meaning and nature of measurement; the third, Towards Coherence Between Classroom Assessment and Accountability, an edited volume that explores the issues relating to the relationships between large-scale assessment and classroom-level assessment. He is founding editor of the new journal Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives. Dr. Wilson served on the Committee on the Foundations of Assessment, and he chaired the Committee on Test Design for K-12 Science Achievement. He has a Ph.D. in measurement and educational statistics from the University of Chicago.

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