Curriculum Vita

Publications at Research Gate

In July 2018, I started a new adventure as Chief of Program and Partnerships (now Chief of Partnerships and Strategy) at Partners in School Innovation.  I had been on the Board of Directors at Partners since 2013 and have known about the work for a long time. I first worked with Partners CEO Derek Mitchell in the early 2000s around his development and testing of QSP (here's a link to a presentation that several colleagues and I did about the work back in 2002). I was extremely excited to join the Partners team in our shared commitment to renewing the promise of public education.

From 2014 to 2018, I spent most of my time working on the Carnegie Foundation's first Networked Improvement Community (the Carnegie Math Pathways). My primary focus was supporting and studying how to scale this relatively complex set of change ideas while ensuring we adhere to the original design principles. Scaling programs while maintaining efficacy and reliability is almost unheard of in education. In higher education, it is virtually unknown. The opportunities for learning here are extremely promising.  In October 2017, the Carnegie Math Pathways found its new home as part of the STEM group at WestEd. 

When I initially joined the Foundation in mid-July 2012, I started a new position at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as the Director of the Advancing Teaching - Improving Learning (ATIL) program. In August 2013, I became the Co-Director of Carnegie's Center for Networked Improvement (CNI), where I managed our Analytics group and created a new Collaborative Technology team. CNI housed teams that deliver the core capacities needed by all Networked Improvement Communities: analytics, developmental evaluation, design and development, network initiation, knowledge management, collaborative technologies, and improvement research. 

From 2010 to 2012, I worked to develop the Center for Data Quality and Systems Innovation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our work explored the challenges of integrating the emerging changes in educational accountability systems with schools' and districts' social and technical systems. The challenge of adapting organizational designs and related software tools to novel uses is real and pressing. 

From 2008-2011, with VARC Director Rob Meyer, I co-led the Value-Added Research Center in its mission to promote the development, application, and dissemination of value-added research methods to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of educational systems - districts, schools, and classrooms. 

From 1997 to 2010, I led a series of research projects on large-scale online collaboration and contributed to several large research projects in math and science education and systemic urban school reform. I also led the Technical Services group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Wisconsin Center for Education Research, which provides a wide range of research consulting and custom development services for projects housed at the Center.

I began conducting education research with John Witte of the Political Science department at UW-Madison in 1991. For five years, I managed the Milwaukee Parental Choice Voucher Study for him. This deeply engaging project introduced me to urban education's challenges (and successes). 

During the early 1990s, I also completed my Doctor of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, under Helmut Willke. My dissertation and post-doc work focused on private-private and public-private cooperation in R&D. The project's particular focus was cooperation efforts between traditionally antagonistic partners. The theoretical framework for this project was based on theories of complex systems. It attempted to identify successful outcomes from occurrences of what the German Sociologist Renate Mayntz calls "antagonistic cooperation."

I mostly did things with my kids when not doing something with socio-technical systems (at least until they both left home). I was on the board, served as a tour chaperone, and was the Wisconsin Children's Choir webmaster for over a decade. I was also a scoutmaster for Troop 16  in Madison from 2009 to 2012. Now that the kids are in college and moving on, it is time for new hobbies - probably back to singing or remodeling. When not working on education reform issues, I can often be found at the helm of a narrowboat on one of the UK's old industrial canals.