The State of Education Policy Research

Susan Fuhrman was recently appointed President of Teachers College, Columbia University. From 1995 to 2006 she was the Dean, and the George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education, at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. She is also the chair of the Management Committee of CPRE, which she founded in 1985. Dr. Fuhrman is currently the principal investigator of the Center on Continuous Instructional Improvement (CCII), a research and development center funded by the Hewlett Foundation that focuses on creating tools and policy supports for instructional improvement processes. She has conducted research on state policy design, accountability, and standards-based reform, and she has written widely on education policy and finance. David K. Cohen is John Dewey Collegiate Professor in the School of Education, and Walter Annenberg Professor of Public Policy, in the Ford School of Public Policy, at the University of Michigan. His research interests include education policy, the relations between policy and practice, and school improvement. With Brian Rowan and Deborah L. Ball, he has directed the Study of Instructional Improvement, a large, mixed-methods study of efforts to improve learning in high-poverty elementary schools at the University of Michigan.
Fritz Mosher is an independent consultant on education policy and research planning, management, and funding. He is senior consultant to the Consortium on Policy Research in Education (CPRE) for dissemination and outreach. He has also been a senior advisor to the Spencer Foundation and a RAND Corporation Adjunct Staff member. He has been an advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Research and Improvement in the United States Department of Education and to Achieve, Inc. In 1998, he retired from Carnegie Corporation of New York after 36 years as a program specialist and policy analyst. Over that time he worked in the full range of the corporation's programs, including international affairs, U.S. governmental reform, education at all levels, and the role of universities in the planning and development of national education systems in Anglophone Africa. In recent years he focused on the policy issues involved in transforming the U.S. public education system into one that would enable substantially all students to reach high standards of achievement. He is a cognitive/social psychologist by training, with a Ph.D. from Harvard University.