Ellen B. Goldring is professor of education policy and leadership at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, where she won the Alexander Heard Distinguished Professor award. Her areas of expertise and research focus on improving schools, with particular attention to educational leadership and access and equity in schools of choice. She is the immediate past coeditor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis . She serves on numerous editorial boards, technical panels, and policy forums, and is the coauthor of three books, including Principals of Dynamic Schools (Corwin Press), as well as hundreds of book chapters and articles. Goldring is currently working on a project funded by the… Wallace Foundation to develop and field-test an education leadership assessment system and establish its psychometric properties. She is also conducting experiments to study professional development and performance feedback for school leaders. She is an investigator at the National Center on School Choice and the Learning Sciences Institute at Vanderbilt. Goldring received her PhD from the University of Chicago.
Mark Berends is associate professor of public policy and education at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University; director of the National Center on School Choice, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences; and the vice president of the American Educational Research Association's Division L, Policy and Politics in Education. His areas of expertise are the sociology of education, research methods, school effects on student achievement, and educational equity. His latest books are Examining Gaps in Mathematics Achievement Among Racial-Ethnic Groups, 1972-1992 (2005, RAND), Charter School Outcomes (2008), and Handbook of Research on School Choice (forthcoming,… Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Berends received his PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.