The Department of Education’s key research office has formed a 15-member panel of researchers and policymakers to advise it on research needed to improve the nation’s urban schools.
The new Urban Education Task Force is expected to meet twice a year. It is part of an ongoing effort by the department’s Institute of Education Sciences to make its work more relevant to practitioners and policymakers.
Michael D. Casserly, the executive director of the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools, will lead the panel. The other panel members are:
Katherine Blasik, an associate superintendent of the Broward County, Fla., schools district; Geoffrey D. Borman, an associate professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Carl A. Cohn, the superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District; Ronald F. Ferguson, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government; and Pascal D. Forgione Jr., the superintendent of the Austin, Texas, school district.
The list also includes Russell Gersten, the executive director of the Instructional Research Group in Long Beach, Calif.; Dan D. Goldhaber, a research associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle; Beverly L. Hall, the superintendent of the Atlanta school district; David Heistad, a research-evaluation official with the Minneapolis school district; Caroline B. Hoxby, an associate professor of economics at Harvard; Valerie E. Lee, an education professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Peter McWalters, the Rhode Island commissioner of education; Jason C. Snipes, the director of research for the Council of the Great City Schools; and Joseph K. Torgesen, a professor of psychology and education at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
