Appendix G
Biographical Sketches of the Panel
Larry Vernon Hedges
Larry Vernon Hedges (he/him) is professor of psychology and medical social sciences at Northwestern University. He is also the Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Education and Social Policy. He has done research across many fields, including statistics, sociology, psychology, and education policy. He is widely published and has contributed to many journals and books in the field of meta-analysis and education research, such as Statistical Methods for Meta-Analysis (1985) and The Handbook of Research Synthesis and Meta-Analysis (2019). He received the 2019 Yidan Prize for Education Research for his work in education. He has made countless contributions to the development of statistical methods and meta-analysis. He is a member of the National Academy of Education, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. He was nominated and confirmed to the Board of Directors of the National Board for Education Sciences. Hedges received his BA in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego, and his MA in statistics and PhD in mathematical methods in educational research, both from Stanford University.
Matthew M. Chingos
Matthew M. Chingos is vice president for education data and policy at the Urban Institute, Washington, DC. Chingos leads a team of scholars who undertake policy-relevant research on issues from prekindergarten through postsecondary education and create tools such as Urban’s Education Data Portal. He is co-author of Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and
Reality of Student Debt, and Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities. Chingos has testified before Congress and his work has been featured in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Before joining Urban, Chingos was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He received a BA in government and economics and a PhD in government from Harvard University.
Donald Ray Easton-Brooks
Donald Easton-Brooks is a professor and dean of the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Nevada, Reno. Easton-Brooks is internationally known as a critical quantitative, culturally responsive scholar and leader. He has over 100 presentations and manuscripts examining impacts/effects of systems, policies, and practices on the academic outcomes and success of students from marginalized communities. He received the 2019 Philip C. Chinn Book Award from the National Association of Multicultural Education for his book, Ethnic Matching: Academic Success of Students of Color. He also received the 2020 Neuner Award for Excellence in Professional-Scholarly Publication for a co-authored article in the Journal of Higher Education Management. He served as a board member of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for WestEd; the executive board of the Council of Academic Deans from Research Education Institutions; and the editorial board of Urban Education. He is one of the founders of the Coalition of Black Education Deans and is a part of the AERA: Senior Scholars on Advancing Research and Professional Development Related to Black Education. He received his BA in sociology from Greenville University, his master’s in early childhood special education and multicultural families, and his PhD in educational leadership, both from the University of Colorado Denver.
Leilani Garcia
Leilani Garcia is currently coordinator with the Stanislaus County Office of Education. She leads the Planning and Information Management Group for the Child & Family Services Division. Garcia manages strategic planning; ensures the integrity of the data-governance program; maintains oversight of the data-management system, analysis, and reporting processes; and identifies, plans for, and deploys new technology to meet business needs. Since 2014, She has served as the data manager for Stanislaus READS!, a local campaign for grade-level reading and, since 2018, the Stanislaus Cradle to Career Partnership. As data manager, She supports the ongoing data analysis and reporting needs of the Partnership while building the data infrastructure and governance program to support the long-term work. Garcia led the development of the Stanislaus Cradle to Career Data Trust and is working
on the deployment of a data warehouse that will support the future work of the Partnership. She is exploring privacy-preserving methods to study outcomes for students, including secure multiparty computing that could connect historical prekindergarten data with higher-education data. Garcia holds an MPA with a concentration in public management from California State University and a BA in child development from Mills College.
Joshua Hawley
Joshua Hawley (he/him) is professor in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University (OSU). He also serves as director of the Ohio Education Research Center and associate director for the Center for Human Resource Research, both at OSU. Hawley has training in education policy and education economics. His primary fields of research are workforce development, including adult education, career and technical education, and human resource development. He and colleagues were responsible for the development of the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive, a statewide longitudinal data system that provides researchers in government and academia with individual-level data on education and the labor force in Ohio. He is author of the 2020 Upjohn Institute book, Data Science in the Public Interest: Improving Government Performance in the Workforce. He completed his EdD from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and his MA and BA in history and Asian studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Samuel R. Lucas
Samuel R. Lucas is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-authored Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth, which received the Gustavus Meyers Award, and has authored three other books, including Tracking Inequality: Stratification and Mobility in American High Schools, which received the Willard Waller award as the best book in the sociology of education. His work has appeared in multiple journals, including Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Sociological Methodology, American Journal of Sociology, and others, and he has served on two National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panels, which produced Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education and Measuring Racial Discrimination. He received his BA in religion from Haverford College and his MS and PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a National Science Foundation Minority Graduate Fellow and Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, specializing in sociology of education, social stratification, research methods, and statistics.
Josh McGee
Josh B. McGee is associate director of the Office for Education Policy and a research assistant professor in the Department of Education Reform at the
University of Arkansas. McGee also serves as the chief data officer for the State of Arkansas. He is a director at the nonprofit research firm MDRC and at the retirement policy nonprofit Equable. McGee is an economist whose work focuses on evidence-based policy and public finance. His research investigates issues related to retirement policy, K–12 education, and economic development, and has been published in popular media outlets and scholarly journals. McGee is a former executive vice president at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, chairman of the Texas State Pension Review Board, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, director at the education nonprofit EdBuild, and member of the Tax Policy Center’s Leadership Council. He has also served as an adjunct faculty member at Rice University, where he taught in the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program at the Jones Graduate School of Business. Josh holds a BS and MS in industrial engineering and a PhD in economics from the University of Arkansas.
Amy O’Hara
Amy O’Hara (she/her) is a research professor in the Massive Data Institute, and executive director of the Federal Statistical Research Data Center at Georgetown University. She is the lead of the Administrative Data Research Initiative and co-founder of the Civil Justice Data Commons. She explores ways to improve privacy and security while expanding access to data. Her research interests include population measurement, data quality, and record linkage. She has published articles on these issues in many journals during her time in the field. Prior to her positions at Georgetown, O’Hara worked as a senior executive at the U.S. Census Bureau. During her time at the U.S. Census Bureau, she founded their administrative data curation and research unit. She received her MA and PhD in economics from the University of Notre Dame.
Patrick Perry
Patrick Perry is the director of policy, research, and data for the California Student Aid Commission, where he oversees the research and financial aid–reform agenda for the Commission. Prior to this, Perry was the chief information officer of the California State University system, where he was responsible for the operation of all enterprise student, financial aid, finance, business intelligence, and human resources systems used by the 23-campus system. Patrick was previously the vice chancellor for technology, research, and information systems at the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, the largest 2-year higher education system in the nation. He is a national authority on the development and management of local, segmental, state, and national student longitudinal data systems, accountability reporting, metrics design, and institutional research. He received his BS in economics from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Judith Singer
Judith D. Singer is the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and the senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity at Harvard University. She has done extensive research in the fields of quantitative methods applied to social, educational, and behavioral issues. Her work has contributed to the development, improvement, and expansion of accessibility of statistical methods. She has been published in many journals and has co-authored three books, By Design: Planning Better Research in Higher Education, Who Will Teach: Policies that Matter, and Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence. Singer is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Statistical Association. She received her BA in mathematics from the State University of New York at Albany and her PhD in statistics from Harvard University.
Kathryn Stack
Kathryn Stack is the CEO of KB Stack Consulting, LLC. Prior to leaving federal service in 2015, Stack spent nearly three decades at the White House Office of Management and Budget. Under the G.W. Bush and Obama administrations, she was a deputy associate director overseeing budget, policy, legislation, regulations, and management issues for the Departments of Education and Labor, the Social Security Administration, the Corporation for National and Community Services, and major human services programs including Head Start, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, child welfare, and food and nutrition assistance. In this role, she helped both republican and democratic administrations strengthen their focus on using data, evidence, and evaluation to improve program results. Recent publications include “The Office of Management and Budget: The Quarterback of Evidence-Based Policymaking in the Federal Government” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2018) and “Harnessing Data Analytics to Improve the Lives of Individuals and Families: A National Strategy,” a 2020 working paper published by the Day One Project of the Federation of American Scientists. Stack holds a bachelor’s degree in government from Cornell University and is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Lynne Stokes
Lynne Stokes (she/her) is professor of statistical science and director of the Data Science Institute at Southern Methodist University. She has extensive experience with surveys, polls, sampling, and nonsampling survey errors. Her research focuses on the fields of sampling, measurement error, and order statistics. Her research has contributed to the accuracy and improvement of statistical estimates of many organizations, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She is a fellow of the American
Statistical Association. She has served on a number of National Academies, panels, including panels on the Review of the Study Design of the National Children’s Study, Alternative Census Methodologies, Assessment of the National Aviation Operational Monitoring Service, Integration of Data Sources to Improve Crop Estimates, and Recreational Fisheries Survey Methods. For the past 15 years, she has been a member of the Technical Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. She received her PhD in mathematical statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Katherine Wallman
Katherine Wallman served from 1992 to 2017 as chief statistician of the United States, advancing long-term improvements and setting standards for the federal statistical establishment. During her tenure, Wallman increased collaboration among the agencies of the U.S. statistical system, fostered improvements in the scope and quality of the nation’s official statistics, strengthened protections for confidential statistical information, and initiated changes that have made the products of the system more accessible. Currently retired, she continues to consult and contribute, particularly with respect to principles, policies, and priorities for activities of federal statistical agencies. Wallman has served as the president of the American Statistical Association (1992) and chair of the United Nations Statistical Commission (2004–2005). She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She received her BA from Wellesley College.
John Robert Warren
John Robert (“Rob”) Warren (he/him) is professor of sociology and director of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on the ways inequalities in educational, health, and cognitive outcomes emerge across the life course. With Chandra Muller, Eric Grodsky, and Jennifer Manly, he is co-leading midlife follow-up surveys of the High School & Beyond cohort—with a focus on the early life and educational factors that shape later-life disparities in health and cognition. Previous work has focused on the measurement of states’ high school completion rates; the consequences of state high school exit examinations for educational and labor market outcomes; and the magnitude of “panel conditioning” (or time in survey) effects in (educational and other) longitudinal surveys. He received a bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from Carleton College and master’s and doctorate degrees in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
