Catherine Clark and Laurence Toenjes

Texas Center for Educational Research
Austin, Texas

About the Authors

Catherine Clark is the director of the Texas Center for Educational Research (TCER) in Austin, Texas. She specializes in elementary and secondary education finance and research on school management and governance. She has recently co-directed a study of program weights and adjustments in the Texas school funding formula, and has been co-director of a study of Texas open-enrollment charter schools.

Prior to joining TCER, Dr. Clark served as a senior research associate at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, and prior to that as an educational specialist at the Texas State Property Tax Board. She has been an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. She is a former middle school teacher.

Dr. Clark serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Education Finance and served on the Board of Directors of the American Finance Association from 1993 to 1996. Dr. Clark is a graduate of Stanford University with a doctorate in education (1978).

Laurence Toenjes is a research faculty member of the University of Houstons Department of Sociology. His current work is focused on the disparities in student performance among Texas campuses of comparable socio-economic characteristics.

Dr. Toenjes has been an active participant in school finance analysis in Texas during the past decade, and has also participated, as a private consultant, in school finance policy analyses in several other states. He has created computerized school finance models for the states of Illinois, Texas, Missouri, and Nebraska.

A primary interest of Dr. Toenjes is the development and use of interactive computer graphics software to display and analyze school finance and student performance data and to use of such techniques to communicate findings to policymakers.

Dr. Toenjes has received his doctorate in economics from Southern Illinois University.