Appendix A: Title I Expert Panel

Bruce Baker
Professor, Rutgers University
Ed.D., Teachers College, Columbia University
M.A., University of Connecticut
A.B., Lafayette College

Bruce Baker’s primary areas of research are education finance and the economics of education. He has written extensively on issues concerning educational equity and adequacy and has testified as an expert witness on issues surrounding school funding equity in state and federal courts. Baker’s current research interest is making research accessible to policymakers. He teaches courses in data analysis at the doctoral level and education law at the master’s level.

Paul Sanders Brown
Retired, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Department of Education
M.A., International Studies, The American University
B.A., History, Randolph-Macon College

Sandy Brown served in the Department of Education’s Student Achievement and School Accountability (SASA) program office and was responsible for administering several programs, including Title I, Part A grants to local education agencies. Brown was responsible for overseeing the financial aspects of SASA’s programs, including the allocation and distribution of funds to states, school districts, and individual schools and the administration of the law’s fiscal requirements.

David Figlio
Orrington Lunt Professor and Dean of the School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University
Ph.D., Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
M.S., Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.S., Business Economics/Public Policy, George Washington University

David Figlio conducts research on a wide range of education and health policy issues, from school accountability and standards to welfare policy and policy design. He is also leading a National Science Foundation–sponsored national network to facilitate the use of matched administrative datasets to inform and evaluate education policy. Figlio is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the executive board for the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.  

Stephen Frank
Senior Advisor, Education Resource Strategies
Ph.D., Political Science and Public Policy, Duke University

Stephen Frank advises on research, methodology, and data analytics as well as state practices for Education Resource Strategies, a national nonprofit. Over the past 14 years, Frank has led strategy development projects in school systems across the country. He also led a 2-year project, funded by Race to the Top (RTT), with the Georgia Department of Education to help it refine a strategy for school district support in resource allocation, including ways to increase resource flexibilities for local education agencies. Most recently, he directed a similar RTT-funded multiyear project with the New York State Education Department and helped to launch the Partnership for Strategic School Management.

Nora Gordon
Associate Professor, Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy; Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research
Ph.D., Harvard University
A.M., Harvard University
B.A., Swarthmore College

Nora Gordon’s research focuses on American education policy, with an emphasis on the federal role in elementary and secondary education. She has studied the distributional impacts of Title I, fiscal rules governing federal education grants, the Community Eligibility Provision, state school finance reforms, causes and consequences of school desegregation, and school district consolidation. Her research has been published in various journals—including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy—and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation for Education Research, the American Educational Research Association, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Her popular writing appears in outlets including the New York Times, Education Week, and TheAtlantic.com.

Gordon has testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education on implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act. She has served on DC’s State Title I Committee of Practitioners and currently serves on the Professional Advisory Board of the National Center for Learning Disabilities and as associate editor of the Journal of Human Resources. Prior to her appointment at Georgetown, Gordon was on the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of California, San Diego.

Heather Hough
Executive Director, CORE-PACE Research Partnership
Ph.D., Administration and Policy Analysis, Stanford University
B.A., Public Policy, Stanford University

Heather Hough is the executive director of PACE. Prior to serving in this role, she led the partnership between PACE and the CORE Districts. Her recent work has focused on using research to strengthen state structures supporting continuous improvement and advance policies that support the whole child. She has worked in a variety of capacities to support policy and practice in education, including as an improvement advisor at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and as a researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California, the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University, and the Center for Education Policy at SRI International.

Wayne Riddle
Independent Consultant
M.A., Economics, George Washington University
B.A., History, University of Virginia

Wayne Riddle is an independent nonpartisan consultant on federal elementary and secondary education policy, specifically with respect to Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). He consults with a variety of education and public policy organizations and associations, especially on Title I accountability policies and allocation formulas. From 1978 to 2008, Riddle was the lead analyst on ESEA overall, and Title I in particular, for the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress. He was closely involved in CRS’s initial efforts to develop the capability to estimate the impact of alternative allocation formulas for Title I, as well as other federal elementary and secondary education programs.

R. Anthony Rolle
Dean, Alan Shawn Feinstein College of Education and Professional Studies, University of Rhode Island
Ph.D., Education Policy Studies, Indiana University Bloomington
M.P.A, University of Washington
B.S., Political Science, Santa Clara University

R. Anthony Rolle is a past president of the National Education Finance Academy. His academic research interests contribute to knowledge of organizational productivity and public finance equity by investigating their undercultivated dimensions. Specifically, Rolle’s theoretical policy research explores and improves relative measures of economic efficiency for public schools, and his empirical policy research explores and applies concepts of vertical equity to efficacy analyses of state education finance mechanisms.

Lori L. Taylor
Professor and Head, Department of Public Service and Administration, and Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Chair in Business and Government, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University
Ph.D., Economics, University of Rochester
M.S., Economics, University of Rochester
B.A., Economics, University of Kansas
B.S., Business Administration, University of Kansas

Lori L. Taylor is professor and head of the Department of Public Service and Administration in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She also currently serves as a member of the editorial board for AERA Open; as a member of the board of directors for the Association for Education Finance and Policy; as a member of the board of governors for the Regional Education Laboratory (REL) Southwest; and as the principal investigator for the Texas Smart Schools Initiative. Taylor developed the National Center for Education Statistics’ Comparable Wage Index and has written extensively on variations in the cost of education, the determinants of school district efficiency, and teacher compensation.

Kenneth Wong
Walter and Leonore Annenberg Chair for Education Policy, Brown University
Ph.D., Political Science, University of Chicago
M.A., Political Science, University of Chicago
B.A., Political Science, University of Chicago

Kenneth Wong has conducted extensive research in the politics of education and governance redesign (including city and state takeover, management reform, and Title I schoolwide reform). His research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Social Science Research Council, the Spencer Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the British Council, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Wong has advised Congress, the Secretaries of Education and Interior, state legislatures, governors, mayors, and the leadership in several large urban school systems on how to redesign accountability frameworks.