Four diverse experts – Martin West of Harvard University, Katie Buckley of Transforming Education, Mariann Lemke of AIR, and Patrick Kyllonen of ETS – will serve as our expert leaders at the second NGALC meeting. They will present on new innovations in accountability surrounding college and career readiness, social emotional learning, and school climate. For more information on these topics, please visit the resources tab. You can find the four experts’ biographies below.

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Martin West is associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also deputy director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and executive editor of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research on education policy. West studies the politics of K-12 education in the United States and how education policies affect student learning and non-cognitive development. His current projects include studies of public opinion on education policy, the effects of charter school attendance and on cognitive and non-cognitive skills, data use in schools, and the influence of relative pay on teacher quality. In 2014-15, West worked as senior education policy advisor to the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. He previously taught at Brown University and was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he is now a nonresident senior fellow.

Katie Buckley is the Director of Research and Assessment at TransformEd, where she is responsible for developing the organization’s research agenda, managing evaluation studies, and leading TransformEd’s work in identifying and validating existing and new assessments of MESH skills. Prior to joining Transforming Education, Katie was a Senior Analyst at Abt Associates and served as a consultant for the Center for Assessment. Katie holds an Ed.D. in Quantitative Policy Analysis in Education and an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), where her research focused on the use of assessments in teacher evaluation systems. While at HGSE, Katie was a teaching fellow for several statistical and policy courses, and served as a graduate fellow at the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR). Katie received a Master’s degree in Public Policy (M.P.P.) from the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Political Science from Providence College.

Mariann Lemke is a managing researcher at AIR. Lemke has more than a decade of experience managing large-scale survey and assessment projects in education at the federal and district levels. At AIR, Lemke oversees assessment and evaluation tasks for district, state, and federal clients. She currently directs a project for Baltimore City Public Schools and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education in Washington, DC to develop value-added models and acts as a task leader on a federal study on the impact of teacher and leader evaluation systems. She is leading stakeholder engagement and communications support for the state of Florida in its work to develop value-added models for use in educator evaluation and acts as senior advisor on a similar project for the state of New York.

Patrick Kyllonen directs ETS’s Next Generation Higher Education Assessment and its Workforce Readiness initiatives; large scale student, teacher, and school questionnaire research and development for the National Assessment for Educational Progress and the Programme for International Student Assessment; and 21st century skills assessment and development research. Before joining ETS in 1999, he was technical director of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Manpower and Personnel Division. His research has focused on the measurement of human abilities, working memory, learning and skill acquisition, psychomotor abilities, personality assessment, computer-based testing, and psychometrics. More recently, he and his colleagues have been investigating affective and noncognitive mediators of educational success and job performance, along with associated new assessments and delivery modes. He has a B.A. in experimental psychology from St. John’s University and a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford University.