Dr. Andrew Porter

Andy Porter has worked in higher education as a researcher and research manager for over 40 years. He is a past president of the American Educational Research Association, an elected member and the current Vice President of the National Academy of Education, and a Life Time National Associate of the National Academies. He has published over one hundred articles and book chapters, and many technical reports.

His research has focused on four interconnected interests:

• For 30 years, he has conducted studies on how teachers decide what content to teach their students. He has documented that the academic content students are taught is the strongest school-controlled variable in explaining gains in student achievement. He has evolved a theory for designing effective curriculum policies and has developed tools for measuring content and assessing alignment (e.g., of instruction to state content standards) that are used in over 30 states.
• He leads an effort to conceptualize, develop, and disseminate an assessment of school leadership. The instrument is the first psychometrically sound assessment of school leadership.
• He has identified characteristics of effective professional development of teachers and documented that the bulk of money spent on professional development is spent on activities lacking those characteristics.
• Psychometrics and applied statistics. He has developed an estimated true scores analysis of covariance, a non-parametric analysis of covariance, and a quantitative index of alignment.

As a manager, Andy is a former Director of the Basic Skills Group of the National Institute of Education (U.S. government), Associate Dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University (where he also co-directed the Institute for Research on Teaching), Director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Director of the Learning Sciences Institute at Vanderbilt University. Under his leadership, the Wisconsin Center for Education Research became the largest research center on the University of Wisconsin campus with an annual budget of contracts and grants in excess of $30 million dollars per year.

Dr. Porter was appointed Dean of Penn GSE in 2007.