William T. Grant Foundation Appoints Penn GSE Dean to Board of Trustees

Andrew C. Porter, the dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named to the board of trustees of the William T. Grant Foundation. Dr. Porter also serves on the GSE faculty as the George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education.

Before arriving at Penn GSE, Dr. Porter taught at Michigan State, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Vanderbilt University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in educational psychology from UW-Madison in 1965 and 1967, respectively. While serving as Anderson-Bascom Professor in Education at UW-Madison, Dr. Porter was also director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. At Vanderbilt, he directed the Learning Sciences Institute and was Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Leadership Policy and Organizations.

Dr. Porter has published widely on psychometrics, student assessment, and teaching. His current interests include understanding how teachers make decisions regarding what to teach, and how those decisions affect student learning. Formerly the chief of the National Institute of Education's Measurement and Methodology Division, he has played important roles in the American Educational Research Association, where he was president in 2001; and the National Academy of Education, where he been a member since 1994 and vice president since 2005.

"A significant portion of our current grantmaking is meant to understand and improve how schools and classrooms affect student achievement and other important student outcomes," said Robert C. Granger, the Foundation's president. "The work presents conceptual, measurement, and analytical challenges. Andy Porter is an expert in each of these areas and we are very fortunate that he has agreed to serve on our Board."

About the William T. Grant Foundation

Since its inception in 1936, the William T. Grant Foundation has had a remarkable constancy of purpose: to further the understanding of human behavior through research. The Foundation's mission focuses on improving the settings of youth ages 8 to 25 in the United States. We invest primarily in high quality empirical studies. Our current research interests include understanding how social settings such as families, schools, peer groups, and organizations work; how they affect youth; and how they can be improved. Our interests also focus on the use and influence of scientific evidence in policy and practice. To a more limited extent, the Foundation invests in capacity-building and communications activities that advance work related to our current research interests.

CONTACT: Nancy Brokaw, nbrokaw@gse.upenn.edu, 215-573-0591