Anthony S. Bryk

Profile from: carnegiefoundation.org

Anthony S. Bryk is the ninth president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In his current role, he is leading work on strengthening the research and development infrastructure for improving teaching and learning. Carnegie’s current priority domain is developmental mathematics education in community colleges. From 2004 until assuming Carnegie’s presidency in September 2008, Bryk held the Spencer Chair in Organizational Studies in the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His main areas of expertise are school organization, education reform and educational statistics.

Prior to Stanford, he held the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education post in the sociology department at the University of Chicago. He was Founding Director of the Center for Urban School Improvement which supports reform efforts within the Chicago Public Schools and launched the University’s professional development charter school in the North Kenwood/Oakland neighborhood.
 
Bryk is also Founding Director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, a federation of Chicago-area research organizations that undertakes a range of studies designed to advance school improvement and assess the progress of Chicago school reform. The Consortium developed a national representation for its twin mission of conducting high quality research on urban school reform coupled with an activist public informing about these research findings.
 
In 2003, Bryk was awarded The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Prize for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Scholarship and the Distinguished Career Contributions Award from the American Educational Research Association. He is also a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. Most recently, Boston College conferred an honorary doctorate of Human Letters for his contributions to educational reform.
 
Bryk recently completed a five-year field trial of the efficacy of the Literacy Collaborative Professional Development Program on teacher practice and student learning. The study entailed developing new instrumentation for assessing instructional practices, logs for detailing coaching opportunities, and piloting a formative performance assessment system for coaching practices.

His most recently published book, Organizing Schools for Improvement, synthesizes fifteen years of evidence from Chicago on how the organization of schools and community context influences the capacity to enhance student engagement and advance student learning.