Adam Gamoran

Adam Gamoran is the president of the William T. Grant Foundation, a charitable organization that supports research to improve the lives of young people. He spent three decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he held the John D. MacArthur Chair in Sociology and Educational Policy Studies. His many roles at UW-Madison included director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, chair of the sociology department, and interim dean of the School of Education. His research interests include stratification and inequality in education and school reform. Recent studies have focused on interventions to improve performance and reduce gaps, including a professional development program to improve elementary teaching and learning in Los Angeles, and a family engagement program to boost children’s academic and social outcomes by strengthening relationships among families and between families and schools, first in San Antonio and Phoenix, and later in Philadelphia. Each of these studies involved large-scale cluster-randomized trials. Gamoran is the lead author of Transforming Teaching in Math and Science: How Schools and Districts Can Support Change (Teachers College Press, 2003) and editor of Standards-Based Reform and the Poverty Gap: Lessons for No Child Left Behind (Brookings Institution Press, 2007). He also co-edited Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement (National Academy Press, 2002) and Stratification in Higher Education (Stanford University Press, 2007). He currently chairs the National Research Council’s Board on Science Education. Previously he chaired the Independent Advisory Panel of the National Assessment of Career and Technical Education for the U.S. Department of Education, and was twice appointed by President Obama to serve on the National Board for Education Sciences.