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Senior Advisors to the National High School Center
The National High School Center Senior Advisors are nationally recognized leaders in various fields including literacy, dropout prevention, capacity building at the state, district and individual school level, and special education. This group of experts draw from their extensive background knowledge to advise the National High School Center on improving high schools.
Brian
Cobb
Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University School of Education
Brian Cobb is Professor Emeritus from the School of
Education at Colorado State University and former Co-Chair of the Education
Coordinating Group for the Campbell Collaboration, an international
professional society dedicated to conducting and disseminating worldwide the
results of systematic reviews (meta-analyses) of educational interventions.
Brian teaches quantitative research design at the doctoral level as well as
quantitative analysis particularly the statistical models used in the analysis
and aggregation of experimental and quasi-experimental research studies. In
recent years, Brian was principal investigator of a $1.9 million U. S.
Department of Education-funded, evidence-based research synthesis grant
entitled What Works in Transition for Secondary Youth with Disabilities. He was
also a senior researcher for a contract funded by the Rehabilitation Services
Administration to conduct a national assessment of transition policies and
practices. Finally he has completed work for the National Center for Special
Education Research on rubrics for assessing the methodological quality and
levels of evidence for interventions research in transition.
Todd
Flaherty
Deputy in Residence, Council of Chief State School Officers
As Deputy in Residence for the Council of Chief State
School Officers (CCSSO) and Senior Policy Consultant for the National High
School Center, Dr. Flaherty works on secondary school transformation at both
the national and state level. Prior to that, as Deputy Commissioner of
Education in Rhode Island for twelve years (1995-2007), Dr. Flaherty played a
vital role in implementing Rhode Island’s systemic school reform
initiatives outlined in the state’s Comprehensive Education Strategy
(CES). Working with his SEA teams, he was part of leading and supporting
a new set of statewide standards and online K-12 curriculum standards, new
large scale assessments through the New England Common Assessment Program
(NECAP), formulating and implementing a set of high school restructuring
regulations, and building a Highly Qualified Leaders program and website. Dr.
Flaherty has also done substantial work in designing and implementing Rhode
Island’s accountability system known as Progressive Support and
Intervention (PS&I), primarily with urban districts.
Currently, Dr. Flaherty collaborates with other national policy-making organizations and state education agencies on secondary school redesign, addressing policy development and comprehensive implementation strategies. He has broad experience as a school administrator, and served as president of the RI School Superintendents Association (RISSA) and was principal of two award winning high schools: Governor James B. Hunt (Jr.) High School in North Carolina, and Narragansett High School, Rhode Island. Dr. Flaherty has been a visiting Associate Professor at Brown University focusing on educational leadership in urban and diverse settings. He holds a Bachelors Degree from Syracuse and a Doctorate from Boston University.
Libia S. Gil
Senior Research Fellow, American Institutes for Research
Libia S. Gil joined the American Institutes for
Research to continue her work as the former Chief Academic Officer for New
American Schools. In this capacity Dr. Gil provides senior counsel on
leadership development initiatives and assists states and districts in
developing strategies for improving student achievement by bridging research
evidence with practice evidence. Dr. Gil is currently the lead consultant for
the High School Renewal efforts on behalf of the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
in the San Diego Unified School District. Her focus on multiple strategies to
address student achievement gaps includes small schools creation and support
for small learning communities in multiple projects across the country. Dr. Gil
was Superintendent of the Chula Vista Elementary School District for over nine
years.
In addition to multiple awards and honors, Dr. Gil received the 2002 Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education for her outstanding leadership as Chula Vista Superintendent. The McGraw Prize is awarded annually to individuals who demonstrate exceptional contribution to the improvement of education systems.
Dr. Gil began her teaching career in the Los Angeles Unified School District and has taught in various programs, including English as a Second Language, Bilingual Education and Gifted and Talented programs. As a teacher, she and her colleagues created a successful K-12 alternative school and numerous alternative classroom programs. She has held a variety of administrative positions including school principal and Area Administrator, supervising K-12 principals, and Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction. Dr. Gil has a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with emphasis on bilingual and multicultural education from the University of Washington.
Nettie
Legters
Research Scientist, The Center for Social Organization
of Schools and The Johns Hopkins University
Nettie Legters, Ph.D. is a Research Scientist at the
Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization of Schools, and
Co-Director of the Center’s Talent Development High Schools (TDHS)
program. Her research focuses on equity in education, school
organization, teachers’ work, dropout prevention, and implementation,
scale-up, and impact of secondary education reform. Dr. Legters has
dedicated her professional career to improving low performing high schools and
advancing the national high school reform movement. She has published
extensively and presented to a wide variety of audiences in national, state,
regional, and district forums. She co-authored with Robert Balfanz the
widely cited report Locating the Dropout Crisis – Which High Schools
Produce the Nation’s Dropouts?, Where Are They Located?, Who Attends
Them? and her book, Comprehensive Reform for Urban High Schools: A Talent
Development Approach is available through Teachers College Press.
Nancy Safer
Managing Research Scientist, American Institutes for Research
Nancy Safer, Ed.D., Managing Research Scientist, has over 30 years of experience in special education with expertise in program development and policy research and analysis related to services for children and youth with disabilities. At AIR, she serves as the Co-Project Director of the National Center on Student Progress Monitoring, a national technical assistance and dissemination center dedicated to the implementation of scientifically-based student progress monitoring, as well as the K-8 Access Center, a national technical assistance center to improve educational outcomes for elementary and middle school students with disabilities.
Dr. Safer is the former executive director of the Council for Exceptional Children where she provided, for almost 10 years, strategic and operational leadership in the management and coordination of the organization of more than 50,000 special educators, related professionals, and families. Dr. Safer is also the former director of the Division of Educational Services at the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs in which she was responsible for the Infants and Toddlers with Disabilities Program and the Preschool Formula Grants Program, and eight discretionary grants programs. She is widely published including directing three annual reports to Congress on the implementation of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act and many other publications related to early childhood, special education, inclusion and other topics. Dr. Safer received her M.Ed. and Ed.D. in Special Education from Temple University.
Terry
Salinger
Managing Director and Chief Scientist for Reading
Research, American Institutes for Research
Dr. Terry Salinger is a Managing Director and Chief
Scientist for Reading Research at the American Institutes for Research. Her
specific areas of focus are reading and literacy research and assessment. She
is currently the project director for the Enhanced Reading Opportunities study,
an IES-funded randomized control trial of the effectiveness of supplemental
reading interventions for adolescent struggling readers. Additionally, Dr.
Salinger provides content expertise on studies investigating pre-service
teachers’ preparation to teach beginning reading, use of an explicit
curriculum for adult ESL learners, and monitoring the implementation of the
Reading First program. She headed a study of the secondary component of the
Alabama Reading Initiative, a state-wide effort to enhance reading instruction;
led the project to develop the framework and specifications for the 2009
National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading; and was senior advisor
to the development of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy.
Dr. Salinger’s professional experiences prior to joining AIR in 1997 include four years as the director of research at the International Reading Association, where she was project director for the development of the National Council of Teachers of English/International Reading Association National Standards for the English Language Arts. She has worked at Educational Testing Service, where she headed development of the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading, developed assessments of teacher knowledge, and did research on classroom-based assessment approaches for reading and writing. She has close to twenty years in other positions in education, first as a classroom teacher in New York City and then as a professor of reading and early childhood education at the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Cincinnati.
Dr. Salinger has a doctorate in reading, with dual emphases on statistics and curriculum design, has done extensive research on the instruction and assessment of reading and writing; she has published widely, especially in the fields of literacy acquisition and standards-based assessment. Two chapters written by Dr. Salinger appear in the 2007 book Adolescent Literacy Instruction: Policies and Promising Practices, which is edited by Jill Lewis and Gary Moorman and published by the International Reading Association.
