EVEA was helmed by a leadership team with decades of experience among them conducting
research, providing education leadership, managing grants and projects, and producing
high quality products to help all students achieve academic success.
These leaders oversaw EVEA's activities to ensure that project outputs were theoretically
sound, technically rigorous, and aligned with project targets and intentions.
SENIOR ADVISOR AND STATE LEAD: Joe Willhoft, Ph.D., is the Executive
Director of the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), one of two Race to
the Top Assessment consortia awarded funds to develop new general assessments that
are aligned to the Common Core State Standards. Until November 2010, Dr. Willhoft
was the Assistant Superintendent for Assessment and Student Information for the
Washington Office of the Superintendent for Public Instruction. In addition to his
responsibilities for Washington's statewide student testing program and student
information systems, he is presently a member of the EIMAC Assessment Task Force
and chairman of the NAEP Policy Task Force for the National Assessment Governing
Board. As the Senior Advisor and State Lead for EVEA, he ensured
that the project was implemented in concert with the needs of Washington and the
other participating states.
CO PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Ellen Forte, Ph.D, is the President
and founder of edCount, LLC and has nearly two decades' experience conducting research;
providing advice and reporting on standards, assessments, and accountability; and
assisting state and local education agencies in the successful interpretation and
implementation of education policies. She currently holds seats on the assessment
Technical Advisory Committees for four states, is Principal Investigator for two
other ongoing validity studies, both funded by grants through the US Department
of Education's Office of Special Education Programs, and is the chief policy advisor
to the National Deaf Education Center at Gallaudet University on its implementation
of standards, assessments, and accountability mechanisms as required under the 2008
Education of the Deaf Act. As Co-Principal Investigator, she provided oversight
to all the activities of this project, including the Management Team.
CO PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Marianne Perie, Ph.D, is a Senior Associate
at the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (NCIEA-Center
for Assessment), whose work centers on standard setting, reporting, accountability,
technical documentation, and validity studies. She has conducted standard-setting
studies in over sixteen states, districts, and foreign countries and is currently
providing technical assistance to a group of states developing and evaluating a
validity argument for their alternate assessment based on alternate achievement
standards. As Co-Principal Investigator and part of the Management Team, she provided
coordination and leadership to the Expert Panel.
CO PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Alison Bailey, Ph.D, is Professor in
the Division of Psychological Studies in Education of the Department of Education,
University of California, Los Angeles, as well as faculty associate researcher at
the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST).
Dr. Bailey's work focuses on language, literacy and assessment, specifically the
academic English language development of second-language learners, and English language
assessment. She serves on the ELD assessment technical advisory board to the California
Department of Education, and has authored numerous books and articles, including
The Language Demands of School: Putting Academic English to the Test, (Yale University
Press, 2007). As Co-Principal Investigator and a member of the Management Team,
she provided direct oversight to the research partners.
PROJECT DIRECTOR: Elizabeth Towles-Reeves, Ph.D, is an expert in
the field of special needs students and alternate assessment, and served as project
coordinator for the University of Kentucky's National Alternate Assessment Center
for 5 years, overseeing projects funded by the US Department of Education's Office
of Special Education Programs. At NAAC, Dr. Towles-Reeves served as a research coordinator
on a validity evaluation project focusing on alternate assessments based on alternate
achievement standards (AA-AAS), which engaged a five-state consortium in studies
to test and strengthen the validity of the participating states' alternate assessment
systems. As the Project Director, Dr. Towles-Reeves provided direct oversight to
the Administration and Partnerships within the proposal.
DEPUTY PROJECT DIRECTOR: Sara Waring, Ph.D, is an expert in the
field of English as a Second Language (ESL). In the past, she was the State Director
of Title III at the South Dakota Department of Education and has served the Sioux
Falls Public School District in various capacities, including as the Director of
Federal Programs and Grants Management, as the district-level coordinator of a discretionary
grant teacher training program for professional development for ESL and mainstream
teachers, and as an ESL teacher at the elementary, middle school and high school
levels. As the Deputy Project Director, Dr. Waring coordinated the research partners
in conjunction with Dr. Bailey.
Together, these leaders directed the Management Team, the Expert Panel, and the
research partners throughout the course of the project.