Eva L. Baker and Gary Orfield, professors of education at UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, have been elected to membership in the prestigious National Academy of Education.
National Academy of Education members are elected on the basis of outstanding scholarship or contributions to education. Election to the academy is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to a professor of education. Baker and Orfield are among sixteen members recently elected.
"I am honored to be among so many distinguished colleagues," Orfield said.
"We are extremely pleased that both Professor Orfield and Professor Baker were elected to the National Academy of Education," said AimÊe Dorr, dean of UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. "This is a well-deserved recognition of the many contributions they have made and continue to make on some of the most important problems of our time."
Baker, an educational psychologist, is the director of UCLA's Center for the Study of Evaluation and co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing. She has concentrated her research on assessment and accountability models, as well as on the design and validation of technology-based learning assessment systems. She has published more than 450 scholarly articles and book chapters.
Influential in educational policy, Baker has testified before Congress on numerous accountability issues. She has chaired the National Research Council's Board on Testing and Assessment, as well as the Assessment Task Force of the National Council on Education Standards and Testing. Her international work is extensive and includes studies of performance standards and national assessment policies for the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Education Forum Project. She has been an adviser to ministries and universities in Latin America, the Middle East, Australia, Europe and Asia and to other international organizations, such as NATO. She is the immediate past president of the American Educational Research Association.
Orfield, who was a professor of education and social policy at Harvard University from 1991 to 2007, now co-directs the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, a civil rights center he co-founded at Harvard in 1996 and which moved to UCLA earlier this year. Orfield's interests include the study of civil rights, education policy, urban policy and minority opportunity. His interest in the development and implementation of social policy is reflected in his recent studies of changing patterns of school desegregation.
Orfield is the author or editor of numerous books, including "School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?", "Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis" and "Higher Education and the Color Line: College Access, Racial Equity and Social Change." He has been an expert witness in dozens of class-action civil rights cases, including Next Friend of Joshua Ryan McDonald v. Jefferson County Board of Education, et al., a Louisville, Ky., case now pending before the United States Supreme Court.
Founded in 1965 to advance the highest quality education research and its use in policy formation and practice, the National Academy of Education is an honorary society that currently has 162 members and 12 foreign associates. Since its establishment, the academy has sponsored a variety of commissions and study panels that have published influential proceedings and reports.
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