Co-directors

Stephen Plank (Ph.D. in sociology, University of Chicago), is an Associate Professor in The Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Sociology, and is also affiliated with the Center for Social Organization of Schools. Plank received a bachelor’s degree in mathematical methods in the social sciences, and sociology, from Northwestern University (1990). His published education research includes Finding One’s Place: Teaching Styles and Peer Relations in Diverse Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 2000), and articles in the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Journal of Vocational Education Research, Sociology of Education, and American Journal of Education. Much of his past and current research focuses on solutions to the problem of high school dropout (including associations with career and technical education), predictors of successful transitions to college, and school climate.

Obed Norman (Ph.D. in science education, University of Iowa) is an Associate Professor of Science Education in Morgan State University's Graduate Program in Mathematics and Science Education. In addition to serving as BERC co-director, he is also the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation funded research project aimed at improving science instruction and student motivation in the Baltimore City Public Schools. Dr. Norman has extensive high school science teaching experience and currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal for Research in Science Teaching (JRST) and the Journal of Science Teacher Education (JSTE}.

Associate Director

Robert Balfanz is a Co-Director of the Everyone Graduates Center and research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools, Johns Hopkins University. He is the Co-Director of the Talent Development Middle and High School Project, which is currently working with more than 100 high-poverty secondary schools to develop, implement and evaluate comprehensive whole school reforms. He is also co-operator of the Baltimore Talent Development High School, an Innovation High School run in partnership with the Baltimore City Public School System. He has published widely on secondary school reform, high school dropouts, early warning systems and instructional interventions in high-poverty schools. Recent work includes Locating the Dropout Crisis, with co-author Nettie Legters, in which they identify the number and location of high schools with high dropout rates and What Your Community Can Do to End its Dropout Crisis. He is also co-author of Graduation Nation Guidebook. Dr. Balfanz is the first recipient of the Alliance for Excellent Education’s Everyone a Graduate Award.

Executive Committee

BERC’s Executive Committee includes representatives from The Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University, Baltimore City Public Schools, and civic and community partners. Dr. Stephen Plank (Johns Hopkins University), Dr. Obed Norman (Morgan State University), Dr. Robert Balfanz (Johns Hopkins University), and Dr. Andrés Alonso, Chief Executive Officer of Baltimore City Public Schools, serve on the Executive Committee. Additional members include Dr. Mary Minter, Chief Academic Officer for Baltimore City Public Schools; Dr. Benjamin Feldman, the Chief Achievement and Accountability Officer for Baltimore City Public Schools; Mr. J. Howard Henderson, President and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Urban League; Dr. Jacquelyn Duval-Harvey, Deputy Commissioner for Youth and Families for the Baltimore City Health Department, and Diane Bell-McKoy, Chief Executive Officer of Associated Black Charities.

Dr. Andrés Alonso was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Baltimore City Public Schools in July 2007. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Columbia University, and earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He resigned a lucrative law practice to teach special education and English language learners for 11 years in Newark, and earned a doctorate from Harvard University’s elite Urban Superintendents Program. Under his leadership as deputy chancellor of teaching and learning in the New York City Department of Education, the school system was a finalist for three consecutive years for the prestigious Broad Foundation Prize for Urban Education, which honors districts demonstrating the greatest overall performance and improvement.

Dr. Benjamin Feldman is Chief Achievement and Accountability Officer for Baltimore City Public Schools, where he oversees the school system’s data and accountability functions. He directs the development of the School Accountability Framework, which measures schools’ ability to increase student achievement and other key student outcomes. Prior to this, he served as Accountability Officer of the Baltimore City Public Schools Division of Research, Evaluation, Assessment, and Accountability (DREAA).

Mr. J. Howard Henderson has been active in the struggle for civil and human rights for over forty years, most recently as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Baltimore Urban League. Prior to assuming leadership of GBUL in 2000, Mr. Henderson served in various executive and management positions in the NAACP national office for over a decade, including as Director of National Programs. As Director of the West Virginia State Employment and Training Division, he oversaw a budget of $95.5 million for job training and development. Mr. Henderson earned a B.S. in education and an M.A. in educational administration from Marshall University.

Jacquelyn Duval-Harvey (Ph.D. in clinical psychology, Pennsylvania State University) is Deputy Commissioner for Youth and Families for the Baltimore City Health Department. Dr. Duval-Harvey is a graduate of Hofstra University in New York. Before joining the City Health Department, she directed the Johns Hopkins Hospital Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Community Programs and served on several boards, including the Maryland School-Based Health Center Policy Advisory Council. Duval-Harvey formerly directed the East Baltimore Mental Health Partnership and was a psychiatric therapist in the Johns Hopkins Hospital school-based program.

Diane Bell-McKoy is President and Chief Executive Officer of Associated Black Charities, a Maryland-based public foundation founded in 1985 focused on closing the health and wealth gaps for citizens of Maryland especially African Americans and thus changing the economic outcomes for the state. Ms Bell-McKoy considers herself a change agent and has served in many roles seeking changes to benefit families and children in the Baltimore – Washington area over the past 35 years. Some of her previous roles included: senior fellow with the Annie Casey Foundation; School Board Commissioner, the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners; Deputy Chief of Staff for former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke and former President and CEO of Empower Baltimore Management Corporation.

Sonja Brookins Santelises was appointed City Schools’ Chief Academic Officer (CAO) in 2010. In her previous role as Assistant Superintendent for Pilot Schools, in Boston, Dr. Santelises developed a track record of improving the achievement of low-income students and students of color in particular. Dr. Santelises also served as Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning/Professional Development and interned in Boston Public Schools as part of Harvard’s Urban Superintendent doctoral program. Dr. Santelises has lectured on urban education at Harvard University, coached superintendents and trained school leaders in major urban districts, and served as executive director of the New York City Algebra Project. Santelises holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University, a Master of Arts in Education Administration from Columbia University and a Doctor of Education in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from Harvard.

Affiliated Researchers and Staff

Rachel Durham is an Assistant Research Scientist with the Baltimore Education Research Consortium (BERC) at Johns Hopkins University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology and demography from Pennsylvania State University and conducted her dissertation research on educational achievement trends among language-minority children. She has also published research on school readiness, early literacy ability, and the relationship between early oral language skills and educational achievement. She and her colleagues at BERC are analyzing several cohorts of Baltimore City school students to examine school engagement and achievement trends among students in the Baltimore City Public Schools, especially the relationship between chronic absenteeism and educational performance within City Schools, and they are currently developing protocols for merging school and student-level information with data from neighborhood or community-level sources to discover relationships between social-environmental factors and educational achievement.

Martha Abele Mac Iver (Ph.D. in political science, University of Michigan) is a Research Scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at The Johns Hopkins University. Her current research focuses on behavioral predictors of dropout outcomes, and she is working with several districts in Colorado to use data on their dropouts to plan interventions aimed at dropout prevention and recovery. Recent invited presentations have been for the Mid-Atlantic Equity Center, the Colorado Governor’s P-20 Education Coordination Council meeting, and the IES Summer Institute of the National Conference of State Legislatures. Mac Iver received a Senior Urban Research Fellowship from the Council of the Great City Schools to conduct research using Baltimore City Schools data. She was recently co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded study of the impact of various reform efforts on middle grades student achievement in Philadelphia, and has conducted numerous longitudinal studies examining factors associated with student achievement in Baltimore.

Doug Mac Iver, Ph.D. ( Ph.D., University of Michigan) is a Principal Research Scientist and co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization of Schools, and author of more than 40 research articles, chapters, books, and monographs on student disengagement, motivation, learning and achievement in early adolescence and on comprehensive and district-wide approaches to improving low-performing schools. Mac Iver directs the Talent Development Middle Grades program (TDMG), a research and development team that helps middle schools in high poverty neighborhoods to engage students with rigorous curriculum and instruction, provides teachers with the support they need to develop deep content knowledge and effective instructional practices, and develops safe, nurturing and challenging learning environments. The TDMG model has been successfully implemented in scores of middle schools nationally and is recognized for publishing high-quality curriculum materials. Mac Iver has won awards for his applied research and development including a Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Community Service from Johns Hopkins University and a Human Development Research Award from the American Educational Research Association.

Raymond Winbush (Ph.D. in psychology, University of Chicago) is Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University and associate editor of the Journal of Black Studies. He is the author of Belinda’s Petition: A Concise History of Reparations for the Transatlantic Slave Trade; Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations; and The Warrior Method: A Program for Rearing Healthy Black Boys. He served as Director of the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University and as assistant provost at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include preventable stressors in urban environments, developmental issues in African Americans, and race relations.

Karl Alexander is the John Dewey Professor of Sociology at JHU. He is also the Director of the JHU IES Predoctoral Training Program in Education Research. During his prolific research career, he has applied and developed a social-psychological and life-course perspective to a variety of educational issues, including the seasonality of learning, educational tracking, high school dropout, teen employment, and the transition out of high school to college and/or employment. His work seeks to illuminate how aspects of personal development that are relevant to school success respond to influences at home and at school, and to the intersection of experiences across these two institutional contexts. Since 1982, he and collaborator Doris Entwisle have led the Beginning School Study, which has monitored the personal and academic development of a sample of individuals who began first grade that year in 20 Baltimore City Public Schools. Two books are included among the project’s many publications: "Children, Schools and Inequality"(with Linda Olson; Westview Press, 1997); "On the Success of Failure: A Reassessment of the Effects of Retention in the Primary Grades" (with Susan Dauber; Cambridge University Press, 1994, expanded and updated in 2003). Alexander chaired the Department of Sociology at Hopkins from 1985 to 1993 and again from 2006 to 2009, is past President of the Southern Sociological Society, past Chair of the Sociology of Education Section of the American Sociological Association, and was editor of the journal Sociology of Education from 2003 – 2006.

Jeanetta Churchill (M.S. in Urban Spatial Analytics, University of Pennsylvania) is a Staff Associate at Baltimore City Public Schools affiliated with the BERC team. Having spent most of her career working in the public health arena as an epidemiologist and statistical data analyst, she brings her strong data management and analytic skills to the BERC project. Ms. Churchill has worked with various demographic surveys at the local, state, national, and international levels, and is adept with all stages of survey management including questionnaire design, data analysis, report writing, and dissemination. In her most recent position as the Director of the Baltimore City Data Collaborative at the Family League of Baltimore City, Ms. Churchill was able to use GIS mapping and population-level data to assess the impact that health, economic, social welfare, and educational outcomes can have on the lives of Baltimore’s children.

Maria Garriott (M.S. in Professional Writing, Towson University) is BERC Program Coordinator. Garriott has written history, language arts, science, and life and study skills curricula for the Talent Development Program at the Johns Hopkins University since 1995. She coauthored curricula to accompany Joy Hakim’s A History of US, Aristotle Leads the Way, Newton at the Center, and the PBS series Freedom! Her writing has appeared in Basic Education, Principal Magazine, The Baltimore Sun, and other periodicals. Her memoir of twenty-five years of living and volunteering in an at-risk urban Baltimore neighborhood, A Thousand Resurrections, was published in 2006.

Advisory Board

BERC’s advisory board reflects the diversity of Baltimore’s educational and civic community, including parents, teachers, business people, researchers, foundation representatives, and community advocates.