Scholar Ronald Ferguson To Speak on Racial Achievement Divide at Brown

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Saturday, January 29, 2011

GoLocalProv Features Team

Brown University will host noted scholar Ronald Ferguson, who will deliver the Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture on February 8th.

Ferguson’s talk, “Pursuing Excellence with Racial Equity: A Social Movement for the 21st Century,” will focus on the racial achievement gap, which has been the focus of much of his research and writing for the last two decades. Ferguson’s work has appeared in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution and the U.S. Department of Education, as well as various books and scholarly journals. As the faculty co-chair and director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, Ferguson has led a universitywide effort to close the nation’s achievement gaps by supporting new research and connecting research to policy and practice.

His talk will begin 4 pm in Sayles Hall on the College Green. It is free and open to the public.

A career in education reform

No stranger to education reform, Ferguson has worked to develop the Tripod Project for School Improvement surveys, which have been used by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation project on Measuring Effective Teaching (MET) to measure student perceptions of engagement and teaching practices. Data from the Tripod Project was recently used by the MET project to show that student perceptions of teaching are strong predictors of learning gains for elementary and middle school students.

In 2010, Ferguson’s most recent book, Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap, was published by Harvard Education Press. He currently holds a joint appointment as a senior lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has taught at Harvard since 1983. Ferguson is also an economist and senior research associate for the Malcolm Weiner Center for Social Policy. He received an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in economics.

For more information about the event, call 401-863-2216.

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