Anthony S. Bryk

Staff Information

Role

President

Organization

The Carnegie Foundation

Bio

Anthony S. Bryk is the ninth president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In his current role, he is leading work on transforming educational research and development, seeking to accelerate learning in and through practice to improve. From 2004 until assuming Carnegie’s presidency in September 2008, Bryk held the Spencer Chair in Organizational Studies in the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His main areas of expertise are school organization, education reform and educational statistics.

Prior to Stanford, he held the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education post in the sociology department at the University of Chicago. He was Founding Director of the Center for Urban School Improvement which supports reform efforts within the Chicago Public Schools and launched the University’s professional development charter school in the North Kenwood/Oakland neighborhood.

Bryk is also Founding Director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, a federation of Chicago-area research organizations that undertakes a range of studies designed to advance school improvement and assess the progress of Chicago school reform. The Consortium developed a national representation for its twin mission of conducting high quality research on urban school reform coupled with an activist public informing about these research findings.

In 2003, Bryk was awarded The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Prize for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Scholarship and the Distinguished Career Contributions Award from the American Educational Research Association. He is also a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. Most recently, Boston College conferred an honorary doctorate of Human Letters for his contributions to educational reform.

Bryk recently completed a five-year field trial of the efficacy of the Literacy Collaborative Professional Development Program on teacher practice and student learning. The study entailed developing new instrumentation for assessing instructional practices, logs for detailing coaching opportunities, and piloting a formative performance assessment system for coaching practices.

His most recently published book, Organizing Schools for Improvement, synthesizes fifteen years of evidence from Chicago on how the organization of schools and community context influences the capacity to enhance student engagement and advance student learning.

Also See

Working Together Toward Stronger Institutions and Student Success
Tony Bryk presentation to the 2011 ACCT Community College Leadership Congress. October 13, 2011.

2010 ACE Commencement Address (video)
Tony Bryk delivers the commencement address to the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE). July 2010.

Interview with Tony Bryk on Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago (mp3 audio)
Tony Bryk speaks with Dr. Dwayne Olsen on the show Education Matters, Wisconsin Public Radio (WGTD). August 14, 2010.

Systematic Naturalistic Inquiry: Toward a Science of Performance Improvement (video & slideshow)
Carnegie President Tony Bryk gave the opening address at the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness in Washington, D.C., in March 2010. His presentation, “Systematic Naturalistic Inquiry: Toward a Science of Performance Improvement” and the Question and Answer session following that presentation are available online.

Symposium on Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago (video)
On January 14, 2010 the Consortium on Chicago School Research hosted a symposium and live webcast at the Gleacher Center in Chicago to celebrate the release of Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago by Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton. In the symposium, four of the book’s authors discuss prominent findings from their detailed analysis of why students in 100 public elementary schools in Chicago were able to improve substantially in reading and math over a seven-year period, while students in another 100 schools were not.

Teachers for a Digital Age: New Strategies to Transform Practice (video)
Tony Bryk was one of five speakers in "Teachers for a Digital Age: New Strategies to Transform Practice," a panel session in the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age forum hosted by Google in October 2009.