Ed Wiley - Biography

Ed Wiley is chair of the Research and Evaluation Methodology Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he also serves as assistant professor of quantitative methods in educational policy.

Formerly a Senior Research Scientist at the American Institutes for Research, Dr. Wiley has several years of applied policy analysis experience.  His current interests center around systems of school accountability, teacher quality and compensation, and school choice -- initiatives central to the current "No Child Left Behind" reform.  He's demonstrated that current methods for computing "Adequate Yearly Progress" may unintentionally disadvantage schools with diverse populations -- the very students targeted by the reform.  Dr. Wiley has also had significant experience with statewide accountability reforms; he is currently a member of the Utah State Technical Advisory Committee, the Colorado Department of Education Annual Yearly Progress Design Committee, and the Nebraska Department of Education's District Assessment Evaluation Team.  He is working with the State of Washington to develop an alternative assessment for students who fail the state high school exit exam, and he previously assisted California's Technical Design Group by projecting impacts of alternative formulations of the school-level Academic Performance Index (API).  Dr. Wiley has worked on evaluations of several state and federal educational initiatives, including Title I, California's Public School Accountability Act, and Equity 2000 (a large reform to improve college-going rates of students from underrepresented populations).  He played a leading role in the comprehensive evaluation of California's largest-ever educational reform, the California Class Size Reduction (CSR) Initiative, focusing on the experiences of special needs students and students from underrepresented populations.

Dr. Wiley is currently leading an evaluation of several aspects of Denver Public School’s “ProComp” (Professional Compensation System for Teachers) reform and is evaluating sampling and weighting procedures used for the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) as part of the federally mandated NAEP external audit.  Previous grants for which Dr. Wiley served as Principal Investigator have involved an investigation of issues of vertical scaling and value-added modeling (with co-PI Derek Briggs, funded by the Carnegie Corporation) and an examination of the statistical characteristics of methods for computing "Adequate Yearly Progress", the accountability metric central to the current "No Child Left Behind" reform (funded by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice).  His methodological research focuses on development and application of statistical methods to address a wide range of issues in education and social science.  His major methodological work has focused on bias in nonparametric estimates of variance components -- statistical estimates key to random effects models and the hierarchical models used for value added analysis.  For this work Dr. Wiley received the Brenda Loyd Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Council on Measurement in Education; his theoretical contribution is noted in Brennan's seminal text, "Generalizability Theory".  His other methodological research interests include Bayesian simulation, computational statistics, and measurement theory. 

Dr. Wiley recently completed a primer on statistical and policy issues regarding value-added models -- models prominently used estimate the contributions of specific teachers and schools to the educational outcomes of students.  His scholarship has appeared in a variety of publications, including the Journal of Educational Measurement, Psychological Science, and the International Journal of Higher Education.  His teaching includes basic and advanced courses in statistical methods common to social science inquiry, including methods for longitudinal analysis, structural equation models, and multilevel modeling.


Education:

PhD  Psychological Studies in Education, Stanford University
MS  Statistics, Stanford University
MA  Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in Education, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
BA  Mathematics, University of Nebraska, Lincoln