The School Wise Press Team
Michael O’Neill is an educator of educators, and the founder of the BridgeWorks Group, which since 1993 has provided support to education leaders through executive coaching, board workshops and strategic planning. He also provides guidance on curriculum and instruction to site leaders and teachers, with a focus on the Common Core transition. In the 1990s, he was a member of the faculty of the California School Leadership Academy. He earned his Ph.D in psychology at the Claremont Graduate School, and his administrative credentials at University of California, Irvine.
Howard Herl is a psychometrician and founder of Evalumetrics, a firm serving close to 200 California school districts with reporting of students’ physical fitness tests. As a senior researcher at CRESST (the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing), he led teams in designing web-based assessment systems. At the Los Angeles County Office of Education, Howard created tools to help administrators understand and explain assessment data, providing services to 81 schools or districts over the course of five years. His experience in working directly with site leaders led him to be a rare psychometrician who is also skilled at bringing measurement of learning down to earth.
Jenny Grant Rankin is an author and educator centered on making proper sense of data and research. She has lectured at the University of Cambridge. Her Ph.D. in education specialized in School Improvement Leadership, and her research focused on the mismeasurement of student learning. She has written ten books and many articles and papers, developed the concept of over-the-counter data, and regularly presents at conferences. Previously, she was a teacher, assistant principal, and district administrator over assessment in Orange County. She was honored by the White House and served as Chief Education & Research Officer at Illuminate Education.
Stanley Pogrow is a national expert on the use of advanced and evidence-based practices to reduce inequity, who teaches reform and quantitative methods to doctoral students at San Francisco State University’s Educational Leadership and Equity program. In the late 1980s, he developed and launched the widely adopted Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) project which was adopted by 2,600 schools in 48 states to help Title I and learning disabled students in grades 4-8. He is also an expert in the use of Design-Based and Improvement Science approaches to improving schools, and author of a textbook, Authentic Quantitative Analysis for Education Leadership Decision-Making and EDD Dissertations (2018).
Jill is a distinguished leader in the work of district governance, having served as a trustee of San Francisco USD for 23 years. During that time, she became a leader in the California School Boards Association, and in 2012 was elected president. Among the education organizations that have benefited from her guiding hand are the National School Boards Action Center Board; the California Cities, Counties and Schools Partnership, and the Council of Urban Boards of Education of NSBA. Her areas of expertise include school finance, urban education and governance, full-service community schools, charter schools, school health programs, healthy school food, and labor-management cooperation. She is co-author, together with Steve Rees, of “Mismeasuring Schools’ Vital Signs” (Routledge, September 2022).
When Steve started School Wise Press in 1995, he was moved to help parents make sense of schools’ vital signs. He brought a level of professionalism to interpreting and visualizing education data that drew on his 18 years in magazine publishing. In 14 years, the company he built helped over 240 district leaders tell their schools’ stories. In 2009, he launched an assessment consultancy, the Owl Corps. And in 2013, his team turned toward helping district and school leaders build evidence from data to improve their ability to plan and manage more wisely. Since 2016, he has enjoyed delivering workshops, and writing presentations. His book, “Mismeasuring Schools’ Vital Signs,” written with Jill Wynns, was published by Routledge in September 2022.
