Gary Henry

Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Education, Peabody College at Vanderbilt University

Gary T. Henry is a Patricia and Rodes Hart Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Education in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organization, Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. He formerly held the Duncan MacRae ’09 and Rebecca Kyle MacRae Professorship of Public Policy in the Department of Public Policy and directed the Carolina Institute for Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Also, he is a Fellow with the Frank Porter Graham Institute for Child Development and research professor in the Department of Public Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill. Henry specializes in education policy, educational evaluation, teacher quality research, and quantitative research methods. He has published extensively in top journals such as Science, Educational Researcher, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Journal of Teacher Education, and Evaluation Review. He is the author of Practical Sampling (Sage 1990), Graphing Data (Sage 1995) and co-author of Evaluation: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Guiding, and Improving Policies and Programs (Jossey-Bass 2000). He received the Outstanding Evaluation of the Year Award from the American Evaluation Association in 1998 for his work with the Georgia’s Council for School Performance and the Joseph S. Wholey Distinguished Scholarship Award in 2001 from the American Society for Public Administration and the Center for Accountability and Performance along with Steve Harkreader. He currently leads two educational research projects, one is the evaluation of the North Carolina Race to the Top initiative and the other is the Teacher Quality Research Initiative for the University of North Carolina General Administration. Other, recent evaluations include North Carolina’s Disadvantaged Student Supplemental Fund, Georgia’s Universal Pre-K program and the Georgia HOPE Scholarship as well as school turnaround in North Carolina. Dr. Henry previously served as a principal member of the Standing Committee for Systemic Reform, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.