Henry Levin

William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Henry M. Levin is the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is Director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, a non-partisan entity www.ncspe.org and Co-Director of the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies in Education, (www.cbcse.org). He is also the David Jacks Professor of Higher Education and Economics, Emeritus, at Stanford University where he served from 1968-99 after working as an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. From 1978-84 he was the Director of the Institute for Research on Educational Finance at Stanford, a federally-funded R. & D. Center. From 1986-2000 Levin served as the Director of the Accelerated Schools Project, a national school reform initiative for accelerating the education of at-risk youngsters encompassing about 1,000 schools in 41 states.

Levin has held Fulbright Professorships in Barcelona and Mexico and is on the Guest Faculty at Peking University and an Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal University. He has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Russell Sage Foundation. He has received honorary doctorates from Monmouth College, Maastricht University (Netherlands), and the National University of San Marcos (Peru). He taught for the Fall Semester of 2012 as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Peking University. In 1992 the New York Times named him as one of “nine national leaders in education innovation”. Levin has been the Editor of the Review of Educational Research and the President of the American Evaluation Association and a winner of its Gunnar Myrdal Award. He is also a recipient of the Outstanding Service Award of the American Educational Finance Association and an elected member of the National Academy of Education. He has been a member and President of the Palo Alto (CA) School Board and was President (2008-09) of the Comparative and International Education Society. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Educational Testing Service.

Levin is a specialist in the economics of education and human resources and has published 20 books and about 300 articles on these and related subjects. At present he is doing research on educational reform, educational vouchers, cost-effectiveness analysis, educational privatization, and benefit-cost studies in education. Recent books he has authored or co-authored or edited include: Cost-Effectiveness Analysis: Methods and Applications (Sage Publications, 2001); Privatizing Education (Westview, 2001); Cost-Effectiveness and Educational Policy (Eye on Education, 2002); Readings in the Economics of Higher Education (Elgar, 2003); Privatizing Educational Choice (Paradigm Publishers, 2005), The Price We Pay: Economic and Social Costs of Inadequate Education (Brookings, 2007), and Between Public and Private (Harvard Education Press, 2010).