BRIAN JACOB, PhD'01

Brian Jacob wants to help improve education in the United States, and his research on such questions as the accuracy of high-stakes testing, teacher integrity, and the ability of principals to predict teacher quality is having a significant impact.

Jacob has been an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government since receiving his PhD in 2001. After college, he taught middle school math New York City’s East Harlem community, which he says inspired his decision to enroll at the Harris School in 1996.

Teaching “solidified my interest in education,” Jacob says. “At the same time, it made me more interested in going back to graduate school and studying education policy issues, doing things from more of a macro level.”

His interest in systemic education issues led Jacob to his doctoral research on the pros and cons of highstakes testing—which connects a student’s scores with whether he/she advances to the next grade or is eligible to graduate. He found that the accountability policy introduced by the Chicago Public Schools in the mid-1990s led to an increase in student achievement, reflected in higher test scores.

However, his research showed that students in Chicago improved significantly more on the city-administered tests relative to the Illinois state exam. “That suggested that teachers may have been teaching to the [high-stakes] test,” he says, “which may make you worry that the great improvement you saw was not generalize-able.”

Since arriving at Harvard, Jacob has taken that project a step further, examining evidence of teacher manipulation of test results. He has focused on students who showed unusually high gains on test scores during one year—and then sank back down the next year, sometimes by as much as two to three grade levels.

Jacob also noticed suspicious patterns, like “a bunch of kids who all answered the last 20 questions identically,” he says, suggesting that systematic cheating of some sort took place. As a result of this research—and the widespread media attention it has garnered—districts are taking the initiative to explore the issue, Jacob adds.

Those findings have made splashy headlines, but Jacob believes another line of research—on what makes an excellent teacher and how well principals identify those characteristics—might be his most influential thus far in impacting educators and policymakers.

In recent work, he found that principals were able to identify the very best and worst teachers in their schools, but had little ability to distinguish between those in the middle. One reason for this is that principals focus more on student outcomes than on improvement and tend to focus on the most recent experiences with the teacher—forgetting about particularly good or bad years a teacher has had in the past.

“My research up until this point has focused on trying to evaluate education policies and programs with the ultimate goal of improving educational systems for the most disadvantaged in our society,” Jacob says. “In the future, I hope to be able to work more closely with specific states and school districts to help them use the insights from research to develop and evaluate new programs for at-risk children.”

Ed Finkel

KENNETH C. GOTSCH, AM'85

Ken Gotsch, the Vice Chancellor of Finance/CFO for the City Colleges of Chicago, avoids the spotlight. After all, he says, it’s typically only when things go wrong that financial officers get any attention. “We’re the ones that they’re going to throw the rocks at, right? So, in many ways, my not being in the limelight is a good thing because it means things are working pretty well.”

Yet Gotsch, who has made a career out of public finance, doesn’t shy away from hard work. In fact, over the last decade, he’s tackled the heavy lifting of restoring confidence in financial leadership at such institutions as the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the Los Angeles Unified School District, and now the City Colleges of Chicago.

Education wasn’t where Gotsch expected to end up. As a student at the Harris School, he was looking to become a budget director at a state budget office or at the federal level in an agency like the GAO. Early on, he interned for the Illinois Bureau of the Budget and worked with the Illinois Economic and Fiscal Commission as a bond analyst before returning to Chicago in 1990 to join the city’s department of revenue.

When Gotsch was offered the CFO position at the CPS in 1995, he was reluctant to accept. “I remember thinking that going to work for CPS was not going to look good on a résumé. At the time, it was kind of scandal ridden and plagued with all sorts of management problems,” he says. “But sometimes when a career opportunity presents itself, you just have to go with it.”

After seven-plus years at CPS, he was offered a chance to work for the financially beleaguered Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest public school system. For Gotsch, this new CFO position was the equivalent of working at a major Fortune 100 company.

The district was facing a steep budget shortfall and, like CPS, there was a lack of credibility plaguing the financial office. “All of the ills of the district were being blamed on the budget office and the CFO,” Gotsch says. He worked hard to recruit strong financial executives and to support progress from the existing management team. After only two years, the budgets were balanced and funds stabilized. The district even received its first award for excellence in financial reporting from the Government Finance Officers Association.

In 2005, Gotsch signed on for his next big challenge—overseeing City Colleges’ total budget of $474 million. Once more he was hired to establish new confidence in the finance office and the budget numbers. He ties his success to strong leadership, guiding veteran staff in a new direction, and bringing in new blood. “The combination of the institutional knowledge and fresh perspectives is really what helps turn troubled situations around.”

Applying his knowledge of public finance to the strategic aims of each educational organization is what really makes his job enjoyable. “It’s not just being an excellent number cruncher stuck in a corner somewhere,” he says.

Jenn Q. Goddu