Mark Berends

Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1992

Short Biography

Throughout his research career, Professor Berends has focused on how school organization and classroom instruction are related to student achievement, with special attention to disadvantaged students.  Within this agenda, he has applied a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to understanding the effect of school reforms on teachers and students.  In the 1990s, he led the summative evaluation of New American Schools (NAS), at the time the largest privately funded reform movement in the nation.  The overall finding of his work was that extensive further development of the reform models and careful alignment of the school system were essential to promoting further innovative instructional strategies and gains in student achievement. 

As a result of this research, the U.S. Department of Education invited Professor Berends’ participation in the national evaluation of Title 1 and the Comprehensive School Reform programs.  He has also examined the relationships of changing families and schools on student achievement between 1972 and 2004. The goal was to understand how these changes during different reform periods related to the black-white and Latino-white achievement gaps.  A key outcome of this work was that secondary school curriculum differentiation (tracking) became more flexible for black and Latino students, which was one of the factors associated with the closing of the achievement gap.

At Vanderbilt, Professor Berends is continuing his research on innovation and scale up of education reforms aimed at schools and classrooms. He is currently the Director of the National Center on School Choice and a co-principal investigator of a project examining the scaling up of peer-assisted learning strategies for young readers with a randomized design. His latest book is Examining Gaps in Mathematics Achievement Among Racial-Ethnic Groups, 1972-1992 (RAND).  And he is currently co-editing two books on school choice entitled Charter School Outcomes, and Handbook of Research on School Choice (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

Professor Berends' teaching interests are in organizations, the social context of education, and advanced research methods. He teaches Advanced Organizational Theory, providing undergraduate students a sociological overview of organizational theories and research; The Social Context of Education, examining the ways in which schools reproduce, reinforce, and challenge prevailing social, economic, and political relationships with a focus on social class, gender, and race-ethnicity; and Survey Methods, providing a more in-depth understanding of survey design.

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