About Richard Coley

Richard Coley is the Executive Director of the ETS Center for Research on Human Capital and Education. His recent work has focused on the achievement gap and on the factors that are associated with the gap as well as on documenting and analyzing national trends in student performance and attainment. Coley has been involved in studies of federal, state and local education policy issues, including studies of school finance and governance, teacher education and certification, educational standards, tracking, education indicators and education reform. Coley’s most recent publications include Poverty and Education: Finding the Way Forward; Fault Lines in Our Democracy: Civic Knowledge, Voting Behavior, and Civic Engagement in the United States; State Pre-K Assessment Policies: Issues and Status; The Mission of the High School: A New Consensus of the Purposes of Public Education?; The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped; Parsing the Achievement Gap; and The Family: America’s Smallest School.