Penny Bender Sebring

Dr. Sebring is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Chicago and Co-director of the Consortium on the Chicago School Research, an organization dedicated to monitoring and assessing Chicago's school reform effort. She is an author of Charting Chicago School Reform: Democratic Localism as a Lever for Change (Westview Press, 1998). Dr. Sebring has directed federally funded longitudinal studies of middle- and high-school students, and she was a Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher. She has published articles on a variety of topics, including students' course-taking patterns in high school, urban education, school leadership, and the utilization of research and evaluation results. She received a B.A. degree in sociology from Grinnell in 1964, an M.Ed. from Pennsylvania State University, and a Ph.D. in education and policy studies from Northwestern University. She serves on the board of the McGaw YMCA, Evanston, Illinois, and the Social Sciences Visiting Committee, University of Chicago.