Biography
With Senior Partner Alicia Grunow, Chris Thorn co-directs the Center for Networked Improvement. The center houses design, development, and improvement research. Together we oversee the core capacities that support all Networked Improvement Communities: analytics, developmental evaluation, design and development, program technologies, and improvement research. The role of the center is to support our partners by developing and promoting an infrastructure that allows us to cull and synthesize the best of what we know from scholarship and practice, rapidly develop and test prospective improvements, deploy what we learn about what works in schools and classrooms, and add to our knowledge to continuously improve the performance of educational system.
In 2012, Chris joined the Foundation to become the Director Advancing Teaching - Improving Learning (ATIL) program. The program gathers experts involved in the conceptualization, development, implementation, and use of teacher evaluation systems to focus on how these systems are best used to make consequential judgments about teachers. The ATIL program also explores how teacher evaluation can inform efforts to improve teaching practices more broadly.
Chris joined Carnegie from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin Center for Education Research. His work there focused on identifying and addressing organizational and technical gaps in information systems in education, the selection and use of multiple measures of educational effectiveness, and the design and implementation of decision support systems at the state-, district-, and school-levels. Chris also had both research and hands on experience with the increasingly complex data requirements of current educational reform efforts.
Chris received a B.A. in economics and German language from Indiana University and an M.A. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in international relations from The Johns Hopkins University, Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Chris earned his doctorate in sociology from the University of Bielefeld, Germany.
