After a three-year search to secure an endowed chair in Organizational Studies from the Spencer Foundation, Tony Bryk was appointed to the position this past summer. This position is jointly held in the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business. Bryk is considered one of the leading educational researchers in the world for his work related to school organizations and education reform. His statistical innovations are widely known and used by academics, policy analysts, and federal and state education agencies.

For the past twenty years, Bryk has been at the University of Chicago where he was the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Sociology. In 1989, he founded and has served as the Director of the Center for School Improvement (CSI), which supports reform efforts in the Chicago Public Schools, including the operation of a professional development charter school for the Chicago Public School system.

He was also the founding director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research which engages in an innovative program of applied research to inform reform in the Chicago schools. The Consortium combines aggressive stakeholder outreach with high quality research on the conditions of education in the city and the progress of local reform initiatives. Their findings have been highly influential in guiding reform not only in Chicago but in several other major urban centers as well.

Though it was a difficult decision to leave Chicago, Bryk said he felt the time was right because both the Center and Consortium were ready for new leadership and he was ready to move on to a new challenge. “I look forward to forging relationships between SUSE and the GSB and am intrigued by all of the possibilities to bridge the gap between business and education leaders and creating research programs to support this,” Bryk explained.“Many of the problems confronting school reform today are fundamentally about organizational design and transformation— from efforts to increase accountability to the strategic redesign of large public bureaucracies to the start up of charter management organization that run networks of schools.”Bryk believes that more effective solutions can arise here by harnessing the interests and expertise that exists between the schools of Education and Business.

Bryk’s current research focuses on the organizational redesign of schools and school systems and the integration of technology into the work of schools. He will teach courses at both Schools, including Advanced Statistical Methods, Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM), and courses related to organizational change and leadership.

“Tony’s vast experience with research-based school reform initiatives will be an extraordinary resource to the School of Education and to the work we are doing to improve education locally and throughout the country.His joint appointment with the GSB will also help us deepen and expand the collaborations that we have developed with the Business School faculty,” Dean Deborah Stipek said.

Among his many accomplishments, Bryk has published seven books, including his most recent Trust in Schools (Russell Sage, 2002), which develops the concept of relational trust among teachers, students, parents, and administrators in school communities. In 2003, he was awarded the Distinguished Career Contributions Award from AERA. He is currently the treasurer-secretary for the National Academy of Education. Previous to the University of Chicago, he was a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he received his doctorate in 1977.

Bryk is married to Sharon Greenberg who earned her undergraduate degree in English from Stanford and is an alumna of SUSE’s STEP program. She earned her doctorate in the politics of education from the University of Chicago.They live in Menlo Park with their eight year-old daughter Sara who is a third grader at Bowman International School.