Two named to National Academy of Education

Two members of the UW–Madison faculty, Thomas Romberg in curriculum and instruction and Robert Hauser in sociology, have been elected to the National Academy of Education (NAE).

Membership in NAE is limited to 125 people whose accomplishments in education are judged outstanding.

Romberg is director of the National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Math and Science, part of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) at UW–Madison. He also serves as Sears Roebuck Foundation-Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education.

Romberg has been a national leader in reforming mathematics instruction in American schools. He has helped move mathematics education from what he calls “19th-century shopkeepers’ arithmetic” to real-life contexts. He was instrumental in the development in 1989 of national standards for teaching math, which replace problems like runaway trains hurtling toward each other at different speeds with everyday situations to be solved by student teams.

Robert Hauser is Vilas Research Professor of Sociology and Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Sociology at UW–Madison. He also directed the university’s Institute for Research on Poverty from 1991 to 1994.

As a researcher and author Hauser has focused on the effects of social stratification in the schools as well as welfare reform and other poverty-related topics. Recently he has chaired a study for the National Academy of Sciences of the possible consequences of President Clinton’s proposal for voluntary national achievement tests in fourth grade reading and eighth grade mathematics. For many years he has directed a longitudinal study of careers and health among 10,000 Wisconsin high school graduates of 1957.

Other NAE members with current or previous ties to the UW–Madison faculty are Andrew Porter, director of WCER; Elizabeth Fennema, professor emeritus in curriculum and instruction and women’s studies; Jurgen Herbst, professor emeritus of educational policy studies and history; Donna Shalala, U.S. secretary of health and human services and former UW–Madison chancellor; Carl Kaestle of the University of Chicago faculty; and Marshall Smith, U.S. undersecretary of education.