Ronald Franklin Ferguson

Senior Lecturer on Education and Public Policy
Senior Research Associate at HKS

Profile

Dr. Ronald F. Ferguson is a Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Research Associate at the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he has taught since 1983. His research publications cover issues in education policy, youth development programming, community development, economic consequences of skill disparities, and state and local economic development. For much of the past decade, Dr. Ferguson's research has focused on racial achievement gaps, appearing in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution, the U.S. Department of Education, the Educational Research Service and various other books and journals. During the late 1990s, he was the Chair and Director of the National Community Development Policy Analysis Network, which produced the social science synthesis volume, Urban Problems and Community Development. He is the creator and director of the Tripod Project for school improvement and the Faculty Co-Chair and Director of the Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI) at Harvard. The AGI is a university-wide initiative to help close the nation?s achievement gaps by supporting new research and connecting research to policy and practice. Dr. Ferguson earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University (1972) and his Ph.D. from MIT (1981), both in economics.

Degrees

• Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology