Project Leadership

The leaders of the Center have spent their careers bridging the boundaries between academia and the policy world. As such, they are particularly well suited to creating this new type of Partnership.

Thomas J. Kane

Thomas J. Kane, the Center’s faculty director, is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His work has influenced how we think about a range of education policies: test score volatility and the design of school accountability systems, teacher recruitment and retention, financial aid for college, race-conscious college admissions, and the economic payoff of a community college education. From 1995 to 1996, Kane served as the senior economist for labor, education, and welfare policy issues within President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. From 1991 through 2000, he was a faculty member at the Kennedy School of Government. Kane has also been a professor of public policy at UCLA and has held visiting fellowships at the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. 

Jon Fullerton

Jon Fullerton is the Executive Director of the Center. Fullerton has extensive experience working with policymakers and executives in designing and implementing organizational change and improvements. Before coming to Harvard, Fullerton served as the Board of Education’s Director of Budget and Financial Policy for the Los Angeles Unified School District. In this capacity, he provided independent evaluations of district reforms and helped to ensure that the district’s budget was aligned with board priorities. From 2002 to 2005 he was Vice-President of Strategy, Evaluation, Research, and Policy at the Urban Education Partnership in Los Angeles, where he worked with policymakers to ensure that they focused on high impact educational strategies. Fullerton previously worked for five years at McKinsey & Company as a strategy consultant. He has a PhD in government and an AB in social studies, both from Harvard.
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Tim Brennan

Tim Brennan is CEPR’s Chief Operating Officer.  As such, he oversees the Center’s financial and operating activities, while serving as a strategic partner to CEPR’s leadership team.  Prior to joining CEPR, Tim served as Chief Operating and Financial Officer of social investment research pioneer KLD Research & Analytics, Inc, directing the growth and ultimate sale of the company to RiskMetrics Group in 2009.  Previously, Brennan co-founded and led Brennan & Fournier, Inc., providing contract financial and operations leadership to New England mission-based organizations.  During his five-year tenure as President, the firm assumed an ongoing leadership role in over twenty individual organizations.  From 1992 through 1998, Brennan served as CFO at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), directing the company’s growth from $12 million to $62 million in revenue, with operational activities in eleven countries.  Brennan earlier held senior management positions with C.R. Bard, Inc., a Fortune 500 developer and marketer of medical products and services.  Brennan earned his B.A. at the University of Notre Dame and his MBA in Accounting at Boston College.
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Sarah Glover

Sarah Glover is the Executive Director of the Strategic Data Project, the vision of which is to see district and state education leaders determine that deep and rigorous analysis is fundamental to successful policy and management decisions.  Before coming to Harvard, Glover founded and ran her own education policy consulting business wherein she worked extensively with superintendent and board leadership teams of some of the nation’s largest districts on governance, goal-setting, and planning.  She also worked with large education-focused foundations on implementing their core programs and identifying potential areas for investment.  She worked for four years at the Houston-based Center for Reform of School Systems on school board governance and leadership and served as the Texas Speaker of the House’s education policy advisor.  Glover holds a Master’s in Public Affairs and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in political science from Tufts University. 
Phone:  617-496-0581
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Corinne Herlihy

Corinne Herlihy is the Project Director for the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness (NCTE) at CEPR.  She oversees the day-to-day operations of the NCTE and the corresponding research agenda. This work includes coordinating data collection and analysis, development of and execution of the national leadership activities and overseeing the timeline of the project. Herlihy serves as a primary liaison with the research team and the districts involved in the core study of developing measures of effective math teaching, and coordinates outside vendors employed in the service of the research. Prior to joining NCTE, Herlihy was a senior research associate and deputy director of the K12 policy area at MDRC, a nonprofit research organization. At MDRC, Herlihy directed a study of small schools of choice in New York City that capitalized on naturally occurring experiments in student assignment data; directed the Boost-Up Math project which resulted in a feasibility report with design options for evaluating supplemental ninth-grade math programs; managed MDRC’s analysis work on the National Reading First Impact Study; was a lead author on evaluations of the Talent Development High School and Talent Development Middle School models; and co-authored Foundations for Success: Case Studies of How Urban School Systems Improve Student Achievement. Prior to earning a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Herlihy was a teacher of mathematics at the middle and high school levels.
Phone:  617-496-9817
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