Transforming Schools with Technology: How Smart Use of Digital Tools Helps Achieve Six Key Education Goals

Dr. Andrew Zucker is a senior research scientist at the Concord Consortium. He has been a teacher of mathematics, science, and computers, a school computer center director, and, for seven years, a budget and policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Education. Zucker has worked in independent nonprofit organizations for 20 years as an education researcher, developer, strategic planner, and evaluator. He was associate director of the Center for Education Policy at SRI International (the former Stanford Research Institute) before returning to the Boston area in 2003.

Zucker’s work at nonprofits has included codirecting a six-year study of systemic education reform in 25 states and Puerto Rico; directing an evaluation of one of the first sets of national education standards; codirecting a five-year evaluation of one of the first online high schools, The Virtual High School; codirecting a project that developed award-winning instructional videotapes for middle school mathematics; and managing a consortium of institutions that were studying 1:1 laptop programs for students (ubiqcomputing.org).

Zucker has published dozens of articles, reports, and book chapters and was lead author of The Virtual High School: Teaching Generation V (2003), the first book focused on online high schools. He also has testified before congressional committees, two state legislatures, and the National Education Goals Panel. He has been a member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics for 30 years and served for three years on the editorial panel of the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. Zucker is also a member of the American Educational Research Association, the Consortium for School Networking, and the International Society for Technology in Education.

Zucker graduated from Harvard College in 1967, received a master’s in education from Stanford in 1970, and an EdD from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1978. He was an Institute for Educational Leadership Education Policy Fellow in 1978–79. He and his wife, Elizabeth F. Zucker, live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.