UMD education college’s new dean is longtime faculty member Jennifer Rice

The University of Maryland’s education college has a new dean. Jennifer Rice will take over the role, which currently belongs to Donna Wiseman, on July 1, 2017.

After joining this university in 2001, Wiseman served as the interim dean during the 2007-08 academic year. She was promoted to the dean position in May 2008.

As dean, Rice will work with the 91 tenured and tenure-track faculty and 69 clinical faculty and lecturers in the college to accomplish the college’s stated mission to “create new knowledge about all facets of education and human development.”

Rice, currently an education policy professor and the education college’s graduate studies and faculty affairs associate dean, focuses her research on “teacher quality and the implementation of pay for performance policies in school districts,” according to her university biography.

She earned her doctorate in education administration and social foundations at Cornell University and joined this university in 1995 as an assistant professor. In 2005, she became the founding director of this university’s Center for Educational Policy and Leadership.

Rice has published multiple books, journal articles and reports relating to her main research interest in the economics of education, including Teacher Quality: Understanding the Effectiveness of Teacher Attributes.

Rice was awarded the Outstanding Writing Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the Journal of Teacher Education in 2005. She has been a National Education Policy Center fellow since 2013.

Rice was a member of the University Senate from 2007 to 2010, a member of the state of Maryland Education Department’s Academic Intervention Initiative Steering Committee from 1998 to 1999 and a member of various U.S. Education Department review boards and work groups from 1996 to 2012.

Before joining the university, Rice received her bachelor’s degree in English and mathematics from Marquette University in 1990 and her master’s degree in education administration and social foundations from Cornell in 1993. Rice was also a research assistant at the Finance Center of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Cornell University and a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research in D.C.