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Melissa Roderick
Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor
School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

E-mail: m-roderick@uchicago.edu

Melissa Roderick is the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a co-director at CCSR. Professor Roderick is an expert in urban school reform, high school reform, high-stakes testing, minority adolescent development, and school transitions. Her work has focused attention on the transition to high school as a critical point in students’ school careers and her new work examines the transition to college among Chicago Public School (CPS) students. In prior work, she led a multi-year evaluation of Chicago's initiative to end social promotion and has conducted research on school dropout, grade retention, and the effects of summer programs. Professor Roderick is an expert in mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in evaluation. Her new study focuses on understanding the relationship between students' high school careers and preparation, their college selection choices and their post-secondary outcomes through linked quantitative and qualitative research. In this joint project with the Chicago Public Schools, Professor Roderick is assisting CPS in tracking successive cohorts of Chicago students and building new indicators through analysis of high school transcripts and surveys of students and teachers to assess the preparation of CPS graduates for college. She is concurrently leading a qualitative study that is following over 100 juniors from three Chicago high schools from the 11^th grade to two years after graduation and examining differences in the educational demands of their classroom environments through a linked study of high school and college classrooms. From 2001 to 2003, Professor Roderick joined the administration of the Chicago Public Schools to establish a new Department of Planning and Development. At SSA Professor Roderick is the faculty director of a new program in community schools and youth development. She is a founding board member and currently serves as the chair of the board of North Lawndale College Preparatory Charter High School. Professor Roderick has a Ph.D. from the Committee on Public Policy from Harvard University, a master's degree in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and an A.B. from Bowdoin College.

Melissa Roderick is credited on the following CCSR Publications:

• From High School to the Future: Making Hard Work Pay Off
• Consortium on Chicago School Research: A New Model for the Role of Research in Supporting Urban School Reform
• From High School to the Future: Potholes on the Road to College
• CCSR's 2007 AVID Reports for Chicago Public Schools
• Sample Individual School Reports: Results about Postsecondary Preparation
• From High School to the Future: A First Look at Chicago Public School Graduates' College Enrollment, College Preparation, and Graduation from Four-Year Colleges
• Ending Social Promotion: The Effects of Retention
• Ending Social Promotion: The Response of Teachers and Students
• Ending Social Promotion: Results from Summer Bridge
• Update: Ending Social Promotion - Passing, Retention, and Achievement Trends Among Promoted and Retained Students
• Annual CPS Test Trend Review, 1999
• Ending Social Promotion: Results from the First Two Years
• Adjusting Citywide ITBS Scores for Student Retention in Grades Three, Six, and Eight
• Changing Standards, Changing Relationships: Building Family-School Relationships to Promote Achievement in High Schools
• Habits Hard to Break: A New Look at Truancy in Chicago's Public High Schools
• Charting Reform in Chicago: The Students Speak