Carolyn Kelley is the Jim and Georgia Thompson Distinguished Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Kelley’s research focuses on strategic human resources management in schools, including teacher compensation, principal and teacher evaluation, and leadership development. She is co-author of three books, including Mapping Leadership: The Tasks that Matter for Improving Teaching and Learning in Schools (Jossey-Bass, 2017). The book provides the theoretical foundation for the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning, an online formative assessment of distributed instructional leadership in schools. Dr. Kelley has a Ph.D. in Administration and Policy Analysis from the Stanford School of Education (1993), a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the University of Michigan (1985), and a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Illinois (1982). She has been a member of the School of Education faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1993.
As co-principal investigator, Kelley co-leads Instrumentation study D focusing on building information tools, based on CALL, to develop practice-based information tools that support equity-centered school leaders.