Jim Kelly is co-director of the Strategic Management of Human Capital project, a major initiative of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE); this multi-year, national project will be launched with significant foundation funding in January 2008.

Mr. Kelly has had a distinguished career in education policy, education finance, philanthropy, and teaching standards, assessment, and certification. For twelve years he was founding president and chief executive officer of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), where he helped to create National Board Certification (NBC), an advanced professional certification program for accomplished elementary and secondary school teachers. Almost all states provide recognition for NBC, and more than 40 states provide additional compensation to National Board Certified Teachers.

Prior to his time at NBPTS, Kelly served eleven years as program officer at the Ford Foundation, where he influenced state education finance and tax policies to make their support for education more equitable. Earlier he was on the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University, was responsible for education policy at the National Urban Coalition, and worked in Pakistan to help establish the Institute of Education and Research at Punjab University. Mr. Kelly began his career as a public school teacher and administrator in Ladue, Missouri. His M.A. degree is from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. is from Stanford University, with concentrations in economics, education and political science.

Since retiring from the NBPTS in 1999, Kelly has served as a senior advisor to Atlantic Philanthropies, the World Bank, the Asia Society, the National Academy of Sciences’ Strategic Education Research (SERP) Committee, Widmeyer Communications, Standard & Poors, and the Henry Ford Learning Institute. He has served on the executive board of the Consortium for Educational Policy Research and the Board of Overseers of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-chair of Learning to Give, a non-profit project that has worked with teachers to develop over a thousand teaching units to help students learn about philanthropy, volunteerism and community service. He serves on boards of other education and non-profit organizations and on the national advisory boards of two education technology corporations. Mentored throughout his career by extraordinarily wise and generous leaders, Mr. Kelly in turn assists many friends and colleagues as they develop their own careers and spheres of influence.

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