Jim Kelly is Senior Advisor to the Dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan and its Teacher Education Initiative, a project developing rigorous teacher development programs and performance assessments aligned with the Common Core Standards (now adopted by 46 states) for what students are expected to learn in school.

From 2007-2009, Mr. Kelly was co-director of Strategic Management of Human Capital (SMHC), a major initiative of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, and funded by the Carnegie, Gates, Ford and Joyce foundations. The SMHC project advanced modern human capital management programs designed to improve the performance of the largest 100 urban school districts by helping those districts attract, develop, evaluate, reward, and if necessary remove teachers and principals, in order to radically improve their human resource management systems.

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), the nation’s advanced professional certification program for accomplished elementary and secondary school teachers. Almost all states provide recognition for NBC; more than 40 states and hundreds of local school districts provide significant additional compensation to the approximately 90,000 (as of 2010) National Board Certified Teachers.

Prior to his time at NBPTS, Kelly served eleven years as a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation, where he influenced education finance and tax policies nationwide 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 during the 1968-69 urban upheavals, 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 B.A. is from Shimer College, then part of the University of Chicago. His M.A. degree is from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. is from Stanford University, with concentrations in political science, economics, and education.

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, and is a board member of the Center for Teaching Quality. 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 chairs the Art Museum Committee of the Cranbrook Educational Community Bloomfield Hills, MI) and is a long-time board member of Musica Sacra, which performs highly praised performances of choral music at Carnegie Hall and other New York City venues. He serves on boards of several other education and non-profit organizations and on the national advisory boards of two education technology corporations. Mr. Kelly was elected to membership in the National Academy of Education in 1999. 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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