Janet S. Hansen

Vice President and Director of Education Studies
Committee for Economic Development

As Vice President and Director of Education Studies at the Committee for Economic Development (CED), Dr. Hansen manages CED education projects spanning early childhood, K-12, and postsecondary education. She initially joined CED in 1999 and rejoined the organization in 2007 after three years as senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. At RAND her work focused on transforming American school finance into a performance-oriented system that supports and encourages the effective use of educational resources to improve student learning, especially in traditionally underperforming urban areas. She was RAND's project director on a joint study of school finance reform sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. From 1991 to 1998, Dr. Hansen was senior program officer at the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (NAS/NRC). She was study director for the Committee on Education Finance and co-edited (with Helen F. Ladd) the committee's 1999 report, Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. She served as director of the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education and also prepared NAS/NRC reports on education and training for the workplace. Earlier, Dr. Hansen was Director for Policy Analysis for The College Board and an academic administrator at Princeton University and the Claremont Colleges. She is currently a Senior Adviser for the College Board and a Research Affiliate at the National Center for Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University. Previously she served as a distinguished Senior Fellow at the Education Commission of the States and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Education Finance Association. Dr. Hansen received a Ph.D. in public and international affairs from Princeton University.