MEDIA CONTACT: Wendy Leopold at (847) 491-4890 or at w-leopold@northwestern.edu

April 13, 2004

Education Is Topic of Policy Lecture

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Grover J. Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, will deliver the 2004 Distinguished Public Policy Lecture sponsored by the Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research on the University’s Evanston campus.

Whitehurst’s free, public lecture on “Making Education Evidence Based: Premises, Principles, Pragmatics and Politics” will take place at 4 p.m. Monday, April 26, in the Tribune Auditorium of the James L. Allen Center, 2169 Campus Drive.

Appointed by President Bush, Whitehurst is the first director of the Institute of Education Sciences, established in 2002 in the U.S. Department of Education. The institute conducts, supports and disseminates research on education practices that improve academic achievement, statistics on the condition of U.S. education and evaluations of the effectiveness of federal and other education programs.

An authority on language and pre-reading development in preschool children, Whitehurst developed “dialogic reading,” a technique widely used by teachers around the world during shared picture book reading with young children. He has conducted extensive research into Head Start programs, and was one of the first investigators to link success in elementary school among disadvantaged youth to pre-reading skill they developed in programs such as Head Start.

For further information about the lecture, e-mail ipr@northwestern.edu or call Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research at (847) 491-8712.