Anthony S. Bryk served as the ninth president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching from 2008 through 2020, where he led the efforts to transform educational research and development, more closely joining researchers and practitioners to improve teaching and learning. He is now president emeritus and a senior fellow. Formerly, he held the Spencer Chair in Organizational Studies in the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University from 2004 until assuming Carnegie’s presidency in September 2008.

He came to Stanford from the University of Chicago where he founded the Center for Urban School Improvement, (the roots for what is now the Urban Education Institute) that supports improvement efforts in the Chicago Public Schools. He also founded the Consortium on Chicago School Research (now called UChicago Consortium on School Research) that continues to produce a range of studies to advance and assess urban school reform.

He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is one of America’s most noted educational researchers. His 1993 book, Catholic Schools and the Common Good, is a classic in the sociology of education. His deep interest in bringing scholarship to bear on improving schooling is reflected in his later volumes, Trust in Schools (2002) and Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago (2010). In his most recent works, Learning to Improve (2015) and Improvement in Action (2020) Bryk argues that improvement science combined with the power of networks offers a powerful new approach to reach our ever increasing educational aspirations.