Melissa Roderick is the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Melissa is an expert in urban school reform, high school reform, high-stakes testing, minority adolescent development, and school transitions. Her work has focused attention on the transition to high school as a critical point in students’ school careers and her new work examines the transition to college among Chicago Public School (CPS) students. In prior work, she led a multi-year evaluation of Chicago's initiative to end social promotion and has conducted research on school dropout, grade retention, and the effects of summer programs. Melissa is an expert in mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in evaluation. Her new study focuses on understanding the relationship between students' high school careers and preparation, their college selection choices and their post-secondary outcomes through linked quantitative and qualitative research. In this joint project with CPS, Melissa is assisting CPS in tracking successive cohorts of Chicago students and building new indicators through analysis of high school transcripts and surveys of students and teachers to assess the preparation of CPS graduates for college. She is concurrently leading a qualitative study that is following over 100 juniors from three Chicago high schools from the eleventh grade to two years after graduation and examining differences in the educational demands of their classroom environments through a linked study of high school and college classrooms. From 2001 to 2003, Melissa joined the administration of CPS to establish a new Department of Planning and Development. At the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, Melissa is the faculty director of a new program in community schools and youth development. She is a founding board member and currently serves as the chair of the board of North Lawndale College Preparatory Charter High School.
