Steven Tozer

Background

About Steven Tozer

Steve Tozer is Professor Emeritus and past University Scholar in Ed Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He was founding Director of the UIC Center for Urban Education Leadership, and founding Coordinator of the UIC Ed.D. Program in Urban Education. As UIC’s first professional doctorate in Education, the Ed.D. has received national awards for exemplary practice from leading academic and policy organizations such as University Council of Education Administration, the Council of the Great City Schools, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow with the Learning Policy Institute. Steve was educated at Dartmouth College, Loyola University/Erikson Institute for Early Childhood Education, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). After an early career in early childhood education, he joined the Policy Studies faculty at UIUC, writing a textbook for teachers that has been continuously in print for over 30 years. He later served as head of Curriculum and Instruction at UIUC; Chair of Policy Studies at UIC; Chair of the Illinois Governor's Council on Educator Preparation; President of the American Educational Studies Association; and President of the Council for Social Foundations of Education. Steve’s collaborations with colleagues from UIC and Chicago Public Schools were continuously funded from 1996 to 2018 by over a dozen philanthropic foundations, the U.S. Department of Education, and National Science Foundation. Author or co-author of over 60 journal articles and book chapters, he is lead author of School and Society, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, 8th Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2021); lead editor of The Handbook of Research in Social Foundations of Education (Routledge, 2011); and co-author or co-editor of three recent books: Bryk, Greenberg et al, How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools (Harvard 2023); Gomez, Biag, et al, Improving Our Schools Together (Roman & Littlefield, 2023; and Darling-Hammond, Wechsler, et al, Developing Expert Principals (Routledge 2023). He has chaired over 75 Ph.D.and Ed.D. doctoral committees.