CLOSUP Faculty Advisory Board

Kenneth Burnley

Kenneth Burnley is currently a Senior Resident Fellow and Director of The Educational Leadership Center at the University of Michigan working between the School of Education and the School of Business to conceptualize, and develop an Executive Leadership Center. He also serves as the practitioner on a scholarly research team studying the impact of poverty on student achievement from the school and societal viewpoint. He has had a distinguished career in public education during which time he was recognized as the 1993 National Superintendent of the Year, a joint public/private sector award given by the American Association of School Administrators and the Service Master Corporation (Aramark). He has held positions of Superintendent of Schools in Fairbanks, Alaska, Colorado Springs, Colorado as well as CEO of the Detroit Public Schools. Improvements in student achievement have been a hallmark of his career; his systemic leadership of the literacy program in the Detroit Pubic Schools narrowed the achievement gap over a three year period at the fourth grade level and is recognized as some of his best work. He has led school districts through some of the most difficult challenges in their histories including the areas of student achievement curriculum/instruction, management and finance.

Paul Courant

Paul N. Courant is the University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan. He is also Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Economics, Professor of Information, and Faculty Associate in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. From 2002-2005 he served as Provost and Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs, the chief academic officer and the chief budget officer of the University. He has also served as the Associate Provost for Academic and Budgetary Affairs, Chair of the Department of Economics and Director of the Institute of Public Policy Studies (which is now the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy).

Courant has authored half a dozen books, and over seventy papers covering a broad range of topics in economics and public policy, including tax policy, state and local economic development, gender differences in pay, housing, radon and public health, relationships between economic growth and environmental policy, and university budgeting systems. More recently, he is studying the economics of universities, the economics of libraries and archives, and the changes in the system of scholarly communication that derive from new information technologies.

Paul Courant holds a BA in History from Swarthmore College (1968); an MA in Economics from Princeton University (1973); and a PhD in Economics from Princeton University (1974). He rides a BMW R1150R motorcycle.

Sandra Danzinger

Sandra Danziger is Director of the Michigan Program on Poverty and Social Welfare Policy at the Ford School. Her primary research interests are the effects of public programs and policies on the well being of disadvantaged families, poverty policy and social service programs, demographic trends in child and family well-being, gender issues across the life course, program evaluation, and qualitative research methods. Her current research examines barriers to employment among single mothers making the transition from welfare to work. She is a Principal Investigator on the Women's Employment Survey. Professor Danziger previously researched how Michigan's General Assistance welfare recipients fared after Governor Engler terminated this income support program.

Margaret Dewar

Margaret Dewar is faculty coordinator for the housing, community, and economic development concentration. She is also the faculty director of the University’s Ginsberg Center for Community Service and Learning. She earned her Ph.D. in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Master of City Planning from Harvard University. Her research is in economic development, urban environmental planning, and urban land use. Her current projects are concerned with remaking cities following abandonment, strengthening deteriorated neighborhoods, and planning across the Great Lakes region. Her projects deal with how planners can address issues facing troubled industries, declining regions, cities with high rates of poverty, and low-income neighborhoods. Dewar teaches courses where students studying for the Master of Urban Planning work with community partners to produce plans that advance the agendas of those partners, principally in Detroit and Flint.

James Hines

James Hines teaches in the department of economics and the law school, and also serves as Research Director of the business school's Office of Tax Policy Research. His research concerns various aspects of taxation. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Harvard, all in economics. He taught at Princeton and Harvard prior to moving to Michigan in 1997, and has held visiting appointments at Columbia, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, research director of the International Tax Policy Forum, co-editor of the American Economic Association's Journal of Economic Perspectives, and once, long ago, was an economist in the United States Department of Commerce.