David Conley is Professor Emeritus of Educational Policy and Leadership in the College of Education at the University of Oregon where directs the Center for Educational Policy Research. He is the founder and president of EdImagine, an educational consulting company.
David Conley is Professor Emeritus of Educational Policy and Leadership in the Department of Educational Methodology, Policy, and Leadership, College of Education, University of Oregon where he joined the faculty in 1989. In 2000, he founded the Center for Educational Policy Research at the University of Oregon, which he continues to direct. He also founded and served for 12 years as CEO of the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC, now Inflexion). He is also the founder and president of EdImagine, a consultancy dedicated to helping educational organizations improve their effectiveness and hone their strategic direction.
Dr. Conley is one of the national thought leaders in the area of college and career readiness, a term he defined and popularized in the early 2000s. He has conducted many of the foundational research studies in this area and has published multiple articles and policy briefs as well as four books on these topics. Most recently, he has studied assessment and accountability system with an emphasis on hard-to-measure characteristics of student performance and multiple measures. His most recent book, The Promise and Practice of Next Generation Assessment, was published in July, 2018 by Harvard Education Press.
In addition to national-level work, Dr. Conley has a long history of service to education in Oregon. He has conducted research on education reform in Oregon and helped shape educational policy in the state since the early 1990s. He has been a consultant to the Oregon Business Council since 1995 and has served on numerous task forces and committees charged with addressing educational challenges in Oregon. He was the primary architect of the Quality Education Model, which is still in use as a means to gauge what it takes to fund Oregon schools adequately to achieve state goals.
He serves on numerous technical advisory groups and panels including the Smarter Balanced Technical Advisory Committee, the NWEA Technical Advisory Committee, the Oregon Workforce and Talent Development Board Essential Employability Skills Taskforce, and, recently, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) Accountability Technical Advisory Committee. He was as a founding board member and chair of the steering committee for New Meridian, a national assessment organization. He is senior advisor to Intellispark, an educational startup creating comprehensive data platforms for school districts. He is also senior advisor to GradGab, an edtech startup dedicated to connecting high school students with college mentors. In 2010, he co-chaired the Validation Committee for the Common Core State Standards.
Before entering higher education in 1989, Dr. Conley spent 20 years in the public school system in a variety of roles including teacher and co-director of two public alternative schools, a site and central-office administrator, and an executive in a state education agency. He received an AA degree from Cabrillo College, his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MA and PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He lived in Eugene for 25 years before moving to Portland full time in 2014. Conley spent his formative years in Capitola, California, near Santa Cruz, where he devoted much of his time to hanging out at the beach and surfing. He currently divides his time between Portland, Oregon, and Cannon Beach, Oregon.
