Carolyn Kelley is the Jim and Georgia Thompson Distinguished Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dr. Kelley’s research focuses on strategic human resources management in schools, including teacher compensation, principal and teacher evaluation, and leadership development. She is co-author of three books, including Mapping Leadership: The Tasks that Matter for Improving Teaching and Learning in Schools (Jossey-Bass, 2017). The book provides the theoretical foundation for the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning, an online formative assessment of distributed instructional leadership in schools.
Kelley has a Ph.D. in Administration and Policy Analysis from the Stanford School of Education (1993), an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Michigan (1985), and a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Illinois (1982). She has been a member of the School of Education faculty at the UW–Madison since 1993.
As co-principal investigator, Kelley co-leads Instrumentation study D, focusing on building information tools, based on CALL, to develop practice-based information tools that support equity-centered school leaders.