Immediate Past President
William F. Tate
Washington University, St. Louis
William F. Tate, Ph.D., a math-science education researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, has completed his term as president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), a professional society with approximately 25,000 members in the United States and abroad. He now serves as Immediate Past President through the end of the 2009 Annual Meeting in San Diego.
At Washington University, Professor Tate is Chair of the Department of Education and the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in Arts and Sciences. He also holds academic appointments in American Culture Studies and Applied Statistics and Computation, and serves as a participating faculty member in the Audiology and Communication Sciences program at the Washington University Medical School.
As his own academic career attests, he supports interdisciplinary scholarship.
He has concentrated his research in two main areas: on mathematics, science, and technology education, specifically in urban settings and on the intersection of urban studies, race and legal thought, and American education.
Professor Tate also serves as the principal investigator and project director for the St. Louis Center for Inquiry in Science Teaching and Learning, one of 10 centers that the National Science Foundation funds in the United States. This center aims to develop an ongoing capacity to produce and diversify science education leaders, researchers and practitioners who apply research with practice to improve science teaching and learning.
Among his professional experiences, Professor Tate has taught at Texas Christian University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has worked in the Dallas, Texas, Public School System as Scholar-in-Residence and Assistant Superintendent of Mathematics and Science.
Professor Tate, who holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Northern Illinois University and a master's degree in mathematical sciences education from the University of Texas at Dallas, received his Ph.D. degree with a focus in mathematics education from the University of Maryland at College Park.
An AERA member since 1991, Professor Tate has been awarded an AERA Early Career Award. He has served as an editor of AERA's peer-reviewed, scholarly quarterly American Educational Research Journal.
Professor Tate also served as Program Chair for AERA's 87th Annual Meeting, held from April 7 to 11, 2006 in San Francisco, California. Approximately 15,500 education researchers from 50 countries attended this meeting, which featured 2,400 peer-reviewed sessions and some 4,000 speakers. Expanding on the meeting theme, "Education Research in the Public Interest," he and AERA President Gloria J. Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison co-edited a book with the same title that Teachers College Press released in April 2006.
In 2005, Professor Tate's monograph entitled "Access and Opportunities to Learn are not Accidents: Engineering Mathematical Progress in your School" was published. His journal articles have focused on the political and social dimensions of mathematics education and science education, as well as urban education.