Laura Goe, Ph.D., completed her undergraduate studies in Language and Learning Theory in Social Context at UC San Diego before going to the Mississippi Delta with Teach for America, where she taught 7th grade special education for three years. She completed her M.S. in Educational Policy and Leadership at the University of Memphis while teaching at-risk middle school students in an urban Memphis school, and later received her doctorate from UC Berkeley's Policy, Organizations, Measurement, and Evaluation program. She is currently a Research Scientist in the Understanding Teaching Quality Research Group at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ, and is Principal Investigator for Research and Dissemination for The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality.

Dr. Goe recently served as one of the 32 reviewers for the second round of ESEA Waiver requests. In 2011, she was one of the experts (along with Charlotte Danielson and OECD staff) that conducted a study of Chile's teacher evaluation system; findings and recommendations from that study will be published in 2012. She currently serves on a number of technical advisory committees focusing on developing teacher evaluation systems, researching the impact of teacher evaluation systems, and evaluating effectiveness of teacher preparation programs. Dr. Goe’s current technical assistance work for the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality is focused on providing research-based support for states and regional comprehensive centers as they consider timely topics such as evaluating teacher effectiveness, understanding growth models, and using multiple measures to assess teachers contribution to student learning growth, particularly in non-tested subjects and grades.

In 2009, Dr. Goe completed a three-year term as co-editor of the AERA journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. She has served as a visiting scholar to the NEA and advisor on their teacher evaluation work, has advised the AFT as a member of their expert panel on teacher evaluation, and served as a consultant to the AFTs Innovation Grant sites in designing innovative, comprehensive teacher evaluation systems.

Besides technical assistance work for the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, she has produced numerous research syntheses and policy guides focused on teacher quality and effectiveness. Her research at Berkeley and at ETS has focused on using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to examining school improvement, the distribution of teachers, formative assessment, and teacher evaluation. She has observed hundreds of teachers around the country for various projects, designed and built quantitative databases, and conducted statistical analyses using national, state, district, and school databases. Her research interests include teacher qualifications, measuring teacher quality, teacher effectiveness, teacher compensation, professional development, the equitable distribution of teachers, and rural/frontier education challenges, as well as school finance and school and district resource use.