American Institutes for Research

Lawrence B. Friedman is a vice president at AIR. He contributes to the leadership and strategic direction of AIR's education work, and of the organization, as well as the growth of its evaluation and research capacity. He also leads the program’s System Supports portfolio, directs the AIR State and Local Evaluation Center, and leads or advises on a range of large-scale evaluation and research studies of high-priority K–12 education reform issues.

Previously, as a chief program officer at Learning Point Associates, he led the development of the organization’s extensive, nationally recognized portfolio of evaluation, research and analytic services to federal, state and local education agencies and private nonprofit and for-profit entities. Dr. Friedman has led large-scale studies of high-priority K–12 education reform issues for the last 25 years. He has expertise in literacy, learning opportunity quality and equity, education technology, and systemic reform at the school, district, state and national levels. He currently is principal investigator for the New York Hall of Science SciGames Investing in Innovation Project Evaluation; the evaluation of the McDougal Family Foundation High School Success Initiative; the Virtual High School Global Consortium Teacher Effectiveness System Development and Data Analysis project; and co-principal investigator for the evaluation of the CASEL/NoVo Collaborating District Initiative to Develop Proof Points for the Role of Social and Emotional Learning in School Districts. He also serves as a senior advisor on a range of studies, including an experimental test of READ 180 in the Milwaukee Public Schools funded under the Striving Readers program of the U.S. Department of Education, and the national assessment of high school junior’s financial literacy conducted in collaboration with the Jump$tart Coalition of Personal Financial Literacy.

Dr. Friedman’s extensive study of education reform and innovation also includes leading the recent research study of Texas’s dual credit programs courses for the Texas Education Agency; co-leading the evaluation of Reading First in Ohio; co-leading a syntheses of studies of middle school and high school effectiveness for the College Board; and leading the evaluation of the nationwide Self-Developing Schools Project for the Soros Foundation–Hungary, the study of technology initiatives in the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, and the five-year evaluation of the New Iowa Schools Development Corporation.