Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He has been a leader in the development of economic analysis of educational issues, and his work on efficiency, resource usage, and economic outcomes of schools has frequently entered into the design of both national and international educational policy. His research spans such diverse areas as the impacts of teacher quality, high stakes accountability, and class size reduction on achievement and the role of cognitive skills in international growth and development. His pioneering analysis measuring teacher quality through student achievement forms the basis for current research into the value-added of teachers and schools. He is chairman of the Executive Committee for the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas at Dallas, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. He was recently appointed to the Equity and Excellence Commission of the U.S. Department of Education, and he served as chair of the Board of Directors of the National Board for Education Sciences from 2008-2010. He is the area coordinator for Economics of Education of the CESifo Research Network.

Hanushek received a B.S. from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1965, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Masschusetts Institute of Technology in 1968.